I spent two days visiting with Bas van Vliet and colleagues in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University. We had some very productive and enjoyable discussions about smart cities, sustainable practices, platforms of innovation and related topics. Check out their useful webpage (and see diagram above) that summarises the social theories employed by their researchers. Thanks to Bas for the invitation!
Simon Guy and I just published an open-access article in the Journal of Urban Technology on ‘Urban Energy Landscapes and the Rise of Heat Networks in the United Kingdom’. We examine the implications of distributed heat to scale, density, mixed-use and materiality. The article is available for download here: tinyurl.com/ydxzbu6l
I am very pleased to announce that Sercan Yalciner has completed her doctoral degree in Architecture at the University of Manchester. Dr Yalciner’s conducted a study on ‘Sustainable Architecture and the Influence of Global Assessment Tools’ with a specific focus on BREEAM International. Her work provides insights on how the notion of sustainability is embedded in building codes and how building professionals transfer and apply ideas to different contexts. Congratulations to Dr Yalciner!
I published a new article in the Journal of Urban Affairs with my colleagues Jenni Cauvain and Saska Petrova on ‘Market-based low-carbon retrofit in social housing: Insights from Greater Manchester’. We conducted a study of social housing providers in Manchester to provide insights on how they are navigating the decarbonisation agenda in the UK while also dealing with privatisation and austerity measures.
How does smart urbanisation contribute to goals of sustainability? Chris Martin, James Evans and I published a paper in Technological Forecasting and Social Change on ‘Smart and sustainable? Five tensions in the visions and practices of the smart-sustainable city in Europe and North America’. We argue that smart interventions tend to reinforce neoliberal modes of urban development rather than emphasise environmental protection and social equity.
Today, I visited Kista in Greater Stockholm with my Master’s students in Urban Infrastructure to learn about the Urban ICT Arena. Åke Lindström, Petra Adolfsson and Lukas Ljungqvist were kind enough to show us around. Some of my colleagues were even brave enough to ride on the autonomous shuttle!
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.
‘Projects, Platforms, and the Emergence of Modular Urban Development’
Andy Karvonen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
James Evans (University of Manchester)
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):
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.
