Publications from our steering committee and partners

For the geographer Karine Hurel, we need to reinvent the way we map the world, the better to understand it and to protect the ecosystems we depend on.

Our planet’s entry into the Anthropocene forces us to rethink the tools we use to describe the world and the living, so as to arrive at shared representations of what it means to live in an upended climate. To do that, cartographers must question their language, their tools and their software, and work with every discipline in the service of the story.

Regional planning, regional appeal, competitiveness, then equality, and finally territorial cohesion: for twenty years, this succession of terms has signalled a search for a new way of thinking about planning in France. None of them convinces. The world is rushing into global change, French society continues to change, and with it the places in which it projects and inscribes itself. But can the same be said of its conception of what “regional planning” - so dear to the country - ought to be? Is collective planning thought lagging behind the social, economic, environmental and cultural transformations it claims to regulate? Struck by the frequency and intensity of today’s debates, controversies and crises around territorial questions, some forty researchers and practitioners gathered from 7 to 13 September 2019 at the Cerisy-la-Salle international cultural centre, to interrogate planning thought and practice. Since the end of the post-war boom, the policy of planning for the territory - or territories - has plainly struggled to change the fundamentals that justified it. Is it still a matter of “planning”? Does it still deal exclusively with “territory”? The time seems to have come to change the categories of analysis, the cast of actors, the language and the horizon that bring them together. Planning thought? A complete overhaul! Far from the worn-out debates that set regions against cities, local against central power, or development against ecology, this collective volume offers a series of avenues for refounding planning thought for 21st-century France.

Some maps say no. Radical maps, which reveal and denounce, which protest. To understand these rebel maps - how they work, what they can do - this book undertakes a voyage of exploration into the heart of map-making. What exactly happens when we make a map, whether it is radical, experimental (one also speaks of critical cartography or counter-cartography) or conventional? What intentions preside over its making and its use? The first function of maps is to help us find our bearings and move from one point to another. They let ships navigate and planes fly. With maps, wars are waged, and sometimes peace is made. They are also formidable dream machines, shaping our image of the world, fixing its memory and ending up manufacturing our reality. What motivates this very particular act of giving the world symbolic form, from Strabo to the anarchist Élisée Reclus, from the Benedictine Hildegard von Bingen to the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, from portolan charts to the general staff map? How much creative fancy is at work, how much Faustian fantasy of mastering our environment, how much scientific sincerity? Between the emergence of the engineer Charles-Joseph Minard’s daring thematic cartography, or that of the information designers Otto and Marie Neurath, and Jacques Bertin’s conceptual semiological approach, lies a break with the conventions of cartographic representation. A liberating break, which opened up the field of experiment and made the democratisation of maps possible. Around 1900, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and their team were inventing new graphic ways of representing statistical data on the situation of Black people in the United States. Some sixty years later, it was to denounce the same cultural and economic racism that a small geographical institute in Detroit, led by William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren, gave shape to what would become radical geography: a committed geography. At that point our relationship to the map as an object changes. An awareness emerges of how it is used and of what it can do. Radical cartography sets out to map economic and social data, to produce deliberately political maps that show and denounce inequalities of life and of rights, political and economic compromises, land grabs, the destruction of habitats by agro-industry, the pollution of the planet, and everything that mortgages, one way or another, the happiness and the future of humanity. Maps, which traditionally play power’s game, become tools of protest and instruments of political and social emancipation when civil society takes hold of them. Politics, art and science then enter into permanent dialogue, to offer an unconventional and free image of the world.

The map gives spatial form to economic and social data. Where traditional cartography reflects and reinforces the powers that be, counter-cartography shows another reality of how we use space: inequalities of living conditions and of rights, political and economic compromises, land grabs, the destruction of habitats by agro-industry and extractive industry… Through 21 international examples, Ceci n’est pas un atlas shows how critical cartography becomes a field tool in the service of struggles and mobilisations.

A conversation with the historian Nepthys Zwer, translator and editorial director of Ceci n’est pas un atlas, published in February 2023 by Éditions du commun. Zwer presents the exhibition drawn from this book by kollektiv orangotango+, first shown at the University of Rennes 2.

Une autre histoire des cartes explores, from prehistory to the digital age, the many forms and functions of drawing the world. The author shows how cartographic representations have served power, science and social struggles, and offers a counterpoint from feminist perspectives and those of marginalised minorities. She invites us to rethink the map not as a simple tool but as a discursive act that shapes our perceptions and our spatial practices - and so to reveal what is at stake in it today.

A talk retracing the sources, methods and contemporary stakes of counter-cartography as a critical practice of maps.

The way we use space reflects our social situation. The relationship a person has with space says a great deal about the place and the role society assigns them. Where and how do they live and work? Within what perimeter does their life unfold? How do they move about, and how fast? In this ground-breaking, richly illustrated essay, nourished by feminist theory, Nepthys Zwer mobilises the spatial approach to cast new light on alienation, submission and domination. Cartography has always been used and instrumentalised by dominant male powers; Zwer turns to counter-cartography to reveal other aspects of our relationship to space and to explore, through mental, imaginary and cultural representations, how we are assigned our place in public space. The book looks for routes towards emancipation - not only to denounce, but to move beyond the inequality and social injustice that subaltern groups endure.

Sovereign geographical data has to be understood as the basis on which public authorities decide. Sovereign data underpins the rule of law: land parcels, easements, planning and environmental regulations. It makes it possible to reach a public decision that can be relied on and challenged in law.

Humanity depends for its survival on a social organisation and on infrastructure that cannot be maintained indefinitely. For the Earth to remain habitable, giving things up has to be organised - not only individually, but at the scale of the “negative commons” that make up the world we live in. The problem is that eight billion people do not easily become “terrestrial” again. This book proposes a politics of the negative commons, allowing us to think through the means of an anticipated rather than brutal detachment for the most fragile populations.

Today we are going to talk about the infrastructure we have inherited: motorways, ski resorts, fertiliser plants. Infrastructure that keeps multiplying and keeps polluting more, to meet needs that are ever more superfluous, making the places we live in ever less liveable. Faced with the social and ecological crisis, some infrastructure will have to go. But which? And how do you dismantle it well? In short, how do we learn to give things up? To discuss all this, I am glad to welcome Alexandre Monnin. Alexandre is a philosopher, director of the master’s programme “Strategy and Design for the Anthropocene” and scientific director of Origens Medialab. Their research covers ecological redirection, the dismantling of infrastructure, and renunciation. In this episode we talk about the weight of inherited infrastructure, the need to close some of it down, and how to learn to give up certain practices.

Faced with the climate emergency, we are going to have to learn to give things up: that superfluous new swimming pool, the development of connected devices, certain investments… So that giving up amounts neither to sacrifice nor to crude anti-modernism, the researcher Alexandre Monnin argues for “ecological redirection”. How do you decide which technologies to abandon? Which harmful infrastructure to part with? They sketch out some lines of action for us.

“We are closing”: for a company, the phrase often sounds like an admission of failure, a lost battle, the end of an activity that founders, managers and staff have often thrown themselves into. Companies live, die or transform, of course. And happily, activities renew themselves. Economic life is mostly interested in the replacement of the old by the new. Even so, a great many activities keep going somehow, sometimes putting off the inevitable. The places we live in are marked by the sediment - sometimes cumbersome - of these survivals and inherited ruins. Now that we have reached the limits of the Earth system, what if we turned our attention to this forgotten space: what is to be kept, what remains?

Behind the language of efficiency, autonomy and prevention, an insidious shift is under way: a medicine that gives up on caring. In the United States as in France, care is becoming conditional, reserved for lives deemed “optimisable”. Drawing on the case of the MAHA programme, the excesses of One Health, the concept of “extractive abandonment” and the emergence of a “soft eugenics”, this article analyses the political and ideological drivers of a systemic renunciation of care.

The Cassini map, the first cartographic representation of the kingdom of France, drawn up in 1744, has been digitised continuously for the first time. How was this map made? And how, over the course of history, has it shaped the way we picture the country?

All it takes is a phone, and you can orient yourself, find your position, plan a hiking route and avoid traffic jams. One click and you travel through space, fly over landscapes reconstructed by satellite; our horizon is infinite. In the 21st century, at barely any exaggeration, getting lost is a deliberate choice. So let us look at the history of cartography. How did people find their way before, and how did the pioneers of a science that would soon be called cartography begin their work? From the gnomon of the first Greek philosophers to radar operated from space, techniques have transformed our relationship to maps - but one thing remains: they still fascinate. Scribbled on a tablecloth for a treasure hunt or drawn to the finest possible definition, maps go with us, in the real world and in our imagination. Our guest is Bernard Bèzes, who knows the subject well: they worked for a long time at IGN, back when those three letters stood for the national geographical institute, where they were in charge of the map library. IGN is now the national institute for geographical and forestry information, and its remit includes representing France in the finest detail and observing how it changes. A witness to the present, the institute also carries an old inheritance in which the French were pioneers - not least a dynasty: the Cassinis.

On the occasion of the exhibition “La France en relief, chefs d’œuvres de la collection des plans-reliefs”, Globe looks back with Bernard Bèzes at IGN’s giant map exhibitions since 1990 - including the giant 19th-century map of France installed there by IGN.

Bernard Bèzes, head of the IGN map library, presents the general staff map of France laid out in the nave of the Grand Palais for the exhibition “La France en relief”. Shown to the general public for the first time, this monumental 650 m² assembly depicts the state of French territory in the 19th century.

Claire Doutriaux explains why planning a cycling trip is easier in France than in Germany, thanks to IGN maps.

As cartography professionals, we work so that experimenting with geography and representing it are within everyone’s reach. That is why we share our passion and our creative mapping tricks at trade fairs, science festivals and makers’ markets. We design every map as a unique object answering a specific need. Craft, technical skill and creative daring are what define our work. We are convinced that the paper map still has its place, but it evolves with technology and interacts more and more with digital objects. The association’s challenge? To reconcile the “tangible” creative world with the abstract world of the digital. So - coming aboard?

Cartapaname, the show about the art and craft of making maps. Once a month, we explore a cartographer’s work together. Through their productions, our guest takes us around the places they explore. Handling data, techniques of making, graphic choices… so many subjects, the better to understand this craft and the know-how of those who show us the world. Presented by Maxime Salles, supported by Les Artisans Cartographes.

IGN once produced road atlases. For several years now, faced with major ecological upheaval, the institute has committed with its partners to developing a capacity for continuous observation of the country in support of transition policies. It is in that context that, as the Republic’s data operator for geographical and forestry information, it publishes an atlas of Anthropocene maps every year. The latest edition, published on 9 September 2025, is devoted to flood risk.

Every November, cartographers the world over show what they can do in the now famous #30DayMapChallenge. The principle is simple: post a new and original map on social media each day, answering a set list of themes. IGN staff, gathered in the thematic cartography studio, are taking part in the 2025 edition. Day by day, discover their creations.

Base maps, online services, videos and teaching packs - tailor-made resources here for learning geography in a way that is both playful and interactive.

Discover France differently with the Cartes IGN mobile app. The app offers the precision of IGN maps, including the new plan IGN, along with a wealth of high-quality thematic layers produced by IGN and its partners. It is a “genuinely free app”, where you can locate yourself without being located. With it you can explore France through overlayable data covering agriculture, the environment, natural hazards, land, property, planning, forests, hydrography, public services, tourism and transport. The app lets you query interactive maps for “detailed information about what is around you”, watch landscapes change by comparing maps and aerial photographs from different periods, and discover points of interest nearby. Its features include route planning on foot or by vehicle, creating your own waypoints, saving your work, and downloading areas for offline use.

This thematic portal exists to publish IGN’s historic data - photographs and maps - and to let you view or download them free of charge. It allows maps and photographs to be compared in several viewing modes. The “before 1965” orthophotographic coverage, for instance, lets you travel back in time, showing France from the air between 1947 and 1965. The portal offers associated value-added services so that users can work with and enrich this data for their own purposes; a printing service is already available. Remonter le Temps thus makes it possible to observe how landscapes have changed over time - shifts in the coastline and the forest, urbanisation, industrial development, road networks, farmland abandonment, and so on.

Octave Klaba, founder and chair of OVH, wants to build a European digital ecosystem capable of counterbalancing the American tech giants.

The consortium of DEEP by POST Group, OVHcloud and Clever Cloud announces its selection by the European Commission in a major tender to supply sovereign cloud services to the institutions, bodies and agencies of the European Union.

OVHcloud positions itself as one of the few credible European alternatives to the American hyperscalers. But its strategy has sometimes worried more than it reassured. Octave Klaba’s return to the leadership is meant to set the tone: OVH knows where it is going and is giving itself the means to get there. The roadmap is dense, focusing on agentic AI, security, compliance and quantum innovation.

Docaposte, France’s leader in digital trust, and Cyblex Consulting, a cybersecurity consultancy and audit firm, present the third edition of their annual cybersecurity barometer. Based on a survey of more than 500 decision-makers, it highlights a gap between the perception and the reality of risk, and a maturity that still varies with the size of the organisation - even as organisations strengthen basic technical measures and increase their budgets.

This fourth edition of the outlook note on “data, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in local areas”, led by La Banque des Territoires and the La Poste group in partnership with the Observatoire Data Publica, draws a complete picture of the dynamics at work, the challenges ahead and the concrete solutions available to support local authorities through their digital transition.

This video explains the logic of the CNIG reference datasets through two essential examples: the national address database (BAN) and the national building register (RNB). Before they existed, government bodies and companies used disparate databases to identify addresses and buildings, which complicated data exchange and produced many inconsistencies. The CNIG supported the creation of these two national reference datasets, which give every address and every building a unique identifier. That makes it possible to cross-reference data from many fields - planning, taxation, energy consumption, emergency services, logistics and so on. The CNIG contributes to the governance of the BAN, through a dedicated deployment committee, to guarantee its development and encourage its adoption by public and private bodies alike.

This video goes inside the creation of a CNIG standard, through the example of the standard on the accessibility of pedestrian routes. For a long time, despite heavy investment in urban development and transport networks, information about their accessibility remained scarce, scattered and hard to use. The CNIG accessibility standard was designed to fill that gap by harmonising how accessibility data is collected. Thanks to it, transport authorities, local councils and road managers can describe the accessibility of their infrastructure consistently and interoperably. That information now feeds reliable route planners, which make a concrete difference to how disabled people get around.

What is the CNIG? Watch the video, which explains it all in a minute and a half.

Geolocated information can look like a highly technical subject of interest to a handful of experts, and yet it is fundamental to our daily lives and to what we do in the places we live. From the positioning of our mobile phones to public policy on safety, planning, tourism or accessibility, geolocated information is everywhere. It feeds a strategic ecosystem worth more than ten billion euros.

Afigéo and six partners (ANCT, BRGM, CNES, CNIG/ECOLAB, IGN, OGE) are glad to publish the results of the first economic study of France’s geo-digital ecosystem, along with the major technological trends worldwide. It puts forward recommendations to support the development of a sector that is strategic for many uses, including monitoring the effects of climate change.

Afigéo publishes a report on the state of play and the challenges of geographical data platforms. National or regional, thematic or general, these platforms have played an essential role for more than twenty years in understanding local areas, supporting decisions and implementing public policy. They concentrate a unique experience of openness, of making geo-digital data useful, and of pooling people and digital infrastructure.

How are maps handled in the media? How do you make a map understandable to everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, the most curious to the most hurried? How can maps be mobilised in a crisis? A panel of experts share their experience and their questions, so that together we can explore the new frontiers of visualisation for wider audiences and for decision-makers.

Jean Leveugle gave us a moment of pure grace, taking us into the kitchen of a new form of science communication… their generosity at the signing table, their conversations with one and all… an exceptional encounter. Thank you again!

A tool for introducing newly elected officials to what opening up data brings, and to handling that data well.

OpenDataFactory is local government’s toolbox for good-quality data, covering production, extraction, standardisation, quality and interoperability. Opening up public data has reached a first milestone, with a great many datasets published by local authorities, ministries, public agencies and private bodies with a public service remit. The programme aims to make opening up public data easier and better structured.

Browse the resources produced by OpenDataFrance, its partners and its members.

The observatory of open data in French local government analyses how public bodies - regions, departments, towns, inter-municipal authorities and so on - open up their data. The analysis is quantitative but also qualitative. Giving public bodies relevant, useful indicators: that is the observatory’s ambition. The tool makes it easier to steer the digital policies run by local authorities. The observatory follows on from the goals of democratising access to information and of the open data approach - the same goals that OpenDataFrance and its partners pursue every day. Since 2025 the observatory has collected its data automatically, so that observations are updated monthly.

An introduction to the Gustave Eiffel University Foundation: its remit, the research programmes it supports and its commitments to the sustainable city.

The April webinar of the TRACCS research programme, “Mapping research on adaptation to climate change since the start of the 21st century”, presented by Lionel Villard, who runs the Cortext platform at the interdisciplinary laboratory for science, innovation and society (LISIS).

An event presenting the LISIS laboratory’s work on mapping the players in research on adaptation to climate change, a project supported by the Foundation.

A partnership research chair set up by the Gustave Eiffel University Foundation and the Institut de la Transition Foncière, the Land Transition chair is led academically within Gustave Eiffel University by two of its constituent schools: the school of architecture of the city and its territories, Paris-Est, and the Paris city engineering school (EIVP). A meeting point and common ground for research on land seen through the prism of living soils, the chair sets out to support the transfer of scientific work in this field towards those who make the city and the places around it.

The Logistics City chair is devoted to research on urban logistics along three lines: (1) urban and peri-urban logistics property; (2) trends and new consumption habits and their impact on urban logistics and its property; (3) public policy on urban logistics, and the new data. It was launched in 2019 and renewed for a new cycle in 2023 with Sogaris as founding patron and the Île-de-France region as funding partner. The Grand Paris metropolitan authority and the Gustave Eiffel University Foundation joined as funding partners in 2024. New concepts, new services and new urban logistics companies are emerging in every major city in the world, driven by digital revolutions and by the need for resilience and ecological transformation. This logistics aims to meet the demand of businesses and residents for new services while answering cities’ concerns about the environmental and social impacts of today’s urban deliveries. The Logistics City chair sits in that context, with a twofold ambition: to pay particular attention to warehouses, those logistics places that are crucial to urban and metropolitan life; and to explore the effect on urban logistics and on local areas of new consumption and distribution trends, especially those tied to e-commerce and digital change.

On 1 January 2026 the Grand Paris metropolitan authority turns ten. To take stock of this first decade of governance - crossed by exceptional events, unexpected crises, major structuring projects and social change - the Paris urban planning agency publishes the first atlas of the Grand Paris metropolitan area.

150 new maps for understanding the city. In 1900, Librairie Larousse published “Paris-Atlas”, a portrait of a city at the time of the second modern Olympic Games and the fifth Paris World’s Fair. Produced under the direction of the archivist and palaeographer Fernand Bournon, it offered a precise, methodical description of the capital through twenty-eight original maps and more than five hundred illustrations. As proof of the interest this originally subscription-only publication aroused, the atlas was reissued for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, in a single volume gathering the twenty-five original parts: one per arrondissement, one placing the city in its history and four setting it in its surroundings. The atlas’s standing among lovers of Paris, and the staging of another Olympiad, naturally invite us to attempt the same cartographic exercise with contemporary means - to give an account of the city today and of its recent changes, architectural and urban as much as sociological and environmental.

The “Data Portraits” platform reinvents itself: a smoother new interface, new dynamic data and updated indicators.

As the Grand Paris Express opens line by line, Apur, the Société des Grands Projets, the DRIEAT, Insee, the EPFIF and the Institut Paris Region are opening a new phase of the observatory of station neighbourhoods, to show the urban and social transformations that come with the metro, at the scale of the neighbourhoods, the lines and the network.

This dynamic tool brings together some thirty short-term indicators for analysing what is distinctive about the Grand Paris economy. Set up in 2020 after the Covid-related economic crisis, it draws on data for Paris and for the Grand Paris metropolitan area. It is updated every quarter, alongside a quarterly outlook note. Once a year, a review of economic trends across the whole year is consolidated from a selection of quarterly indicators.

The map you are about to consult is the fruit of collective work carried out with Leonard’s members. It reflects the broad directions our community spots and discusses day after day, through the events, meetings and round tables it takes part in.

Swann Lamarche is a partner relations officer at IGN, France’s national institute for geographical and forestry information, working on risk prevention and adaptation to climate change. Frédéric Delafosse heads Resallience (VINCI group), a consultancy specialising in data analysis for adapting places and infrastructure to climate change. They look back at the central role of cartography in anticipating climate hazards.

Leonard and La Fabrique de la Cité hosted a round table to explore the key role of sovereign cartographic data in today’s transitions. For the first Map Day, launched by La République des cartes, Leonard and La Fabrique de la Cité - both partners of the collective - joined forces to organise a round table on the strategic stakes of cartography. Developing cartographic twins of the country is emerging as a key lever of sovereignty: mastering your spatial data, your models and your simulation tools strengthens the ability of public and private players to decide autonomously and in an informed way. It is also a major environmental issue. As instruments of anticipation and decision support, cartographic twins make it possible to simulate the effects of climate change, assess the impact of planning policies and imagine more resilient, more sustainable trajectories. The event took stock of how these cartographic twins are developing in France, highlighting existing initiatives, technological choices and the governance frameworks around them. It also asked what conditions large-scale deployment would require, and what the obstacles, opportunities and prospects are.

A good-practice guide on urban logistics property. Alongside Rêve de Scènes Urbaines (RSU) and Sogaris, Leonard helped produce a guide designed as an operational tool to help local areas turn a constraint into an opportunity. With land becoming scarce, goods flows intensifying and the demands of the ecological transition growing, urban logistics can no longer be thought of solely in terms of flow and immediate performance. It has become a strategic issue of urban transformation, at the crossroads of planning, mobility, environmental and economic development policy. The guide argues a strong conviction: that storage should be brought back into the heart of cities, no longer as an invisible or contentious constraint but as a lever of territorial resilience, urban quality and environmental performance. The fruit of work by a community of interest bringing together public bodies, private players and experts, the guide addresses everyone in the urban logistics property value chain. Conceived as a directly usable tool, it combines concrete accounts of experience, tried-and-tested good practice and operational avenues suited to the specific constraints of urban areas.

For Building Beyond 2026, Leonard recorded a series of video podcasts in English to extend the debates of the event and share what came out of it with an international audience. Six guests, six areas of expertise, six complementary views of one challenge: building energy systems that are more resilient, more frugal and more sustainable.