This year, the Living within Planetary Boundaries Chair is hosting anthropologist Verónica Calvo Valenzuela in residence. Her work is notably structured around the Down to Earth workshops, which she co-developed at the Collège des Bernardins in dialogue with Bruno Latour. Through two sessions, on March 30 and April 30, she invites participants to better understand how this approach enables territorial stakeholders—urban planners, architects, developers, and institutions—to identify their interdependencies—social, affective, economic, and biophysical-chemical—with the environments they inhabit and transform.
The first of these sessions takes place on Monday, March 30, 2026, from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM, at the Nantes School of Architecture, under the theme: “Down to Earth: New Practices for Architecture, Anthropology, and Cartography.” Registration required.
2:00 PM to 6:00 PM
at the Nantes School of Architecture
6 Quai François Mitterrand, 44200 Nantes
Registration required : https://forms.gle/7d5WHuVg62qYggpP9
In 2017, philosopher Bruno Latour introduced in his essay Down to Earth an approach based on self-description, aimed at making visible our relationships of dependence with the territories we inhabit—and, in doing so, our earthly condition.
Nearly ten years later, what has this approach brought to the fields of architecture and urban planning? How does it help us rethink ways of grounding ourselves within territories?
Verónica Calvo Valenzuela, anthropologist and resident of the Living within Planetary Boundaries Chair, alongside Alexandra Arène and Soheil Hajmirbaba, architects at SHAA—an architecture, urban planning, and research practice focused on environmental transformations—will engage in a dialogue to present how this approach informs their respective practices.
This space for discussion will also offer participants the opportunity to experiment with an orientation exercise at the heart of the Down to Earth process, in the form of a workshop.
PROGRAM
2:00–2:15 PM | Welcome and registration
2:15–3:00 PM | Introductory presentation
3:00–3:20 PM | Discussion with the audience
3:20–3:50 PM | Group work session
3:50–4:00 PM | Break and set-up
4:00–5:00 PM | Orientation workshop: identifying obstacles and challenges in urban ecology projects
5:00–5:15 PM | Conclusion
From 5:15 PM | Informal discussions over drinks until 6:00 PM
Alexandra ARENES and Soheil HAJMIRBABA
shaā is a Franco-Iranian practice working at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, ecology, and anthropology on transdisciplinary projects that bridge the social sciences and Earth sciences. The studio is led by two partners with multidisciplinary and multicultural backgrounds: Alexandra Arènes, PhD in Architecture (France), and Soheil Hajmirbaba, Architect and Urban Planner (France/Iran). shaā is affiliated with SOC, a cartographic research platform that promotes alternative mapping practices as a way of understanding Earth’s dynamics, notably through collaborations with Bruno Latour.
The studio explores how architecture questions and transforms the Earth’s critical zone through situated knowledge, practices, and research. shaā’s projects (research-action, architecture, and urban planning) are grounded in careful attention to the actors within a cosmopolitical network, the sharing of skills as a means of developing non-speculative projects, and relationships with soil, rocks, and meteorological phenomena as the foundation of any intervention on Earth.
The studio’s work has been exhibited at design biennials (Rotterdam 2023, Saint-Étienne 2024), in museums (Lieu Unique 2025, ZKM Karlsruhe 2020), and published in books—Terra Forma (B42, 2019), Gaïagraphie (B42, 2025), How to Land? (LLL, 2025)—as well as in various articles and conferences.
Verónica CALVO VALENZUELA
“The Last House: Integrating Anthropology and Earth Sciences to Understand Habitability in the Urban Critical Zone”
This project explores the connections between the Earth’s biophysical dynamics and the ways humans inhabit the world. Drawing on critical zone sciences—which study the thin layer of life at the planet’s surface—Verónica brings in an anthropological perspective, attentive to the various forms of interdependence that shape territories within the urban critical zone.
Her approach builds on the method of “territorial self-description” developed in the Down to Earth workshops, co-created at the Collège des Bernardins with Bruno Latour. As part of her residency within the Living within Planetary Boundaries Chair, Verónica invites territorial planners (urban planners, architects, developers, etc.) to identify their social, affective, economic, and ecological interdependencies with the environments they inhabit and transform. The project aims to test a transversal and holistic method with these practitioners, in order to develop tools capable of addressing the complexity of contemporary territorial issues. In dialogue with the research conducted at the Nantes Observatory of Urban Environments (ONEVU), this project proposes to rethink what constitutes a territory within a broader reflection on the habitability of the Earth.
