Andrew Karvonen

Congratulations to Alexander Craig-Thompson at Uppsala University on the successful defense of his PhD thesis Inverse Urbanism: Mapping Imaginaries of Stockholm’s Subsurface. He studied the role of the underground in Stockholm and challenged its dominant spatial imaginary as an untapped resource to be exploited. He calls for decision makers to embrace a three-dimensional perspective of the city and acknowledge the central role of the underground in achieving densification and decarbonization goals. Alex’s supervisors included Magdalena Kuchler, Ari Tryggvason and Corine Wood-Donnelly. It was an honor to be part of the grading committee with Jenny Norrman, Nils Björling and Wiebren Boonstra as well as opponent Karolina Isaksson.

Seven new projects have been awarded funding from ShiftSweden for the Lund Urban Transition Lab: The Playology of the Schoolyard (Växtvärket Malmö), From Parking to Place (ViaEuropa Sverige AB),
ReInstaLL 2.0 (RISE), No Waste to Waste (Lund University), Metamorphosis (Lund Municipality), Future Scenarios (Lund Municipality), and Digital Inventory for Reuse (Historical Parts Sweden AB). I look forward to working with the project teams on circular building, mobility, and integrated planning.

On 24 April, I participated in the defense of Karolina Pantazatou at Lund University for her thesis Integrating Environmental Simulations and Semantic 3D City Models: A Framework for Requirement Specification, Automated Data Linking, and Visualization in Sustainable Urban Planning. She developed a workshop to apply digital tools to assess solar access and noise in urban environments. Congratulations to Karolina and her supervisors (Lars Harrie, Jouri Kanters, Kristoffer Mattisson, and Per-Ola Olsson)!

It was gratifying to attend Marikken Wullf-Wathe’s doctoral defense at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Marikken’s thesis Dreaming of smartness: Mobilizing, implementing and motivating the smart city provides insights on how smart city actors assemble technologies and people in specific contexts to realize particular digitalized futures. Karolina Isaksson, Marianne Millstein, and I supervised the research. Thanks to the opponent (David Pinder) and the grading committee (Katharine Willis, Guy Baeten, and Meike Schalk) for fostering a lively and thought-provoking discussion. And congratulations to Marikken!

Yesterday, the Urban Future-Making research training group at HafenCity University Hamburg visited Lund. They spent the morning with colleagues from Urban Arena and CIRCLE to share ideas about urban research as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration. In the afternoon, the research training group toured Brunnshög with Christian Wilke and Katarina Meier from the City of Lund. It was great to strengthen the connections between Hamburg and Lund.

I co-edited a special issue of Urban Planning with Jenni Cauvain and Antonella Bruzzese on ‘Streets as platforms of public life‘. The following articles are free to download:

Streets as Platforms of Public Life
By Jenni Cauvain, Antonella Bruzzese and Andrew Karvonen

From Survival to Solidarity: Reclaiming Santiago’s Streets and Plazas Through Food, Care, and Collective Resistance in Ollas Comunes
By Francisco García and Francisco Vergara-Perucich

“Can She Handle It?” Women Delivery Drivers and the Gendered Politics of Hanoi’s Streets
By Sarah Turner and Hạnh Thúy Ngô

Elevating Informality: Street Vending, Design Politics, and the Remaking of Public Space in Bandung
By Sidh Sintusingha

Reclaiming Public Space Through Governance Transformation: The Case of Piazze Aperte, Milan
By Antonella Bruzzese

Experimental Logics of Street Transformations
By Martin Emanuel, Nima Karimzadeh, William Hilliard, Andrew Karvonen and Daniel Normark

The Social Zipper: Redefining the Role of Streets in Disadvantaged Housing Estates
By Lene Wiell Nordberg, Rikke Borg Sundstrup, Marie Stender, Rikke Skovgaard Nielsen, Mette Mechlenborg and Claus Bech-Danielsen

I enjoyed collaborating with Zipan Cai, Cong Cong, and Weiming Huang on a new article in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems titled ‘Fine-grained urban land use simulation: Integrating spatial dynamic modeling with a pre-trained vision-language model‘. We fed data from streetview images in Shenzen, China into a spatial dynamic model simulate different pathways of urban evolution to 2035. The outcomes can inform the work of urban decision-makers.

I co-authored a new article in Urban Planning titled ‘Experimental logics of street transformations‘. We compare and contrast four distinct experimental logics of street reconfigurations in Stockholm from 2014 to 2023. Thanks to my colleagues Martin Emanuel, Nima Karimzadeh, William Hilliard, and Daniel Normark, as well as the rest of the EmbedterLabs project team.

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.