I co-authored a new article in Cities with Devika Prakash titled ‘Institutional logics of the smart city and the emergence of new configurations of local governance’. We studied the smart city agenda in Kochi, India and how the ambitions of the national government are changing the institutional character at the municipal level. The article is open access and free to download.
I am starting a new project titled ‘Streets as Catalysts of Urban Transformation’ with Kathryn Furlong from the University of Montreal. Over the next year, we will develop a new agenda on the various ways that city streets are being reoriented to realize improved urban futures. The project is funded by Lund University’s Get Started programme that supports collaborations with various international universities.
On Friday, I participated in the doctoral defense of Janneke van der Leer at Chalmers University. In her thesis, Experimenting for Sustainability: Institutional Capacity Building in Swedish Sustainable Urban Development Projects, Janneke analysed three Swedish case studies (Kvillebäcken, Vallastaden, and Brunnshög) to produce new insights on how local governments develop institutional capacity for energy transitions. Congratulations to Janneke, her supervisors (Paula Femenias and Kaj Granath), and the SOTEK project team!
I published a review of Jamie Wang’s MIT Press monograph Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore on the LSE Review of Books website. In the book, Jamie provides a thick description of the eco-modernist approach to urban development that the Singaporean government has honed over the last 60 years. She critiques the singular promotion of economic growth and high-tech capitalism that is rapidly pushing out Singapore’s rich history and culture. Her more-than-human approach calls for a broadening of sustainable urban development to support and celebrate the multitude of relations between humans and non-humans. This is an insightful and thought-provoking book.
Yesterday, Christian Klöckner, Alice Grønhøj, and I served on the assessment committee of Ditte Mogensen‘s PhD defense in the Department of Management at Aarhus University. Ditte’s thesis combines practice theory and behavioral science to examine how, when, and why homeowners choose to implement or abandon energy efficient retrofitting of their houses. The findings of her study provide new insights on the challenges of closing the energy efficiency gap in the existing housing stock. Congratulations to Ditte (and supervisors John Thøgersen, Kirsten Gram-Hanssen, and Per Telling) on a successful defense!
I co-authored a new peer-reviewed journal article in Urban Transformations titled ‘Learning ecosystems in urban transformations: a research agenda‘. This is an outcome of the FORMAS project ‘TRANS-LEARN: Ecosystems of learning for urban sustainability transformations’ that formally ended on Tuesday. Thanks to Jonathan Metzger for leading a dynamic group of co-authors (Sara Brorström, Jonas Bylund, Anique Hommels, Martin de Jong, Paula Kivimaa, Meike Levin-Keitel, Raine Mäntysalo, Amanda Winter, and Marc Wolfram) through many vibrant and thought-provoking discussions on how urban stakeholders can learn to learn better.
I was honoured to attend the doctoral defense for Devika Prakash at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Devika’s thesis is titled From Chaos to Control (Rooms): Smart city governance and the re-wiring of technologies, expertise and organizations. Thanks to the opponent Govind Gopkumar and the grading committee members Ola Söderström, Sophie Schramm, and Jennifer Mack for the stimulating discussion. And thanks to my fellow supervisors Jonathan Metzger and Henrik Ernstson. Big congratulations to Devika!
I co-authored a new article in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research with Devika Prakash and Jonathan Metzger on the governance implications of smart city control rooms in India. We developed new insights on how these facilities are reinventing the relationship between local, state, and national governments based on Devika’s extensive fieldwork in Kochi. Control rooms are having a wide range of long-term impacts on how cities function and they will become more prominent and powerful in the coming decades.
I contributed to a new article in Urban Geography on the role of citizens in smart cities. My co-authors and I studied the institutional logics of seven cities around the world to compare and contrast the dynamic interplay of citizens, local governments, and technological innovation. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2551135. Thanks to my co-authors for the productive collaboration: Tim Bunnell, Zachary Spicer, Byron Miller, Teresa Abbruzzese, Paolo Cardullo, Sangwon Chaee, Catherine Chang, Greig Charnock, Ming-Kuang Chung, Kwon Heoi, Sue-Ching Jouj, Olga Kordas, Lily Kongl, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, HaeRan Shinm and Orlando Woods.
I attended the 16th International Sustainability Transitions Conference in Lisbon and delivered a presentation titled ‘Achieving experimental governance through process learning’ with findings from the EmbedterLabs project. And Lena Neij and I delivered a speed talk on ‘Shaping a research agenda on Innovation-Sustainability research in the EU’ with reported on some of the key outcomes from the CIRCLE Innovation Research Day on 23 April.
Andrew Karvonen 