Conference

Stéphane Frioux: Looking through past smogs : writing history of air pollution and its management in the 20th century (France and Lyon in particular)

On The June 19, 2019

18h00 - 20h30
Salon de la Résidence IEA
3 Allée de Fontenay, 69007 Lyon

Air pollution has become one of the main issues in urban environmental management for public authorities at various scales. It is also an important focus for epidemiology and scientific research, as well as environmental monitoring technology.

Environmental history can provide some information about the reconfigurations of stakeholders’ interactions and can explain how and why air pollution management sometimes accelerated, and sometimes stagnated. The communication will provide an account of international historiography, and the first results of a study conducted in France.

Stéphane Frioux
is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Université Lyon 2 (France) and Junior member of the Institut universitaire de France (2018-2023). His research deals with urban environmental history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on the management of pollution (water, air and soil). He recently edited or co-edited special issues of reviews : « Mobilier pour l’environnement après 1968 », Le Mouvement social, n°262, janvier-mars 2018, and « Sur les traces de la santé environnementale », Écologie & Politique, n°58, 2019/1.

Among his latest publications
, « Air Pollution as Urban Problem in France, From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the 1970s », in Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid et Bert de Munck (éd.), Urbanizing Nature. Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500, New York, Routledge, 2019, p. 217-237, and « The diffusion of innovations to improve the French urban environment (1890s-1940) », Modernen Stadtgeschichte, 2018/2, p. 102-116.