Author: Andrew Karvonen

I am pleased to report that my PhD student, Ahlam Sharif, successfully passed her PhD viva on ‘Sustainable Architectural Design between Inscription and De-scription: The Case of Masdar City’. Her work on the development and inhabitation of Masdar City’s student housing provides novel insights on how architects, developers, and building users interact in the production of sustainable cities. Congratulations to Ahlam!

While attending a RESIN project meeting in Freiburg, my colleagues and I got a guided tour of the noted sustainable urban district of Vauban. The designers have created a very liveable, vibrant, and dense neighbourhood by moving automobiles to the periphery and providing a wide range of services. The area attracts some 25,000 visitors per year from around the world who are interested in understanding how sustainability principles have been realised on the ground.Definitely worth a visit!

With several colleagues from the Centre for Urban Resilience and Energy, I attended a workshop on ‘Urban Climate and Energy Transformations in Bergen. We were hosted by Håvard Haardstad, Tarje Wanvik, and Stina Oseland from the Spaces of Climate and Energy Laboratory at the University of Bergen. We had a lively two days of discussions about climate change, energy transformations, and justice. We also had a productive session with practitioners from the Bergen municipality.

Gabi Schliwa and I attend the ‘International Symposium on Urban Living Labs‘ at Newcastle University on 25-26 February. The event included an inspiring set of presentations on emerging initiatives in the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, and the USA where researchers are putting the notion of urban living labs into practice. Gabi and I gave a brief presentation on Manchester’s Triangulum project.

Last week, I attended a workshop on co-housing at the University of Sheffield titled ‘Collaborative Housing and Community Resilience‘. As part of the workshop, we conducted site visits of three co-hoousing projects in Sheffield (Fireside Housing Co-operative (pictured above), Open House Project, and Shirle Hill Co-housing). Each of the projects is in a different state of development and each provides different ideas about how to design and manage these alternative forms of living. Great stuff!

I am spending the next three months as a visiting fellow at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel where I will be affiliated with Cosmopolis and MOBI. Beyond the great group of urban researchers here, the city is an amazing source of inspiration. Looking forward to beer, chocolate, and bureaucrats!

On 7-8 January, I co-hosted the first Winter School for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Power Networks at the University of Manchester at Bridge 5 Mill in East Manchester. We heard keynote talks by Robin McLaren and Peter Crossley and also engaged in panel discussions with academics, industrial partners, and doctoral students.

Simon Guy and I just published a book chapter titled ‘District Heating Comes to Ecotown: Zero-Carbon Housing and the Rescaling of UK Energy Provision’ in Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South edited by Olivier Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford (Routledge, 2016). The contributors explore how infrastructure is being reworked in cities around the world and the implications to politics, governance, and everyday life.

On 23 November, I participated in a workshop on ‘The Domestic Nexus: Interrogating the Interlinked Practices of Water, Energy and Food Consumption’ as part of the ESRC-funded Nexus Network. I delivered a presentation on ‘Domestic Experiments: Bringing Living Labs into the Home’ and learned a lot from colleagues from the UK, Denmark, and Estonia on the notion of the nexus. Thanks to Matt Watson, Ali Browne, and others for organising.

On 8-9 October, I attended a workshop hosted by the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on ‘Smart City-Regional Governance: ‘Smartness’ in Reconciling Internationality, Competitiveness and Cohesion?‘. The workshop was organised by Tassilo Hershell and Bas van Heur and included a wide-ranging discussion on the implications of smart city agendas. With my co-authors James Evans (University of Manchester), Kes McCormick (University of Lund) and Gregory Trencher (Clark University), I presented ideas about ‘Smartness and the Disintegration of the City’.