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A review essay on a book by Harry Collins & Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2007).

This article seeks to comprehend the event that presents the "model of Karlsruhe" -- an original means of transportation combining the train and the tramway -- as a great European success in terms of urban transport. By presenting success as self-evident, the "success story" discourse tends indeed to minimize the significance of the various challenges that this innovation has to overcome, eventually asserting itself on the long run. As such, this discourse fails to take into account the numerous equipments of expertise that force the recognition of its success across borders while implying the assemblage of multiple constraints. The pragmatic perspective this article opts for invites thus to refuse a mystical conception of the foreign by substituting a genuine "art of the distance" to it, that is another way to conceive the greatness of public action and its forms of legitimization through the production of a multiplicity of collective agencies capable to connect both sites, actors and projects. Adapted from the source document.

Our technicians and industrial societies are rooted in practices and lifestyles which generate high dependence has the respect of certain fossil energies, massive gas emission sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Rooted in the habits of modern life, and beyond in the production and mass consumption structures, these practices condition. Adapted from the source document.