L’urbanisme, ou le refoulement de la normativité

Planning shares with other disciplines, as distant as law and medicine, an obvious normativity. But this peculiarity, fully adopted by the latter domains, is much more problematic in urban planning. Urban planning, when it is not disputed as a discipline, seems to be divided between the analyses making out of it a scientific approach which consolidates a better knowledge of the territories (urban studies), and proposals aimed at orienting transformations of these territories towards their improvement (project activities). This distinction is enforced in the French case by a cleaving academic organization