International mobility

All mobility programmes were badly affected by the health crisis in 2020. Like all French universities, Université Gustave Eiffel invited its students who were abroad to return to France, which a lot of them did. Exceptional financial support was offered for those who needed it. For mobility trips that had been planned but had not yet begun, alternative solutions were found with the partner universities, notably through remote tutoring and online seminars.

The same was true for mobility trips among the University’s researchers and teacher-researchers, who postponed their projects. Our ability to welcome guest professors was also badly affected and many of them had to cancel or return home early. Nonetheless, a few mobility trips were still able to go ahead despite the exceptional circumstances. Two examples are given in the following pages. Similarly, several LIAs (International Associated Laboratory) for staff and student mobility were able to be created in spite of the circumstances.

I-SITE FUTURE supports 23 new international collaboration projects

Following its second Incentive Call for International Mobility and Cooperation (AIMCI), which closed in March 2020, I-SITE FUTURE has selected 23 new projects out of the 36 that were evaluated. The budget for this call was approximately €360,000. The objective is to strengthen or initiate new international scientific and/or educational collaborations on the theme of the city of tomorrow. The long-term aim is to place the I-SITE consortium at the heart of the coordination of a network with international visibility involving top-level foreign universities in the field of urban issues.

The selected projects mainly concern the geographical areas of Europe (Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands), North America (USA, Canada), Asia (Japan, China, Singapore), South America (Brazil, Mexico), Sub-Saharan Africa (Madagascar, South Africa) and the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia). They focus on different types of activities such as setting up research projects (including jointly supervised PhDs), contributing to a European or international network, outgoing mobility (with or without a teaching role), organising international seminars and setting up an international associated laboratory.

The duration of the projects varies from 6 to 18 months and their launch has been severely impacted by the health crisis. A summer school call for proposals was also launched at the end of 2020. The submitted projects will be assessed in 2021.

Continuing international collaboration on automated vehicles

On the occasion of a visit by Anne-Marie Idrac, High Representative for the Development of Automated Vehicles, to Washington DC in January 2020 on the subject of “public policy, regulation, experimentation and deployment”, the COSYS department organised and led the annual meeting between Université Gustave Eiffel, the Directorate General for Infrastructure, Transport and the Sea (DGITM), AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) and USDOT (US Department of Transportation).

As part of the French ministerial initiative “Robomobile Life”, an international comparison focusing on the USA, Canada, Germany, China, Japan, Australia and other European countries was carried out. It identified similarities between current approaches, described their organisation and supported the Ministry for Ecological Transition in making initial contact. After the strongest players were identified, the DGITM worked on the matter with the American Transportation Research Board and wrote a policy brief for the G20 (via the T20 group): “Defining the role of automated transportation infrastructure in shaping sociotechnical systems”.

Archival City: planning the city of the future by incorporating data from the past

Archival City "Urban systems, archives and city heritage" is a springboard project financed by I-SITE FUTURE and a research programme in which ACP laboratory is strongly involved. The project was very active in 2020, with a study day on historical sources on Greater Paris attended by archivists and librarians (17 September 2020), a seminar on the “History and Archives of urban pollution” in partnership with the Lyon municipal archives (12 November 2020) and a workshop on news from research on the colonial world (12 October 2020) in conjunction with researchers and archivists from the French National Overseas Archives (Aix-en-Provence). Archival City bridges the gap between those interested in the history of the city and those who build its future: archivists, documentalists, historians, architects, geomaticians, etc. The programme aims to question the concept of urban archives at an international level and focuses on six major cities: Jerusalem, Quito, Bologna, Hanoi, Algiers and Greater Paris.

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