The Value of “Patrimoine” - Archive ouverte HAL
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

The Value of “Patrimoine”

Résumé

This paper investigates forms of valuation in the governing of large infrastructures. In the 2010s, the French state withdrew its previously ubiquitous technical services, leaving road management with territorial governments and roadworks companies. Yet, public bodies and private companies questioned the awareness of local governments, regarding the substantial maintenance work that ageing infrastructures are worth. They created the National Road Observatory (ONR), dedicated to “knowing” and “preserving” road networks. Drawing on interviews at the ONR and in local authorities, as well as an analysis of their working documents, I discuss the interplay between the quantification work of the Observatory and the valuation problem it is meant to tackle. The ONR strives to correlate the states of roads with maintenance and management practices. Every year, territorial governments are asked to fill in spreadsheets with accounting data about roadworks, and forms with indicators regarding the physical dimensions and states of roads. These statistics are expected to prove that roads are valuable and deserve to be well maintained. This notably entails the valuation of past management, which enacts the infrastructure’s fragility and its manager’s responsibility. In institutional discourses surrounding the Observatory, roads are referred to using the French word “patrimoine”, which conveys not only the sense of an asset bringing future benefits, but also that of a legacy. The form of valuation at play at the ONR interestingly matches this duality. As it acknowledges the value of past work, quantification appears as a particular mode of attachment, intended to secure a transferred responsibility.
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Dates et versions

hal-03904048 , version 1 (16-12-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03904048 , version 1

Citer

Roman Solé-Pomies. The Value of “Patrimoine”. 4S annual meeting, Oct 2021, Toronto, Canada. ⟨hal-03904048⟩
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