Previous Conferences

CIST2011 - Founding territorial sciences

Organised in Paris from the 23rd to the 25th of Novembre 2011 in Ecole nationale supérieure de Chimie, CIST founding conference ambitioned to create the interdisciplinary field of the territorial sciences in France and include it wihtin existing foreign research networks.

Over a hundred communications were submitted, amongst which some 60 were selected by the scientific committee. The 90 interventions were organised in six plenary and twenty-four parallel sessions.
The conference gathered over 200 participants, forcing the organisation committee to reject some registrations due to the lack of space. The conference public mainly came from the social sciences with over twenty represented disciplines, and half of the participants from geography and land-use planning.
A third of the conference public came from outside Ile-de-France and some twenty from outside France, which enabled to discuss similar foreign experiments such as what was developped by the University of California with its Center for spatially integrated social science (Helen Couclelis) or the "territorial sciences" formalised by Quebec universities (CRDT, Université de Laval, Bruno Jean et Nick Chrisman). Experiments in Italy (Roberto Camagni, Politecnico di Milano) and Germany (Christian Schulz, Université de Luxembourg) were also presented.

Some communications got published in the 1st book of the "Collection du CIST" series in Karthala (P. Beckouche, C. Grasland, F. Guérin-Pace & J.-Y. Moisseron (dir.), Fonder les sciences du territoire, Karthala, 2012).
All the long summaries of presented communications have been printed in the proceedings as well as presented in the CIST2011 sub-collection on the open archive platform HAL.
Read the conference report (pdf, in French).

CIST2014 - Frontiers and boundaries of territorial sciences

Organised in Paris on March 27th and 28th 2014, the 2nd international conference of the CIST (CIST2014) aimed to clear new and uncharted ground in this area, while reinforcing existing links between CIST scientific areas and involved disciplines.

The conference gathered together 160 participants, amongst whom 30 from foreign institutions. At the end of the 1st day of the conference, the GIS hold its General Meeting; the report (with complementary arguments reaching the CIST until mid-April 2014) can be found at the end of the general report of the conference (in French).

Apart from the printed proceedings, with all the communications presented during parallel sessions, whose long summaries are online in the CIST2014 sub-collection on the open archive platform HAL, some communications have been published in a book in Karthala (F. Guérin-Pace & É. Mesclier (coord.), Territoires et mobilisations contemporaines. Regards sur un phénomène planétaire, Karthala, 2016) as well as in various journals (Revue du développement territorial RDT, thematic features in Mappemonde and L'Espace géographique).
The videos of some communications and plenary sessions are also online.

CIST2016 - Looking for territories?

The first two CIST conferences addressed a number of theoretical and practical issues in the territorial sciences. The third edition of the conference (CIST2016), held in Grenoble on March 17th and 18th March 2016, continued this tradition by examining the expectations of citizens, inhabitants, and public and private bodies with respect to territories.

This two-part event presented both a scientific conference, with 80 communications selected by the scientific committee and organised in 21 sessions and sub-sessions, and debates and discussions with the actors who make territories: public bodies who participate in the French territorial reorganisation, those who follow and deal with its development; private stakeholders who follow some expectations for territories, those handling relationships work towards finding solutions; groups who representent specific categories of territory expectations, those who formalise them and have other needs rise.
All in all, over 300 people, academics and stakeholders, participated in the conference, amongst which 77 coming from foreign institutions.

The proceedings were printed, and the long summaries of the communications are on line in the CIST2016 sub-collection on the open archive platform HAL. Some communications edited by R. Lajarge, L. Cailly, A. Ruas et G. Saez got published in 2019 in Demande(s) territoriale(s) at Karthala.
Filmed interviews and videos of the plenary sessions are also on line.

CIST2018 - Representing Territories

Organised in Rouen from March 22nd to 24th, 2018, the 4th CIST international conference (CIST2018) aimed at mobilising territorial sciences to address the issue of representations, after three conferences that successively sought to found the sciences of the territory, to overcome the fronts and borders, especially in terms of interdisciplinary collaborations, and finally to explore the territorial social demand.
The objective of the conference was to seize this approach of territories by representations and to determine what it brings to the analysis of territories, from a theoretical, methodological and empirical point of view.

The scientific part of the conference gathered 110 papers divided into 15 thematic sessions resulting from a formal call and 2 varia sessions. Overall, the quality of the proposed papers was higher thanks to this call for sessions phase, while the authors solicited were less international (less than 17%, half of them outside Europe).
A series of events were added to increase the scope and influence, particularly at the local level (round tables for the general public, workshops, etc.).
In total, more than 250 participants (the vast majority of them French‧e) attended the conference, despite the train strike.

The proceedings have been printed, with the abstracts of the papers moreover in a CIST2018 sub-collection on the HAL open archive platform.
A book is currently being produced and will be published in 2020 by university presses.
Filmed interviews and videos of the plenary sessions are also online.

CIST2020 - Population, Time, Territories

Initially planned on the Condorcet campus (Paris-Aubervilliers) and finally organized in videoconference from 18 to 20 November 2020 because of the particular sanitary context, the 5th international colloquium of the CIST (CIST2020) placed the concept of population at the heart of the debates of territorial sciences. Central in demography and biology, more marginal for other disciplines, the concept of population implies a grouping of individual entities. According to the approaches, the social, the territorial, the biological, etc. constituted the privileged criterion of aggregation, according to variable temporalities and scales of observation. Articulating population, time and territory in a transdisciplinary and international perspective was the challenge of this conference; beyond a theoretical and methodological advance, the diversity of the proposed thematic sessions showed that this triptych is at the heart of contemporary issues.

The scientific part of the conference brought together 131 papers divided into 16 thematic sessions resulting from a formal call for papers and 2 varia sessions. As with the previous conference, the quality of the papers proposed was improved thanks to this call for sessions. This colloquium confirmed the internationalisation of the ISTC with 165 authors‧es solicited‧es attached‧es to a non-French institution (43% of which half outside Europe).
Related events (notably the urban walk) had to be cancelled due to the health context.
In total, more than 350 participants‧es (the vast majority of them French‧e) attended the conference by video.
The proceedings have been printed, and the abstracts of the papers can be found in a CIST2020 sub-collection on the HAL open archive platform.

A dossier des Annales de droit will be published by the Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre (PURH).
Videos of most of the sessions are also online, until September 2022.