LASUR Seminars

Once a month, the Laboratory of Urban Sociology organizes a seminar with a researcher interested in cities or urban phenomena. The presentation lasts about 45 minutes and is followed by an exchange with the audience. The sessions are held in French and sometimes in English.

• Participation in the seminar sessions is open
• For more information : [email protected]

The seminars are open to the general public upon registration (here).

Upcoming seminars

• 24.02.2026 – Matias Echanove, urbz, Genève (EN)
  The Homegrown City
  Viewed from the EPFL campus, in Renens, Switzerland, the homegrown city appears like a distant reality. Locally developed, without urbanists, engineers or architects, homegrown habitats are usually seen as surviving fragments from what we once called the “Third World”—pre-industrial, backward, irrational and anachronistic. I challenge that view and argue that homegrown urbanism is a prevailing or latent condition everywhere. Drawing from cases in India, Japan, Colombia and Switzerland, I will present a practice that radically departs from the project-centric approach that currently dominates the urban design imagination. I will propose a method based on the acceptance of incremental transformation as the basis for a future that is not only more inclusive and robust, but also more efficient and beautiful.
  
  

• 31.03.2026 – Francesca Cellina, SUPSI, Mendrisio (EN)
  Sustained car-free living: Long-term impacts of a one‑month mobility trial with car‑freeing incentives in Switzerland
  Mobility trials offering temporary access to sustainable transport modes are increasingly used to reduce car dependence, yet evidence on their long‑term effects is limited. We assess the one‑year impacts of the 31DAYS Challenge, a month‑long car‑free trial in Winterthur (Switzerland) that provided 754 participants with free use of an e‑bike, public transport, and car‑sharing, followed by a conditional car‑freeing incentive. Using a one‑group pretest–posttest design with 222 individuals and 196 households, we estimate changes in transport mode use and ownership and compare effects on incentive recipients and non‑recipients. Results show substantial, persistent behaviour change: 19% stopped using the car, and correspondingly use of e‑bike, train, and public transport increased. Car ownership markedly declined, with 21% of households becoming car‑free alongside increases in e‑bike and travelcard ownership. Incentives amplified effects, though the trial alone still produced meaningful long‑term reductions. Findings highlight car‑free trials – especially when paired with incentives – as cost‑effective tools for promoting car‑free living.
  
  

• 14.04.2026 – Manfred Max Bergman, Universität Basel (EN)
  Methodological Mapping of the Space-Mobility Research Nexus
  This presentation treats space and mobility as inseparable, where space is produced through movement, coordination, and pause, while mobility is always spatially formatted by routes, nodes, and boundaries. Their intersection is therefore not an overlap but a relational field in which placement and movement continuously reify one another. This perspective invites complex mixed methods approaches based on methodological mapping across different forms of evidence, which can show how movements cluster or stretch, while narrative interviews, participatory mapping, and field observation can uncover how actors interpret routes, obstacles, and anchors in everyday life. The aim is not merely conventional triangulation, but conceptual integration: Using different methods to move between patterns in systems and interpretation of experience. Mixed methods research can theorize space-mobility while also exploring how they are experienced, governed, and contested.
  
• 28.04.2026 – Ola Söderström, Université de Neuchâtel (FR)
  Designing cities that promote mental health
  Urban mental health has in recent years become a field of research in which new alliances have formed, both interesting and controversial, between the life sciences and the social sciences. On the one hand, a growing number of studies in psychiatry have focused on the urban dimensions of psychosis (“urbanicity”). These studies have gradually moved beyond classical forms of spatial epidemiology to study mental health in urban settings in situ, notably using real-time assessments via smartphones. On the other hand, studies in the social sciences have recently begun to develop mobile biosocial methods to investigate the urban ecologies of mental health. Situated at the intersection of life sciences, social sciences, and design, this presentation will first draw on two previous projects using video recordings of urban trajectories and biosensory ethnography to study the urban experience of people living with a diagnosis of psychosis. It then shows the shift toward participatory action research through the implementation of a living lab in the city of Lausanne, mobilizing participatory mapping to co-develop and experiment with urban interventions aimed at fostering an environment more conducive to recovery from psychosis. In its current phase, the project aims to develop, together with the City of Lausanne, an urban mental health strategy. Finally, the presentation will open onto three broader questions concerning the permeability between bodies and environments, forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of “psychiatric commons.”
  
• 26.05.2026 – Axelle Grégoire, Omanoeuvres (FR)

Past seminars

Since 2019, the LaSUR seminars have hosted numerous speakers. Below, you will find a list of past presentations.

2024-2025

• David Guéranger – Ecole des Ponts ParisTech
• Alexandre Rigal (CEREMA), Tiphaine Robert (Universität Bern), Clément Rames (EPFL), Pierre-André Horth (CEREMA) et Richard Grimal (CEREMA)
• Victor Santos Rodriguez – SciencesPo Paris
• Nerea Viana Alzola – Université de Genève 
• Julie-Anne Boudreau – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Jules Grandvillemin – EPFL
• Felipe Link – Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
• Nagy Makhlouf – EPFL
• Tommaso Vitale – SciencesPo Paris
• Juliet Fall – UNIGE
• Mara Ferreri – Politecnico di Torino 
• Mathieu Berger et Daniel Cefaï – UCLouvain et EHESS
• Maxime Felder – EPFL 

2022-2023

• Benjamin Motte-Baumvol – Université de Bourgogne
• Quentin David – Université de Lille
• Clément Rivière – Université de Lille
• Mathieu Berger – UCLouvain
• Hlib Vysheslavskyi – EPFL
• Nathalie Fanzy et Chloé Montavon – EPFL

2021-2022

2019-2020