Environcide: War, Environmental Infrastructure, Heritage, and Law beyond the Nature/Culture Dichotomy

Talk by Emmanuel Kreike, Princeton University, Paris IAS Fellow, in the seminar "Property, environment, heritage, and society" organized by Pr. Christian Bessy,  Director of the laboratoire IDHE.S ENS-Paris-Saclay.

There is no such thing as property. There are only forms of property with different properties (characteristics). The idea of this seminar is to compare them by working on complex objects such as heritage, environment and knowledge. We will particularly work on the qualification conflicts around these objects, paying attention to the degree of juridicality of the claims and to the distribution of powers that are deployed. The issues dealt with will be as disparate as: a work of art in the public space, a patented invention, the perspective offered by a landscape, an ancient site threatened by the opening of a construction site, an operation of expropriation for public utility, ... Heritage issues may overlap with environmental issues in the sense that there is a human intention of preservation and transmission to future generations, a form of claim that may come into conflict with the rights attached to the ownership of a building, an industrial installation or manufactured products. One example is the individual property right of a client on a building qualified as utilitarian, allowing him modifications to meet new needs, modifications that will come into tension with claims in terms of architectural heritage or copyright of the architect who initially designed the building.

These conflicts of qualification will be studied in the light of the forms of valuation of the things in presence, the games of argumentation and the devices of negotiation invented by the actors. From a practical point of view and the way of living this seminar, we will organize wanderings on the various grounds and will proceed to experimentations and collections of materials and arguments.