Suchergebnisse

Quite apart from the diversity of situations in small and medium-sized towns, stabilising their town centres is a major challenge. In both countries, town centres have been weakened by commercial changes, a decline in the supply of services and transformations in lifestyles. They are characterised by an increase in vacancy rates, which accelerates a spiralling loss of attractiveness and atmosphere of neglect. Since the beginning of the 2000s, this challenge has been central in the public debate. In both countries, urban renewal has been a key element of this revitalisation policy. However, although the context of public action is rather similar in France and Germany, the modes of governance differ. In France the administrative municipal system continues to provide a narrow and fixed framework despite recent territorial reforms that favour the intermunicipal level. In addition, cooperation, communication and participation of local actors from business and civil society are more firmly anchored in social and political practice in German small and medium-sized towns.

This chapter is devoted to mobility in France and Germany. First, key mobility indicators for the two countries are presented. This shows that private motorised transport still dominates in both France and Germany. Despite many negative effects on the climate, but also on health and quality of life, no far-reaching measures have been adopted. Hopes are pinned on technological progress and the integration of electromobility. However, this will not solve the shortage of land in cities or the car-dependence of many (low-income) households in rural areas in France. Subsequently, an empirical example from Berlin is used to show how financial and time restrictions affect the willingness of car drivers to switch to alternative modes of transport. Financial measures have a greater influence than time-related measures. For the French example, regional disparities and social dependence on the car are considered more closely. Finally, the current policy initiatives of the two countries are presented in order to assess the potentials of the transport transition.

The postures of secrecy and revelation maintain our common relational dynamics between sharing and not sharing. Science, which has become the dominant form of knowledge, is a rational and empirical knowledge sharing. For this purpose, the knowledge articulates languages, if possible unambiguous, spaces of rational deliberation, technical devices and resources of the imagination. This activity meets other logics called power, prestige, status, profit, customer, blind adherence and revealed truth, in which the postures of secret invite themselves massively. The codes of ethics attempt to regulate this mix of contradictory logics by setting standards of scientific exchanges, recalling the person rights and particularly the subjects observed rights, protecting the working conditions of the researcher, preserving its autonomy from funders and policy makers, and ensuring the dissemination of its results.

This article retraces the evolution of the Romanian electoral management system
during the postcommunist decades, by considering it from an institutionalist
and strategic perspective. Electoral management is the setting where various
institutional actors are in constant interaction with the view of producing the
postcommunist democratic legitimacy. Their very interaction is a test of the
validity of the postcommunist polity. If the general design of electoral management
remained relatively stable, the institutional actors called to participate in the
endeavour changed their political status, and their institutional attributes and
their policy capacities. The sequence of postcommunist elections unravel the
process of institutional disjunction and political re-conjunction between the
central government, local administration, and the judicial, which set the patterns
for the institutionalisation of Romanian democratic politics.

Mihail Kogălniceanu and Nicolae Bălcescu, historians, writers and politicians,
important actors of the revolution of 1848 in the Romanian Principalities, dedicated
much of their early historical writings to the justification of the nationstate.
Their main concern, common to the '48 generation across Europe, was to
answer to the most important question related to the process of nation building
and state building: "Who are we?", 1848 being for the Romanians the first moment
of the collective constitutional memory. The article contends that the two
historians retroactively applied to the past categories specific to the 19th century,
the past itself being a weapon and guide for the future. Both Kogălniceanu
and Bălcescu submitted the political project of nation-state building to a archeology
identity called upon to justify.

Germany and France offer two different models of political and administrative organisation: a federal state on one side of the Rhine and a unitary state on the other, albeit one that has become more decentralised over the last 40 years. Thus, the French régions have reduced capacities for action compared to the Länder. At the local level, the administrative structure was strengthened in Germany by merging municipalities, whereas France chose to use intermunicipal structures. In contrast to the political and administrative stability in Germany, local and regional organisation in France is constantly evolving, faced with a succession of laws, the pace of which has accelerated over time. The same applies to spatial planning, which has been framed from the outset by the German Grundgesetz (GG - Basic Law), but which has undergone much more evolution on the French side, even if the loi d'orientation foncière (LOF - Basic Land Act) of 1967 and the loi solidarité et renouvellement urbain (SRU - Law on Urban Solidarity and Renewal) (2000) represent two fundamental stages. In both countries, the strategic dimension of planning has been strengthene, and each side has developed its own tools for the management of urban projects.

This paper proposes to discuss the theoretical and methodological issues applied to the study of immersive environments in information and communication sciences. Environments considered are digital devices that generate more or less strong effects of immersion (virtual reality, augmented reality, serious games, etc..). The authors question the renewal of a constructivist and ethno-methodological posture that will be put into test in various experiments. The paper concludes with an illustration of a methodology currently being tested on an industrial project.

Because the organization has been, since a long time ago, analyzed as an open system, it necessarily includes communicational problematics which transcend it. Key issues that the organization reflects refers too to issues, ever discussed in other places. For example, the development of interactive corporate sites challenges the definition of public spaces, which has already been questioned for its symbolic dimension, reduced to the level of an event democracy, for example in the case territorial communication. Interactivity proclaimed still raises the question of the exploitation of the diversity displayed by the company, the French pragmatic sociology has already critically debated the intentionality and reference to the connectionist society within the project-based-City. In some ways convincing with regard to the application of scientific tools already tested elsewhere, analogies let open, however, the question of modeling, when the environment is playing along with its own cultural characteristics, as it is in the case of business sites in Tunisia.