PhD in Geography

Short description

Thesis

A city within its systems of cities over two thousand years : the case study of Noyon as an approach proposal. Download PhD.

Keywords

long term; system of cities; intra-urban space; interdisciplinarity; Noyon

Prize

Awarded the GdR MAGIS Geography Thesis Prize

Jury

Presented and defended publicly on December 5, 2018

Jury members

Sophie de Ruffray (Professor, Université de Rouen – rapporteur), Laurent Schneider (Directeur de recherche CNRS, Directeur d’étude EHESS – rapporteur), Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau (Professeure, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne – chair), Sander van der Leeuw (Professeur, Arizona State University – reviewer), Dominique Michelet (Directeur de recherche CNRS émérite – reviewer)

Direction

Lena Sanders (Directrice de recherche CNRS, UMR Géographie-cités), Nicolas Verdier (Directeur de recherche CNRS, Directeur d’Étude EHESS, UMR Géographie-cités)

Summary

This doctoral research seeks to understand the evolution of a city along the entire duration of its existence. The research is built upon the case-study of Noyon, a French city founded in the 1st century AD. Our approach can be synthesised in three steps. First of all, we assess the functional intra-urban structure so as to establish the trajectory of the city over 2 000 years. Then, we identify the relative position of the city within the system of cities it interacts with. This position is studied in terms of political, administrative and economic features. Finally, by confronting the intra-urban trajectory and the relative position of the city, we can investigate to what extent the history of a city and the history of the other cities of the system are united. The vastly long term considered raises two main issues. Firstly, the societies studied, over 2 000 years, are highly distinct. Comparing them involves to question the consistency of the definition of spatio-temporal entities, in order to study their trajectories. Secondly, this method requires to work with archaeological, textual and iconographic data, which are sporadic and scarce, especially when studying large scales processes. This turns a large part of our research into an investigation where many clues have to be collected in order to retrace some long-disappeared spatial configurations and facts. All of this requires new methodologies, along with a need to unambiguously delineate the paths relative to knowledge building, in order to offer a reproducible study of cities in systems over the long term.