LabEx Architectures - COHABIT

Architecture can and must play a central role in addressing the challenges faced by people around the world. The LabEx Architectures aims to contribute to the advancement of knowledge and practices that enable the design of sustainable, equitable, and resilient places and spaces. Architecture enables the initiation and conduct of discussions that bring together scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and the private sector with civil society. It encourages critical reflection on the multiple interrelationships between space, materiality and immateriality, atmospheres, skills and knowledge, people, and ecosystems—on the ways in which we live, perceive, think, and shape our environment.

LabEx Architectures aims to serve as a catalyst for transdisciplinary research, fostering connections between basic and applied research at the intersection of disciplines and practices. It supports the development of methods that enable the academic and non-academic worlds to jointly engage in action-oriented research to transform the world. Research in project-based disciplines such as architecture offers a unique opportunity to study the tensions that arise and the opportunities that emerge when theory meets practice, and when academia meets society.

Through the COHABIT project, CERAG is committed to analyzing innovative and sustainable housing models—such as the Atticora cooperative in Isère—to address current ecological and social crises. By bringing together a transdisciplinary team (management, architecture, sociology, engineering), this project examines the relationship between eco-friendly construction techniques using local materials, cooperative governance, and everyday life. This qualitative approach, combining ethnography and technical surveys, helps unravel the organizational and emotional dimensions of these new, solidarity-based living spaces to better understand how to transform our ways of living in a sustainable manner.

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