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’.
I participated in a workshop on ‘Urban STS: Assembling New Perspectives‘ hosted by the European University at St Petersburg, Technical University of Munich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. I delivered a presentation on ‘The Smart City Agenda and the Technopolitics of Infrastructure Innovation’. Thanks to Diana West and Anastasia Karkacheva for organising the event.
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’.
Andrew Karvonen 