Franck Scherrer

Franck Scherrer has been a full professor of urban planning at the Université de Montréal since 2010. An alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, he holds degrees in geography (M.sc. Université Lyon 2) and urban planning (P.h.D. Institut d'urbanisme de Paris). He was first in charge of urban foresight at the French Ministry of Urban Planning, then a professor at the Institut d'urbanisme de Paris (Université Paris-Val de Marne), and at the Institut d'urbanisme de Lyon (Université Lumière Lyon 2), where he was director from 2006 to 2010. He has also taught at engineering schools (associate professor at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and the Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'État), in France, and as a visiting professor at the Lebanese University and Tongji University in Shanghai.

In France, he has worked as a researcher at the CNRS Techniques, Territoires, Sociétés Laboratory (Paris Marne-la- Vallée) and the CNRS Environnement, Ville, Société Laboratory (Lyon). He joined the Université de Montréal in 2010 as Director of the Institut d'urbanisme, then, from 2016, Director of the École d'urbanisme et d'architecture de paysage. From 2017 to 2020, he was Director of the EDDEC Institute, whose mission was to support and promote the training, research, action and outreach of Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal and Polytechnique Montréal in the fields of the environment, sustainable development and the circular economy. From 2014 to 2018, he was also president of APERAU, the international association for the promotion of urban planning research and teaching, which brings together French-speaking urban planning institutes. Since 2020, he has been Associate Vice-Rector for Research, Discovery, Creation and Innovation.

Its research expertise on cities and urban planning is multidisciplinary, particularly at the interface between environmental sciences and engineering, and the social sciences and humanities. It focuses on the socio-political role of networked urban infrastructures (in the fields of transport and water in particular), the place of water in the city, new urban planning methods (metropolitan planning, public participation, territorial foresight, innovative urban design, integrated urban/transport planning, etc.), urban collective action in the field of urban planning, and the role of water in urban development. ), collective urban action in terms of sustainable development and the circular economy, and the temporality of urban planning and urban policies (intergenerational long-term planning, temporal policies, reversible cities, etc.). Since 2020, he has been the academic director of Chemin de transition, a knowledge mobilization project on socio-ecological transition in Quebec, supported by the Université de Montréal and Espace pour la vie.