À la recherche de l’Université de Vincennes disparue, les arbres témoins d’un passé enseveli

Abstract

The Vincennes Experimental University Centre, located in the heart of the Bois de Vincennes, was known from 1969 to 1980 for offering avant-garde teaching techniques, opening its doors to non-baccalaureate holders, and welcoming internationally recognized teachers (Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, etc.). The buildings were razed to the ground in 1980 and covered with several tens of centimeters of fill. The campus is now buried under a forest area and remains invisible to the visitors of the Bois de Vincennes. We managed to reveal the university’s past landscape through georeferencing and diachronic analysis of aerial photographs, interviews with members of the University of Vincennes, archival studies, and field surveys. The current trees are proving to be a very good indicator of the spatial organization of the former campus. The presence of certain trees, woody biodiversity or biomass allows the University to re-emerge. The past, hidden by several centimeters of soil and almost 40 years of forest management, reappears in a careful study of plants and landscapes.

Keywords

• landscape
• geomatics
• Paris
• urban ecology
• biogeography
• historical geography