After completing a master's degree in social sciences (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ulm/Paris, Luca Pattaroni obtained a joint PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of Geneva. He has been an assistant at the Faculty of Law (University of Geneva), a visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and a visiting Professor at the Federal Universities of Fluminense and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
Luca Pattaroni is Professor of Urban Sociology EPFL and co-director of the Laboratory of Urban Sociology (LaSUR) of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC/EPFL). . He is also the co-responsible of the research committee «Urban Sociology» of the Swiss Sociological Association.
Contributing to the field of Urban Studies, his work addresses the expression of differences and the making of the common in contemporary cities, focusing on the concomitant transformation of lifestyles, institutional settings, and spatial forms. His research explores housing issues, public spaces, urban migration, and cultural and urban movements. In his research, he uses mixed methods to combine measurement and modeling approaches of significant societal transformations with fine-grained and dynamic descriptions of socio-spatial situations, encouraging further dialogue between urban sociology, architecture, and engineering sciences.
Luca Pattaroni is also actively engaged in professional collaborations with architects and urban planners. He regularly participates in international competitions within interdisciplinary teams. Among others, he won in 2021 the First Prize for the milestone renovation of a student housing tower in Paris (Tour des Poissoniers, Paris Habitat/CROUS) as a partner of the consortium led by L'AUC (Grand Prix d'Urbanisme, 2021) and Fagart&Fontana Architects. He is also regularly commissioned as urban issues expert by public authorities. In 2020, he was appointed as a member of the national Think Tank of the Swiss Association of Consulting Engineers (USIC) & Rethink_ing.
Aside from his academic and professional commitments, Luca Pattaroni is very involved in tightening the relationship between academia and urban public life. He makes frequent media contributions and gives numerous public talks. He is also the co-founder and President of the artists and artisans Cooperative Ressources Urbaines, which manages 700 members. He is also vice-president of the Filogie Foundation aiming at the renewal of affordable housing through the experimental development of housing projects.

My research investigates how societies composed of heterogeneous ways of life manage to sustain a shared world. Starting from empirical inquiries into cities, housing and cultural production, I explore the socio-material forms through which plural societies organize coexistence.

Across my work, I have examined diverse settings — urban squats, collective housing arrangements, public spaces, and more recently the material infrastructures of cultural production. These investigations share a common concern: understanding how differences in rhythms, attachments, needs and modes of inhabiting the world become politically and spatially composed.

My approach draws on pragmatic sociology and theories of engagement, particularly the work of Laurent Thévenot, while engaging with phenomenological analyses of inhabiting and with material approaches to social life. Building on these traditions, I focus on the role of socio-material forms — spatial arrangements, institutional devices, and everyday practices — in stabilizing relations between individuals, collectives and environments.

Rather than treating democracy as primarily a matter of norms or deliberation, my research examines how democratic coexistence depends on concrete forms capable of accommodating plural ways of life. In this perspective, cities appear as key laboratories where the tensions between differentiation and commonality become visible and politically consequential.

More broadly, my work contributes to a sociological and political theory of the forms through which plural societies compose a common world.