Andrew Karvonen

I co-authored a new article in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research with Devika Prakash and Jonathan Metzger on the governance implications of smart city control rooms in India. We developed new insights on how these facilities are reinventing the relationship between local, state, and national governments based on Devika’s extensive fieldwork in Kochi. Control rooms are having a wide range of long-term impacts on how cities function and they will become more prominent and powerful in the coming decades.

I contributed to a new article in Urban Geography on the role of citizens in smart cities. My co-authors and I studied the institutional logics of seven cities around the world to compare and contrast the dynamic interplay of citizens, local governments, and technological innovation. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2551135. Thanks to my co-authors for the productive collaboration: Tim Bunnell, Zachary Spicer, Byron Miller, Teresa Abbruzzese, Paolo Cardullo, Sangwon Chaee, Catherine Chang, Greig Charnock, Ming-Kuang Chung, Kwon Heoi, Sue-Ching Jouj, Olga Kordas, Lily Kongl, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, HaeRan Shinm and Orlando Woods.

I attended the 16th International Sustainability Transitions Conference in Lisbon and delivered a presentation titled ‘Achieving experimental governance through process learning’ with findings from the EmbedterLabs project. And Lena Neij and I delivered a speed talk on ‘Shaping a research agenda on Innovation-Sustainability research in the EU’ with reported on some of the key outcomes from the CIRCLE Innovation Research Day on 23 April.

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.