Jacques Lévy is a professor of geography and urbanism at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

He was a senior lecturer and then professor at l'Institut d 'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) from 1999 to 2007 and has been a visiting professor at the University of New York, Los Angeles (UCLA), Naples (IUO), São Paulo (USP), Mexico (Cátedra Reclus), Sydney (Macquarie University), Bergamo (Università degli Studi di Bergamo), Liège (ULiège) and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003–2004).

Conducted in interdisciplinary groups, his research focuses on such topics as urban models, mobility, the micro-geography of public spaces and the extent of globalization in metropolitan areas.

He likewise built a social theory based on “dialogic systemism,” i.e. a vision of society as a whole that is sensitive to the action of the actors within it and which diverges from both structuralism and methodological individualism.

In the 2000s and 2010s he continued in the same vein, introducing an actor/object/environment triptych that made it possible to take into account the contributions of an “actor turn” in thinking on non-human agents, and generalize the concept of environment by refusing to limit social aggregates to "assemblages."

Since 1994, one of Jacques Lévy's main contributions is the formalization of a theory of social space, most notably through the building of a vocabulary that reworks basic concepts while making them coherent.

As early as 1984, in analyzing the municipal elections in Paris, he showed the existence of a political space that was not reducible to the distribution of social groups defined on the basis of socio-economic criteria.

Since 1997, this analytical work has been supplemented by numerous electoral studies on the France, Switzerland, the European Union and the United States, often published in newspapers and scientific journals.

It appears that, when questions of openness (to Europe, migrants, religions or minority sexual orientations) arise, the electoral space is highly sensitive to gradients of urbanity.

He has developed a method based on free exploration of urban environments, mostly on foot, to facilitate comparisons by the body, and the scales and metrics of different cities.

He has criticized certain schools of thought in North American geography and sociology, led most notably by David Harvey and Neil Smith, for their inability to take into account the profound nature of urbanity by reducing it to a clash between communities or economic or political domination.

He has characterized this movement, with its strong activist focus combining Marxism and culturalism and promoting the defense of the homogeneity of the slums, as "neo-structuralist," whereas for Jacques Lévy, urban development should aim for sociological and functional diversity.

The second model, on the other hand, produces the "scattered and fragmented urbanity" often found in small towns and city outskirts in North America and Africa.

In the collective work L’invention du Monde, which he edited in 2008, he linked various components of today's world (including the Earth as one of the "natures of humanity") and suggested a periodization of globalization in seven phases, the first being the spread of Homo sapiens across the planet.

By analyzing recent events, he confirmed the impossibility of explaining the current dynamics using only geopolitical or economic logics, as well as the need to observe the emergence of a society of individuals at the global scale through the appropriate "lenses."

One of the evolutionary paths he explores is the broadening of the range of cartographic techniques and semiotics to escape from a "Euclidean prison," which cannot correctly process both cities and the global scale.

On this point his approach differs from Ed Soja's neo-structuralist one by proposing a view of spatial justice based on urbanity, inhabiting and the co-production of public goods.