Geographer. Member of the Prize’s Board of Experts.

Director of the la École Urbaine de Lyon, he studied Geography at the University of Tours, is professor of Urban Studies at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) of Lyon, and a member of the research unit UMR 5600 Environment City Society (EVS), which is supported by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Lyon. Among the many positions of institutional responsibility he has held are president of the French National Council for School Curricula from 2014 to 2017, director of the French Education Institute (IFÉ) from 2012 to 2017, co-president (with Paul Chémetov, of the Conseil Scientifique de la Consultation Internationale: Un pari pour le Grand Paris, in 2008 and 2009, and president of the University of Tours and the Conference of University Presidents (CPU).

Notable among his published works are Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés (with Jacques Lévy, Belin, 2003), L’avènement du Monde: essai sur l’habitation humaine de la terre (Seuil, 2013), El hombre espacial (Amorrortu Editores, 2015), and Hyper-lieux: les nouvelles géographies de la mondialisation (Seuil, 2017).

Last update: March 2019