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I contributed a book chapter to the new Routledge compendium Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Benjamin Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocom. My chapter is about the various ways that urban nature is being realised in today’s cities and includes specific examples from Manchester.

At the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference in Philadelphia, my book, Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology and the Sustainable City, received the 2014 John Friedmann Book Award. I am honoured to receive the award and be acknowledged for my contributions to contemporary debates on sustainability and urban planning.

Today, it was announced that the University of Manchester is part of a winning bid for a Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission to develop smart city demonstration projects. The €24m project will be conducted over five years (2015-2020) and includes the development of low-carbon lighthouse districts in Manchester, Eindhoven, and Stavanger. The overall project will be led by Fraunhofer IAO and at the University of Manchester, James Evans, Krassimira Paskaleva, and I will be leading the work package on monitoring and evaluation. The press release on the project is here.

On 6 October, I co-organised a workshop with Saska Petrova and Jenni Cauvain at the University of Manchester for our CHARISMA project on retrofit of social housing in Greater Manchester. We hosted 30 professionals from the public, private, and third sectors to summarise some of the findings from our project, hear about the experiences of others (GENTOO and Northwards Housing), and brainstorm on optimising the energy performance of the existing housing stock. More details about the workshop and the project can be found here.

Paul Schell, former mayor of Seattle, passed away recently. He made some significant contributions to the sustainable development of Seattle and its reputation as a city of nature. Beyond his term as mayor, he was also influential at the Port of Seattle and the University of Washington. I admired his position as a civic leader and a champion of neighbourhood empowerment. He will be missed.

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).