The spatial organisation for cooperation: what knowledge can we use from a historical analysis to understand the design of a new campus at Saclay ?

This proposal is part of the thesis which is looking at the conception of the Campus Paris-Saclay (France) being part of the implementation of a nationwide public policy the main purpose of which to give France a higher education and research system of excellence. One of many reforms is to stimulate the scientific cooperation by grouping together some of the best French higher education institutions and to promote cooperation between public research and the economic world. The starting point of the research is to question what involves the notion of campus by looking at the hypothesis that a historical approach can create knowledge. We propose to focus on the principles of campus development in order to establish a morphological and functional genealogy of this object. The principles reveal that the purpose of the first campus was to organise a new community or to bring several communities together and create a social link between them, materialised by specifics shapes: quadrangle, galleries etc. What kind of knowledge can we use from empirical examples of cooperation in the business field (Axelrod, 1984) (Hatchuel, 1996) (Segrestin, 2006) to enhance the reflection and to conceive the spatial organisation of the cooperation between several partners of the campus? We propose to look at the actual management of emblematic projects for cooperation at Saclay, such as the Learning Center building and its spatial organisation in order to question if the new campus will create innovative conditions for the production of knowledge.