France Ville Durable publishes our students' research

Charlotte Burnod, Sophie Lecuit, Emérence Nouhaud, Carmen Orduña Correcher AND Thomas Soudon-Verhague, STUDENTS FROM THE master Governing the Large Metropolis, carried out a capstone project with France Ville Durable last year. Their work has just been published by this partner!

Within the framework of the national “Mirror Group” dedicated to the Horizon Europe programme, France Ville Durable asked our students to carry out a comparative study of the carbon neutrality strategies of four European cities that have been selected to join the EU mission “100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030”: Copenhagen (Denmark), Dunkirk (France), Grenoble (France), and Valencia (Spain).

With the objective of providing a comparative case study in the implementation of a carbon neutrality strategy at the municipal level, this report examines the levers and obstacles encountered by these municipalities. In addition to providing an inventory of good practices that can be replicated elsewhere, the study includes local contexts and their particular features in order to account for their strategies and enable better scaling up.

The report is organised into four parts. The first part presents the definition and framing of the challenges of the urban transition to a low-carbon economy. The second part details the methodology of the study, including the criteria for selecting the four cities and the criteria for analysing the carbon neutrality strategies. Given the diversity of decarbonisation models for cities, the third part presents in detail each city studied, in the form of monographs, and presents the specificities of each city so as to understand the characteristics of its decarbonisation approach. The fourth part details, through five themes, the main obstacles and levers encountered, in order to reach a set of recommendations.

Read the student research.