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I am co-organising a paper session at the RGS-IBG annual meeting with James Evans on ‘Projects, Platforms, and the Emergence of Modular Urban Development’. See below for a description of the session and instructions for submitting an abstract.

Session Title

‘Projects, Platforms, and the Emergence of Modular Urban Development’

Session Convenors

Andy Karvonen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)

James Evans (University of Manchester)

Abstract

There are increasing expectations that cities can catalyse sustainable urban transformations through experimentation and innovation. Funding agencies and local governments are encouraging urban actors to develop, trial and demonstrate digital, financial, ecological and social ‘solutions’ that are discrete, modular, and replicable. Such products can then be upscaled to the city as a whole or easily transferred and replicated in other locales. This entails a new mode of urbanism that is modular and universal rather than situated and particular, suggesting a new landscape of cities that is inherently piecemeal, patchy, and variegated. In this session, we invite theoretical and empirical papers that explore the emerging modularisation of cities, the influence of projects and platforms in the pursuit of sustainable urban development, and the anticipated and real effects of this agenda.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Different approaches to modularisation (e.g. social, economic, political, ideological, material)
• Different techniques of modularisation (e.g. best practice, technical solutions, spatial bounding)
• Comparisons between the rhetoric and practice of modularisation
• Replication, upscaling and the lexicon of modularisation
• The practical and ideological tensions between modularisation and sustainability
• Enabling strategies for modularisation
• The relationship between market approaches and modularisation
• The history and present of closed system urban imaginaries (e.g. the capsular city)

Instructions for Authors

Please send proposals (title, 250-word abstract, and author details) to apkar@kth.se and james.z.evans@manchester.ac.uk by 31 January 2018.

I was honoured to present some of my research on smart sustainable cities at the 2017 International Symposium on Sustainable Smart Eco-City Planning and Development at Cardiff University on 12 and 13 October. Special thanks to Li Yu and the Cardiff Confucius Institute for organising the event.

It was great to participate in the Exploring Experimental Cities workshop 21-23 September in Copenhagen. Aalborg University in Copenhagen and City Link hosted three days of talks and events that were inspiring and challenging.  Special thanks to Peter Munthe-Kaas for pulling it all together. Let’s do it again!

The LSE Review of Books just published a new review of Justin Parkhurst’s The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2017). Parkhurst provides a very useful summary of the pros and cons of evidence-based policy and provides a framework for using evidence effectively. This is essential reading for those who are interested in the connections between research and policy. Read more here.

I was invited to a workshop in Stuttgart on Real World Labs hosted by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the German state of Baden-Würtemberg. Six project teams presented their current work on situated innovation and I delivered a keynote presentation on ‘Impacts and Implications of Real World Labs’. I also convened a workshop with Niko Schäpke and Katleen de Flander on ‘Space, scale and time as key dimensions of configuring urban real world labs’. Thanks to Niko for the invitation!

I am very pleased to announce the release of Key Thinkers on Cities edited by Regan Koch and Alan Latham. Regan and Alan recruited several great scholars to write short pieces about influential urban academics and practitioners. I was honoured to contribute a chapter on Matthew Gandy. Something for the summer reading list!

I attended the Nordic Geographers Meeting in Stockholm and co-organised three sessions on ‘Smart for Whom?’ with Federico Cugurullo. Thanks to following contributors for their insightful presentations:

1. The Social and Environmental Implications of Smart Cities: A Global Comparative Research Agenda,
Byron Miller
2. Doing smart governance: an assemblage approach, Matthew Cook and Simon Joss
3. Understanding Smart City Policies through a critical analytical framework: the cases of Cape Town and Amsterdam,
Hebe Verrest and Karin Pfeffer
4. Interface points and divisions in a smart urban district in the Dublin Docklands, Liam Heaphy
5. Knowledge Politics and Representational Inequalities in Open Calgary, Ryan L. Burns
6. Stretching “Smart”: Enhancing Health and Well-Being of Urban Residents in Kashiwa- no-ha Smart City,
Greg Trencher and Andrew Karvonen
7. The UK Smart City and its Publics, Rob Cowley, Simon Joss and Federico Caprotti
8. The “smart” inhabitant: ‘Digi-Tal’ services and social differences in Tel Aviv City, Tali Hatuka & Hadas Zur
9. What the smart city model can learn from Latin American cities. The case of Medellin, Colombia, Gynna Millan
10. How we know where we are in the smart city – citizen perceptions in Amsterdam, Christine Richter, Shazade Jameson, Linnet Taylor and Carmen Pérez del Pulgar
11. The unsustainability of smart-city governance: new hardware, old software, Federico Cugurullo
12. Equality and the Smart City: Negotiating (Post)Democracy in Manchester, UK, Joe Blakey
13. Exploring agriculture in smart urban development: a realistic food supply or middle class indulgence?,
Per-Anders Langendahl, Matthew Cook, Cecilia Mark-Herbert, and Annika Gottberg
14. Technology beyond politics? Smart urbanism and social inequalities in the European city, Henrike Rau, Samuel Mössner, and Marco Santangelo

The Experimental City (Routledge 2016) has now been published in paperback. Same great chapters in a more affordable format. What could be better?

I delivered a lecture at the University of Luxembourg on ‘Urban Experiments: The Politics of Measuring, Assessing, and Scaling’ as part of a public lecture series on ‘Science and Citizens meet Challenges of Sustainability’. I also hosted a workshop with Master’s students that are earning a Certificate in Sustainable Development and Social Innovation. Good stuff! Thank you to Ariane König for the invitation.