Author: Andrew Karvonen

The Manchester Evening News just published an article to highlight the research that Sarah Butler, Laura Partridge and I are doing for our ‘Stories from the Road‘ project. We have published 17 stories about personal experiences on Oxford Road. Check it out!

I co-authored a blog posting on ‘The Life and Death of Zero Carbon Housing’ on the Geography Directions website. This is related to a new journal article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers on ‘Zero carbon homes and zero carbon living: sociomaterial interdependencies in carbon governance’.

 

It was an honour to co-host the cities@manchester 2015 Summer Institute in Urban Studies from 28 June to 2 July. Roger Keil (York University), Pauline Lipman (University of Illinois-Chicago), Jennifer Robinson (UCL), and Simon Marvin (Durham University) contributed to four days of intensive debate and discussion about all things urban with 25 early career researchers. Looking forward to another summer institute in 2016!

Dan Welch and I convened an academic workshop on 24-25 June for the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute on ‘Beyond Practices: Sustainable Consumption and Sociotechnical Systems’. We had a lively set of debates over two half-days with keynote presentations by Inge Ropke and Alan Warde.

Along with Catherine Grandclement (EDF R&D) and Simon Guy (Lancaster University), I co-authored a new article in Energy Policy titled ‘Negotiating comfort in low energy housing: The politics of intermediation‘. We use a case study in France to study how human and non-human actors attempt to mediate the sometimes diverging goals of comfort and energy efficiency in an innovative housing development. This article is part of a forthcoming special issue on energy efficiency and comfort that will be published in 2015.

I contributed a book chapter to the new Routledge compendium Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Benjamin Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocom. My chapter is about the various ways that urban nature is being realised in today’s cities and includes specific examples from Manchester.

At the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference in Philadelphia, my book, Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology and the Sustainable City, received the 2014 John Friedmann Book Award. I am honoured to receive the award and be acknowledged for my contributions to contemporary debates on sustainability and urban planning.

Today, it was announced that the University of Manchester is part of a winning bid for a Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission to develop smart city demonstration projects. The €24m project will be conducted over five years (2015-2020) and includes the development of low-carbon lighthouse districts in Manchester, Eindhoven, and Stavanger. The overall project will be led by Fraunhofer IAO and at the University of Manchester, James Evans, Krassimira Paskaleva, and I will be leading the work package on monitoring and evaluation. The press release on the project is here.

On 6 October, I co-organised a workshop with Saska Petrova and Jenni Cauvain at the University of Manchester for our CHARISMA project on retrofit of social housing in Greater Manchester. We hosted 30 professionals from the public, private, and third sectors to summarise some of the findings from our project, hear about the experiences of others (GENTOO and Northwards Housing), and brainstorm on optimising the energy performance of the existing housing stock. More details about the workshop and the project can be found here.

Paul Schell, former mayor of Seattle, passed away recently. He made some significant contributions to the sustainable development of Seattle and its reputation as a city of nature. Beyond his term as mayor, he was also influential at the Port of Seattle and the University of Washington. I admired his position as a civic leader and a champion of neighbourhood empowerment. He will be missed.