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’.
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.
Andrew Karvonen 