This conference, taking place on 15 October 2026, marks the beginning of the third year of the Habiter au prisme des limites planétaires Chair. For this new residency, the Institute welcomes anthropologist Alix Levain, whose research will explore how planetary boundaries are perceived, debated and appropriated in a growing metropolis. Entitled “Living Conditions and the Conditions of Life: Problematizing and Popular Appropriations of Planetary Boundaries in a Growing Metropolis”, her project examines the connections between environmental transformations, living conditions and inhabitants’ experiences. The inaugural conference on Thursday, 15 October 2026, will provide an opportunity to discover her background, the key questions underlying her research, and the perspectives for this new year of residency.
6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
L’école nationale supérieure d'architecture de Nantes (ENSA)
6 Quai François Mitterrand, 44200 Nantes
Open to the public
Immensity, Finitude, Everyday Life: The Habitability of Earth Through the Lens of Lived Experience
Contrary to an interpretation that emphasizes the ecological insensitivity of audiences who need to be won over, it proposes rethinking the ecological experience as an experience of limits, deeply intertwined with that of social inequalities.
Contemporary thinking on planetary boundaries outlines a trend—one that is difficult to reverse—toward increasing damage to the Earth’s habitability. It gives rise to an intellectual vertigo characteristic of the contemporary ecological experience, which one might assume levels the playing field and brings together the experiences of citizens whose living conditions differ. Does this shared experience actually exist?
Yet, within the everyday routine of actions, emotions, attachments, aspirations, trials, and struggles—which we might be too quick to label as “ordinary”— « planetarization » ie the global scale of the finitude, does not have the same implications for everyone, depending on their life stories. An exploration of the testimonies collected and preserved in the “citizen notebooks” in 2018–2019 allows to grasp the full extent of this. It opens a rare window onto the expression of ecological concerns, the socially and politically differentiated conditions under which they arise, and the way in which they intersect with living conditions and issues of justice, knowledge, and recognition. The Chair’s work this year will be devoted to this topic.
