Transport or energy infrastructure – roads, highways, railways or waterways, high-voltage lines – have been major technical, economic and political markers of progress. But the upheavals of climate change and the erosion of biodiversity, to which they have contributed, are reversing the outlook. These major lines make it possible, in fact, to isolate or connect environments, to generate new relationships with spaces, to create landscapes.
They carry with them possibilities for transforming our lifestyles, for cooperation between actors, for a more positive relationship between living beings and human constructions, with the challenge of decarbonization in the background. By mobilizing active and creative research, the Ittecop research program (land transport infrastructure, territories, ecosystems and landscapes) brings together public and private actors with a view to improving their actions and their knowledge on these subjects.
Intended for infrastructure managers or developers, experts from administrations and design offices, as well as students and researchers, this work examines how infrastructures contribute to mobilizing territories around environmental issues and studies the possibility of hybridization knowledge and practices between ecological and social sciences. It focuses on political tools and their criticism, on the procedures for environmental assessment of projects, and on the “avoid-reduce-compensate” doctrine. Finally, research on infrastructure is envisaged as participating in the renewal of the management and design of these major developments.