The Ambassadors of HAL

“Working with many teachers abroad, I attach great importance to the accessibility of academic work in order to promote the dissemination and development of research in my field. The HAL, TEL and DUMAS platforms are invaluable resources for teachers and researchers in some countries of the world. With this in mind, I am participating in the HAL programme to contribute to the dissemination and visibility of science online, accessible to all.”

Nicolas Tixier is a government licensed (DPLG) architect with a Ph.D and an officially authorized research director. A professor at the National School of Architecture of Grenoble (ENSAG) in the Theories et Practices of Architectural Design and Urban Planning, he also teaches at the Annecy Alpes Art Academy and the Institute of Urban Planning and Alpine Geography, and is a researcher for Cresson. He also works as part of the collective BazarUrbain (winner of the 2007 Young Urban Planner Prize). From 2003 until 2010, he was project manager for the Office of Architectural, Urban, and Landscape Research at the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. He has been the Chair of the Grenoble Cinémathèque since 2009. In 2018, he became Director of Cresson and adjunct director of the UMR mixed research unit Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités.

The fields he addresses in his research, projects, and teaching concern what we might categorize as a “public thing”, which is not understood as a thing per se, rather as a composition, a stage for action and for society. In his work on the urban and territorial condition, he makes use of the open field of ecology (the ecology of perception, social ecology, and environmental ecology) and the – by nature prospective and retrospective – field of the urban project (urban design and history) to develop methodological tools for approaching a site, producing and sharing its representations, and articulating its potential futures. His current work focuses on the urban transect as a field practice, representation technique, and approach to projects. Between heritage and fiction, he looks at territories and how they are fabricated through ambiances.

Open Science is one of the most exciting goals of recent years for the human and social sciences, both in terms of access to researchers’ publications and access to research data. Our laboratory, thanks to the help and energy of our librarians, is fully committed to this, supporting the HAL Open Archive and promoting open access to scientific publications, bibliodiversity and innovation. Contributing to the repositories of tomorrow is a bit like the feeling you get when you deposit your work in an open access repository.