Born in 1945, Pierre Veltz holds an engineering degree and a PhD in social sciences. After beginning his career as an urban planner, he went into academic life and consulting. He founded and headed LATTS, an interdisciplinary research group, at the crossroads of technical and sociological research. From 1981 to 1991, he was the Dean of Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, one of the leading French “Grandes Ecoles”. From 1999 to 2004, he was the Director of this School. He also chaired ParisTech, which is a group of ten foremost engineering schools in Paris. He is Professor at the Ecole des Ponts and at Sciences Po Paris He is also the scientific director of IHEDATE (Institut des hautes études pour le développement et l’aménagement des territoires en Europe). His fields of research are: urban development and planning, economic geography, management and the transformations of organizational structures. From 2008 to 2015, he is in charge, for the French government, of the development of an ambitious innovation cluster in the southern part of the Paris region (Paris-Saclay)