Architects, Urban Planners and Landscape Architects facing the Challenges of the 21st Century – ProMetUrba21

1) We combine an inductive approach with a deductive approach. The processes referred to by the expression “the challenges of the 21st century” are numerous, heterogeneous, and undoubtedly considered unevenly by the individuals and professional groups analyzed. In order to avoid inferring our assumptions as researchers about the processes at work, their origins, and their impact on professional training and practices, we will adopt an inductive approach. Throughout the study, we will leave it up to our respondents to define what constitutes “transitions and challenges” and how they perceive the issues involved.

2) We rely on a dialogue between qualitative and quantitative approaches. Statistical sources and databases exist on the issues that interest us, but they are often underutilized and rarely cross-referenced. These include socio-demographic statistics on the members of these three groups, data from observatories (economic observatories, professional integration observatories, etc.) produced by national bodies such as INSEE, CEREQ, OMPL (Observatoire des Métiers dans les Professions Libérales) or the supervisory authorities for these professional fields; by professional organizations (Ordre des Architectes, Conseil Français des Urbanistes, Collectif National des Jeunes Urbanistes, Fédération Française du Paysage, etc.); by institutions and researchers. We will conduct a secondary analysis and supplement it with questionnaire surveys focused on our questions. Because our approach emphasizes professional representations and identities as well as learning and professional positioning strategies, the qualitative component is essential for understanding the underlying drivers of these dynamics. The work program includes interview campaigns, observations of key situations, and documentary work on archives and gray literature. All questionnaires, interview and observation grids will be designed collectively with the leaders of axes 1, 2, and 3 and the cross-cutting axis.

3) We are careful to take into account the diversity of the sectors and, within them, local diversities, with a targeted approach that avoids the dispersion of our resources. Thus, a panel of training programs has been selected to unify the meso-level surveys (between the macro-level of national frameworks and the micro-level of individualized approaches). These training courses are spread across several cities, including Bordeaux, Grenoble, Nantes, Paris, and Rennes. This choice is based both on a variety of local training configurations and on criteria for access to the fields through the presence of team members.

Many of the transitions, even upheavals, which have affected our societies over the past twenty years, first and foremost the fight against climate change, have a massive and direct impact on the design and management of inhabited spaces. As a result, professions shaping inhabited spaces are subject to a major challenge in adapting their skills and practices. The project focuses on the professional groups of architects, urban planners and landscapers as “linked ecologies” (Abbott, 2003), engaged in the same dynamic of readjustment to the socio-environmental context. It considers this dynamic through three dimensions:
1) Socialization into professions, in light of new societal issues, during initial training. This questioning in terms of professional socialization (Hughes, 1955; Dubar, 1991) focuses on the double movement of an evolution of the training supply and of identification models from trainers on the one hand; and on the other active construction by students of their learning strategy and their identity references on the other hand. The hypotheses are that (a) the response to the uncertainty of knowledge and the change in practices leads everyone towards tailor-made courses and towards multidisciplinary openness, and that (b) developments in the content of the three sectors studied have similarities. The project verifies and qualifies these hypotheses.
2) Continuities and ruptures in the trajectories, faced with a context changing practice. The interactionist definition of the notion of career (Hughes, 1958; Strauss, 1992) leads us to compare the changes occurring in professional situations and the meaning they have for the practitioners of the groups that we study. Our hypothesis is that the trajectories at work revolve around three processes: initial integration, progressive adjustments to the context of practice over the course of careers, and sometimes radical bifurcations.
3) Professional groups facing the test of readjustments to transitions. Recent work in urban research highlights various dynamics of evolution in professional practices: the increased involvement of architects, urban planners and landscapers in activities located upstream and downstream of design; the generalization of socio-ecological issues in their discourses and practices; the decompartmentalization of their intervention through various forms of participatory democracy. Our hypothesis is that these three dynamics produce redistributions within the three professional groups taken as objects, but also connections between them, on new segments. The effects of the feminization of these professional environments, the effects of generation, and the relationship to knowledge and experience run through all of these dynamics.
In this project, the research team is a network of researchers founded in 1999 (RAMAU, ramau.archi.fr) mobilizes its multidisciplinarity, its access to a diversity of educational establishments in these three fields, as well as well as the partnerships it has built with public administrative authorities and organizations representing these professional groups. To understand the dynamics from the perspective of their objective effects, and from that of the representations that come attached, our methodology is mixed: questionnaire surveys and secondary analyses of existing survey data for the quantitative approach; interview surveys, focus groups, documentary analysis and observations of significant situations for the qualitative approach.