Books & ideas

The Enduring Mammoth

Jean Le Bihan — 2023-12-12T06:30:00Z

Cutting the number of civil servants is a topic that is raised at each election in France. Why this anti-civil service attitude, despite public services themselves being constantly praised? Why this hostility, even though as soon as electoral campaigns are over, it is usually left without any practical consequences?

Basic Urban Services in India: a Paradoxical Bricolage

Hugo Ribadeau-Dumas — 2021-03-15T08:00:00Z

Why is India still unable to efficiently supply basic services to all urban dwellers? When the public authorities concentrate large projects in megalopolises, small towns improvise heterogeneous solutions, thereby reinforcing segregation.

Running Water on Every Floor

Emmanuelle Hellier — 2018-02-15T08:00:00Z

How did people living in Paris, New York and London slowly gain access to running water? Although private companies shared the water market from the 17^th to the 18^th centuries, cities slowly realised the need for a public network.

The Creative Class to the Rescue of Cities?

Denis Eckert & Michel Grossetti & Hélène Martin-Brelot — 2012-11-09T08:02:07Z

The notion of a creative class has been used to shape public policies promoting urban growth by building infrastructures and developing amenities that are likely to attract the ”creative workers”. And yet this hypothesis does not hold up, as the results of a European study show. Developing education and infrastructures that can serve the population as a whole may be a much more productive strategy.

Reforming the French Police

Ivan Jablonka & Pauline Peretz — 2012-02-03T07:43:00Z

In their discussion of crime and the best ways to curb it, French politicians have relied on a crude opposition between “the culture of results” and neighborhood policing, a doctrine whose American origins they seem to ignore: for sociologist Fabien Jobard, more than creating a new force, reforming the police implies better coordinating between central and local authorities.

Universal Postal Services: High Noon For a Time-tested Institution?

Dieter Plehwe — 2011-03-25T09:57:30Z

Dieter Plehwe describes how the different European postal services, in the backdrop of the crisis of Fordism and state regulation, have had to face new innovative groups with aggressive expansion strategies. He shows how decisive the role of governments and how intricate private and public actors, national and European regulations have been.