Author: Andrew Karvonen

From 29 June to 4 July, I co-hosted the 2014 cities@manchester Summer Institute on Urban Studies with Kevin Ward, Cecilia Wong, and Laura Partridge. We had a week of events around theory, methodology, and career development with 25 early career researchers from around the world. Plenary speakers included University of Manchester colleagues including Simon Guy, Diana Mitlin, and Erik Swyngedouw, as well as external academics such as David Imbroscio (University of Louisville), Loretta Lees (University of Leicester), Eugene McCann (Simon Fraser University), Colin McFarlane (Durham University), and Michael Neuman (University of New South Wales). The above photo shows Eugene McCann preaching to the masses on a walking tour of East Manchester. More info on the Summer Institute here.

This news item from Buzzfeed includes some fascinating images of abandoned shopping malls in the US. For me, these photos serve as a reminder of the constant maintenance that is required to keep these buildings in operation. It is also amazing to amount of stuff that is left behind when these buildings were abandoned.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Thomas Parke Hughes (1923-2014), a highly influential scholar in the history of technology. I continue to learn from his work on large technical systems and hope to build upon his insights in the future.

I am pleased to announce the publishing of a symposium in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research on ‘Urban Laboratories’. My colleague Bas van Heur and I edited the following collection of papers:

Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities
Andrew Karvonen and Bas van Heur

Experiments and Counter-Experiments in the Urban Laboratory of Water- Supply Partnerships in India
Govind Gopakumar

‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Lower Your Carbon Footprint!’ — Urban Laboratories and the Governance of Low-Carbon Futures
James Evans and Andrew Karvonen

Planning and Experimental Knowledge Production: Zeche Zollverein as an Urban Laboratory
Philipp Dorstewitz

Houses of Experiment: Modern Housing and the Will to Laboratorization
Ignaz Strebel and Jane M. Jacobs

An article in City Paper describes how residents in Baltimore are using guerrilla art to slow traffic. One intervention that was actually commissioned by the municipal government was the zipper crosswalk (see image above).

An article in Dezeen Magazine features the work of French photographer Laurent Chéhère who creates imaginative images of Paris buildings unhinged from their surroundings.

 

An interesting conflict between a new building and an eight-lane highway in Xi’an, Shaanxi province in Western China. More info and photos here.

I am pleased to announce a new book chapter, ‘Expertise: Specialised Knowledge in Environmental Politics and Sustainability’, co-authored with my colleague Ralf Brand. The chapter appears in the Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, edited by Paul G. Harris. More info here.

I recently contributed to a special issue of Building Research & Information edited by Tim Dixon and Malcolm Eames on ‘Urban retrofitting for the transition to sustainability’. The special issue includes the following articles:

Scaling up: the challenges of urban retrofit
Tim Dixon & Malcolm Eames

City futures: exploring urban retrofit and sustainable transitions
Malcolm Eames, Tim Dixon, Tim May & Miriam Hunt

Retrofitting England’s suburbs to adapt to climate change
Katie Williams, Rajat Gupta, Diane Hopkins, Matthew Gregg, Catherine Payne, Jennifer L. R. Joynt, Ian Smith & Nada Bates-Brkljac

Retrofitting existing housing: how far, how much?
Phil Jones, Simon Lannon & Jo Patterson

Socio-technical issues in dwelling retrofit
Chris Tweed

Towards systemic domestic retrofit: a social practices approach
Andrew Karvonen

Regenerating cities: technological and design innovation for Australian suburbs
Peter W. Newton

Water–energy nexus: retrofitting urban areas to achieve zero pollution
Vladimir Novotny

Reducing energy demand through retrofitting buildings
Fionn Stevenson

I accompanied Graham Haughton and his ‘Sustainable Communities’ class on a fieldtrip to see Saltaire, a old industrial town that has been regenerated as a sustainable urban development. There are some interesting tensions here between historic preservation and aims to improve the energy performance of buildings. We also visited the Greenhouse in Leeds, a refurbished building with impressive sustainability credentials.