Author: Andrew Karvonen

Today, I had the pleasure of attending the Responsive Cities Session at the World Cities Summit Mayors Forum in Vienna. We learned about experiences in participation and governance in six cities around the world and then participated in roundtable sessions where we discussed opportunities and challenges.Thanks to the Centre for Liveable Cities Singapore for hosting the dialogue. I am looking forward to the next World Cities Summit in Singapore 14-16 June 2026. Image credit: Mayors Forum of the World Cities Summit 2025

This week, I attended the 7th Nordic STS Conference in Stockholm at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University. On Thursday, the EmbedterLabs project team co-hosted two paper sessions on ‘Laboratories as Agents of Urban Transformation’ and I shared some findings on our study of the City of Stockholm’s summer streets programme. And on Friday, I participated in a roundtable discussion titled ‘Revisiting the Urban Question in STS’ organised by Devika Prakash, Elise Perrault, and Jonas Bylund. It was fun to meet up with friends old and new.

Today, I participated in a webinar with Nina Vogel to explore the synergies and tensions among data, landscapes, and the built environment. Thanks to Lina Berglund-Snodgrass and Sara Ringvall Sundkvist at Movium for hosting the webinar and moderating the discussion. This was the first in a series of webinars on the various ways that digitalisation and landscape are coming together. I look forward to future engagements.

I served on the grading committee for the PhD defense of Anna-Riikka Kojonsaari‘s doctoral thesis on Wiring Power: Empowering Energy Democracy and New Actor Roles in the Smart Electric Grid at Lund University. The opponent was Tomas Moe Skjølsvold and I was joined on the grading committee by Senja Laakso, Carina Listerborn, and Barry Ness. Congratulations to Anna and her supervisors (Jenny Palm and Daniela Lazoroska) for a successful thesis and defense!

I co-authored a new journal article titled ‘Heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Europe: layering and orchestrating Positive Energy Districts‘ with Dieter Bruggeman, Dick Magnusson, Michael Ornetzeder, and Harald Rohracher. We summarise some of the findings from our TRANS-PED project on how energy innovation and urban planning are coming together in Stockholm, Brussels, and Graz. The article is part of a special issue in Sustainability Science on ‘Urban Sustainability and the Governance of Heterogeneous Energy Systems‘ edited by Jochen Monstadt, Kei Otsuki, and Shaun Smith.

I am spending the month of March as a guest researcher at Linköping University in the Department of Thematic Studies. I look forward to engaging in discussions with Harald Rohracher, Dick Magnusson, and colleagues on infrastructure networks and cities. I will also engage with Sara Gustafsson and Spilios Iliopoulus on our new project on Energy Resilient Cities. And I will probably spend a lot of time watching this driverless shuttle navigate the campus.

Two influential urban thinkers passed away in the last few days. Donald Shoup, a professor of urban studies at UCLA, was an ardent critic of free parking. His 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, delineated the negative impacts of parking and served as inspiration for policymakers in multiple cities to change their local regulations and policies to improve environmental conditions and quality of life for urban residents. Meanwhile, Dickson Despommier inspired vibrant debates about the relationship between agriculture and cities by promoting the notion of vertical farming. A professor at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, his 2010 book, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, spurred venture capitalists to fund multiple high-tech urban farms over the last decade (many of which failed). Interestingly, neither Shoup nor Despommier had formal training in an urban discipline. Shoup had a PhD in economics but mainly focused on cities while Despommier was a microbiologist who got involved in urban food issues by chance. Both will be missed.

I wrote a review of the Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities edited by Olivier Coutard and Daniel Florentin. This is an excellent addition to the sociotechnical study of urban infrastructures with multiple theoretical and empirical insights from around the world. Recommended!

I met with the Humanity’s Urban Future team, a programme funded by CIFAR (The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research), at the Central European University in Vienna. We had a wide ranging discussion on what makes a good city of the future. I contributed with some ideas about the technopolitics of urban AI and look forward to seeing how the work develops in the coming years.

I published a short commentary in Buildings & Cities journal titled ‘Unmaking Cities Can Catalyse Sustainable Transformations‘. I challenge the current ‘innovation imperative’ in cities and suggest that we also need to dismantle and remove outdated and unsustainable elements to realise improved urban futures. This is one of several commentaries that are celebrating the 5th anniversary of the journal.