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Justice-oriented climate activism is proliferating. Many scholars aspire to deliver research that supports activism. However, measures of impact for research evaluation and funding purposes place little weight on the use of research by activists. Here we consider how academics and academia might effectively support and enable climate activism. We report outcomes from a series of online deliberative workshops involving both activists and academics from several European countries. The workshops were facilitated to create space for discussion, sharing of experiences and the development of proposals for the future. The outcomes take the form of a set of principles (a “minifesta”) for academic-activist engagement generated by the group. In discussing the process and outputs, we argue that a focus on inclusion can support politically transformative change of the scale and urgency required. We suggest that this also demands a shift in attitudes toward the role of activism and activists in collaborative processes. We further discuss the inevitable incompleteness of this process, arguing that incompleteness is, itself, a feature of inclusive engagement. We conclude that scholars working on climate issues in any discipline could benefit from increasing mutually supportive collaboration with activists; and that such collaboration and inclusion could help liberate democracy from authoritarian tendencies and market influences. Collaborative engagements generate legitimate, rich, and impactful outcomes even with the limitations posed by COVID19. We, therefore, commend both the model of engagement and the principles it generated for our colleagues and peers.

Justice-oriented climate activism is proliferating. Many scholars aspire to deliver research that supports activism. However, measures of impact for research evaluation and funding purposes place little weight on the use of research by activists. Here we consider how academics and academia might effectively support and enable climate activism. We report outcomes from a series of online deliberative workshops involving both activists and academics from several European countries. The workshops were facilitated to create space for discussion, sharing of experiences and the development of proposals for the future. The outcomes take the form of a set of principles (a “minifesta”) for academic-activist engagement generated by the group. In discussing the process and outputs, we argue that a focus on inclusion can support politically transformative change of the scale and urgency required. We suggest that this also demands a shift in attitudes toward the role of activism and activists in collaborative processes. We further discuss the inevitable incompleteness of this process, arguing that incompleteness is, itself, a feature of inclusive engagement. We conclude that scholars working on climate issues in any discipline could benefit from increasing mutually supportive collaboration with activists; and that such collaboration and inclusion could help liberate democracy from authoritarian tendencies and market influences. Collaborative engagements generate legitimate, rich, and impactful outcomes even with the limitations posed by COVID19. We, therefore, commend both the model of engagement and the principles it generated for our colleagues and peers.

Tactical urbanism is a modality of intervention resulting from citizen initiatives, involving temporary, reversible and inexpensive material transformation, whose objective is to introduce rapid changes in the use and appropriation of urban public space. During or shortly after the spring 2020 lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tactical urbanism proved to be a simple, quick and inexpensive way to respond to the health emergency of social distancing. In particular, bicycle lanes and paths, referred to as pop-up infrastructures or in France as “coronapists,” were created in order to avoid a modal shift to the car by people afraid of using public transport. Based on research conducted with interviews and video elicitation in five French cities–Grenoble, Lyon, Montpellier, Rennes and Saint-Étienne–with experienced and novice cyclists, the article analyzes how these pop-up infrastructures have been perceived and used according to the context, the type of infrastructure and the profile of cyclists. Building on the discussion of the role of infrastructure, the aim here is to understand how the contingencies arising from the layout of transitory infrastructure produce a different relationship to space and mobility. In doing so, we examine the potential spillover effect of the coronapists on a population that did not practice utilitarian cycling before the pandemic and the continued practice of those who were already utilitarian cyclists. The purpose is to examine how these new infrastructures may have acted as a facilitator of modal shift or as a learning facilitator, and what particular role coronapists played in the practice of utilitarian cycling. The article first examines the reception of the infrastructure and then questions the uses related to an assessment of the cyclability in terms of comfort, safety and security. The article ends with a discussion of the interests and limitations of the tactical dimension in the implementation of coronapists. The diversity of the territory surveyed has shown the political force of the infrastructures and the effect that these transitional infrastructures have had as a complement to other measures. They promote new uses and encourage new people, including children, to adopt cycling on a daily or more regular basis. This result invites the pursuit of this proactive policy. These promising results encourage the development of these infrastructures in sparsely populated, suburban or rural areas. In addition, we have shown that ridership is highly dependent on cyclists’ assessment of the comfort, safety, and security of the path. This perception varies greatly depending on the context, the type of facility and the experience of the cyclists. In most cases, the coronapists have helped to stimulate more cycling by providing greater coverage and safer or more direct routes. The expectancies and dissatisfaction generated by transitional facilities, which relate to perceived bikeability, inform us of the importance of considering the diversity of uses in their design as well as their physical quality and maintenance. The results of our survey encourage the design of readable, wide, physically separated, continuous and maintained facilities to improve cyclists’ sense of safety. Finally, the results also show the importance of thinking about cycling policy by considering the full range of possible uses and experience levels from the design stage onwards in order to attract new cyclists.

This paper looks at the development of new workplaces : coworking spaces (CSs). It aims to understand the spatial dimensions of coworking from an approach centered on agents, in this case creators of CSs and coworkers. Our results show that their spatiality is related to residential and occupational mobility. They consist of developing a professional project locally and/or working in the place where they want to live. They develop a special relationship with space through co-presence, spatial mobility and virtual mobility. They produce a new type of space made of flows and places. They have a network-based perception of space where CSs appear as hubs around which they organise their virtual, spatial and social mobilities at different time scales.

The COVID −19 pandemic reminded us that we need better contingency plans to prevent the spread of infectious agents and the occurrence of epidemics or pandemics. Although the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in water has not been confirmed, there are studies that have reported on the presence of infectious coronaviruses in water and wastewater samples. Since standard water treatments are not designed to eliminate viruses, it is of utmost importance to explore advanced treatment processes that can improve water treatment and help inactivate viruses when needed. This is the first study to investigate the effects of hydrodynamic cavitation on the inactivation of bacteriophage phi6, an enveloped virus used as a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate in many studies. In two series of experiments with increasing and constant sample temperature, virus reduction of up to 6.3 logs was achieved. Inactivation of phi6 at temperatures of 10 and 20 °C occurs predominantly by the mechanical effect of cavitation and results in a reduction of up to 4.5 logs. At 30 °C, the reduction increases to up to 6 logs, where the temperature-induced increased susceptibility of the viral lipid envelope makes the virus more prone to inactivation. Furthermore, the control experiments without cavitation showed that the increased temperature alone is not sufficient to cause inactivation, but that additional mechanical stress is still required. The RNA degradation results confirmed that virus inactivation was due to the disrupted lipid bilayer and not to RNA damage. Hydrodynamic cavitation, therefore, has the potential to inactivate current and potentially emerging enveloped pathogenic viruses in water at lower, environmentally relevant temperatures.

The alarming increase in water pollution is driving research into novel, environmentally friendly treatment solutions such as hydrodynamic cavitation. This study is part of the research on the pin disc rotational generator of hydrodynamic cavitation, which utilises the low pressure wake behind the rotor pins to induce cavitation and the short gap between the rotor and stator pins to enhance cavitation cloud fluctuation. Due to the lack of understanding of the effects of cavitation treatment, a laboratory device was built to investigate the mechanisms of cavitation generation and the effects of various geometric features such as the diameter, number, and shape of the rotor pins and the gap size between the rotor and stator pins. Using simultaneously measured pressure fluctuations and high-speed visualisation, a method was developed to quantify the extent of cavitation, and it was found that throttling the high-pressure side had an order- of- magnitude smaller effect on cavitation than the number of rotor pins. It was found that a smaller number of rotor pins with large downstream area produced the most aggressive cavitation conditions. The weak spectral response and lower mean vapour cloud area, as well as the lower fluctuation in the case without stator, demonstrated the key role of the stator in the onset and aggressiveness of cavitation.

The bicycle is an invention with gendered ramifications, inserting itself into a landscape that is primarily conceived and occupied by men, and its use requires mechanical main­tenance, a practice that is also primarily the province of men. This article takes up the question of body vs. body between gender and technique. Basing ourselves on studies focusing on the social relationships of the sexes as well as research focusing on material culture and the gender of objects, we ask how social practices and their components are deployed as functions of gendered corporeal processes, and in so doing we contribute to the construction of gendered realities and identities of persons. This article is based on four corpuses produced by inquiries that were carried out in the cities of Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Montpellier and Strasbourg: corpuses involving observations, images and interviews based on cyclists’ records that were commented on, the relation to bicycles on the part of male and female adults and male and female adolescents, practices concerning repairs, and certain feminist initiatives connected with cycling. We show that the bicycle-object sends us back to ambiguous usage, examples of which reveal and reinforce the gendered order, but in certain contexts may also call that order into question.

Although waste issues do not dominate environmental, political and social discourses in New Caledonia, waste management has profoundly changed within the past fifteen years due to, amongst other factors, increases in production and consumption. These transformations are taking place within a "modernization" framework, which aims to rationalize waste under a model largely inspired by France. Our paper shows that this rationalization takes the form of institutional, infrastructural and behavioral normalization, and that it responds to imperatives that prioritize sanitation, environmental protection and the circular economy. The introduction of recycling reveals the assumptions inherent in this (ongoing colonial) emphasis on modernization. We examine several cases relating to the recycling economy to illustrate how the reality of the waste streams are determined by the specific physical, economic and institutional geography of the New Caledonian island. The analysis offers a critical look at the modernization models in the field of waste and their replication indifferently to contexts. We argue that the indifference of initiatives to modernize New Caledonia’s waste management system according to French colonial assumptions is resulting in the uneven and complex implementation of modern waste management systems.