Death, city and "ecology": The construction of an alternative funerary landscape in the Strasbourg metropolitan area.

Since the early 2000s, funerary landscapes have been no exception to the trend to take environmental issues into account in urban design. In practices as in spatialities, the notion of ecology has spread and has been mobilized to the point of calling into question the imaginaries around death and the dead in the territory. As an essential link in the urban fabric, the cemetery is a privileged place to observe the arrival of these issues and their translations, both in the individualized expression of a new relationship to burial, and in its quality as a public space. It would then become a renaturalized space whose landscaping qualities are highlighted in terms of soothing mourning, but also in terms of the benefits it could bring in terms of the environment (habitats for biodiversity, etc.) and urban comfort (cool island, local planted area, etc.). A number of municipalities have taken the initiative by rethinking the management and layout of their funeral spaces. Among others, Strasbourg is one of these communities that also intends to carry out a project to transform its funerary spaces, making them laboratories for a plural ecology.

Based on the Strasbourg example, the thesis therefore studies the extent to which the phenomenon of greening cemeteries is leading to a rethinking of their place within the urban fabric. It is based on a CIFRE thesis carried out within the funeral service of the City and Eurometropolis of Strasbourg between 2022 and 2025. We structure our work around 3 axes and hypotheses.

(1) What are the spatial transformations taking place in Strasbourg's cemeteries? On what scales? What are they doing to the cemetery?

(2) How and by whom are these transformations carried out? What are the imaginaries, discourses and practices around these spatialities?

(3) How are the reconfigurations of the cemetery taken into account from an operational and strategic point of view on a larger scale in a project for the ecological transformation of a territory?

Thus, by analyzing the operationalization of the notion of ecology in the form of public policy, we show that cemeteries, long perceived as fixed places, are today spaces in transformation, bearers of new spatial, symbolic and political dynamics. Using Strasbourg as an example, our research aims to examine the conditions of this greening of cemeteries, and how it may be changing their spatialities, their imaginary and their governance in the urban fabric of the Anthropocene era. Our thesis shows that the arrival of environmental injunctions and their spatialization in cemeteries takes place in a number of ways: through regulations (e.g., the normative greening of urban planning, which also affects cemeteries); through voluntary approaches initiated by cemetery management services or otherwise; and through citizen demands, notably via naturalist and ecologist associations (e.g., the role of associations in the greening of cemeteries). role of associations in putting tree burials on the political agenda) or through reconfigurations of professional practices (e.g. institutional and financial support for the creation of a funeral cooperative). Overall, in an established context, our research shows how the multiple representations of ecology and death, and their confrontations, shape one or more new cemetery landscapes. Ecology acts here as a structuring principle, but also as an object of debate in which the cemetery becomes a space for the hybridization of imaginaries. These evolutions imply adjustments in discourse, layout and associated uses, revealing tensions between traditions, new social expectations, regulatory constraints and environmental ambitions. We therefore highlight how this notion, plural and malleable, is mobilized, appropriated and disputed by a diversity of actors (technicians, elected representatives, residents, associations, funeral operators...) - in the context of the requalification of the funerary landscape.

The thesis thus sheds light on narrative registers around the greening of funeral spaces and practices, whose discourses can inform us about how they cohabit as well as the state of progress of these shifts in thinking in a local and institutional context. Relations between humans and non-humans are replayed in this powerful symbolic space, where ecology crystallizes the confrontation of individual and collective narratives and values. The competing ecological and funerary functions of the cemetery revealed by our survey illustrate the persistent cohabitation of both anthropocentric and biocentric visions. Socially fabricated and practiced, the landscape embodied in the cemetery shows us a complex process reflecting a way in which the living inhabit the world. But the ongoing process of greening the cemetery requires us to rethink the grammar of actions to be mobilized in this space. The transformation of the cemetery towards a new type of ecological cemetery can be understood as an indicator of social change, and could point to the beginnings of a new funerary transition. By reconsidering the cemetery as a living place that conveys meaning, and as material for projects, death then becomes a full-fledged component of ecological and territorial reflection to rethink a project for society.