Jean-François JANIN is since 2017 Chairman of URBA 2000, Association created in 2003 as a governmental project to study, through concrete large scale experiments, the effects of new technologies on the day to day life of inhabitants of French territories.
After 30 years of exponential evolutions of the “new technologies”, the pertinent dimensions of the “territories” has been considerably enlarged for questions of energy, ecology and digital transitions, but local pollution, decentralized production of energy as well as quality of education, human relations and health remains a local question which is clearly linked to the density of people living in a walking distance.
The role of local public bodies to find the way towards a sustainable development in spite of the complexity generated by technologies is ever growing. As adviser to the territorial managers, URBA 2000 try to help them to build a consistent strategy and create regular exchange relations with other territories to exchange best practice and risks to avoid.

During his professional life, he was successively :
– Engineer in state administration for environment in Paris (1974-1976) and for industrial development, security-safety and innovation in industry in Clermont-Ferrand (1977-1986)
– CEO of the Chamber of commerce and industry of LILLE (1987-1996)
– Head of ITS Task force in the Ministry in charge of Transports (1997-2016)

He is graduated of Ecole Polytechnique (1969), ENPC (1974), Paris Political Sciences Institute (1974)

As cochairman of the THNS Forum, I am very glad to welcome you in Lyon, Versailles, Paris and Valenciennes for the THNS 2019.
I wish you a pleasant journey in these cities where you will see the effects of real involvement of many actors of municipalities, transport operators, urban planners, architects an engineers to built the cities of the future on the same place where the cities were build, along the same rivers and using almost the same roads and railtracks as 100 years before.
Technologies are deeply modifying the flows of people, the speed of their movements, the quantity of energy they use every day in the urban sprawling of metropolisation. It is clearly not a sustainable evolution.
We are now in a specific moment where the consciousness of the climate change is emerging, especially among young people. They have new requirements on the cities and new judgment about the management of mobility : its necessity, the cost of it for individuals, enterprises, taxpayers, nations and the planet.
At the same time where low dense territories see a rapid reduction of daily services, people are thinking that they prefer to live in the country. Is it possible to reintroduce the quality of life in the territories where the mobility services are too expensive ? Is it possible to imagine new combinations of technologies ? A reinvention of automobile ?
We hope that your stay in France will help to find some ideas to be developped in order to find sustainable answers to this global question.