I co-edited a new compendium titled Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities with James Evans, Chris Martin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, Kes McCormick, Rob Raven, and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan. The contributing authors use case studies from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India and China to examine how social and environmental issues are interpreted and integrated into smart city initiatives and actions. The collection was previously published as a 2019 special issue of Local Environment.

I am very pleased to announce that JPI Urban Europe has funded a new project titled TRANS-PED: Transforming Cities through Positive Energy Districts. I will be leading a transdisciplinary learning network of positive energy district stakeholders and researchers in Sweden, Belgium and Austria. I look forward to collaborating with the team to develop new approaches to frame, embed, assess and upscale urban innovations.

Nicholas Smart, Theo Eisenman and I published a new article in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution titled ‘Street tree density and distribution: an international analysis of five capital cities.’ We conducted a comparison of Ottawa, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Washington, D.C. to highlight the cultural legacies of urban greening. The article is open access and can be downloaded here.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Techno-Politics of the Sustainable-Smart City
Frontiers in Sustainable Cities: Governance and Cities
Edited by Andrew Karvonen, Matthew Cook and Mark Lemon

Contemporary sustainable urban development discourses and practices are increasingly being influenced by and conflated with a wide range of smart and digitalization agendas. The integration of ICT into urban systems promises enticing new ways of knowing and acting upon cities to enhance their economic, environmental, and social performance. The emergent smart urban operating systems are often presented as neutral analytical devices and an inevitable consequence of technological development. However, the move to digitalize cities is having profound and long-lasting impacts on the knowledge politics of sustainable urban development.

This Research Topic focuses on the techno-politics of the sustainable-smart city and how urban knowledge is being assembled and institutionalized through processes of digitalization. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions from scholars in planning, geography, political science, anthropology, sociology, science & technology studies, and aligned disciplines to contribute new insights on how practices of monitoring, sensoring, analyzing, modelling, simulating, and automating are influencing the political rationalities of sustainable urban development. 

We welcome contributions on issues related but not limited to:
• The ‘new urban science’ and emergent approaches to knowing cities
• Sensored landscapes, surveillance and social control
• City information modelling, digital twins and the politics of abstraction 
• Urban operating systems as new centers of calculation
• The disruptive potential of platforms to reorganize collective services
• Algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence and calculative rationalities
• Digital exclusion and the right to the city

For further information, see https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/17010/techno-politics-of-the-sustainable-smart-city

I participated in a doctoral seminar today by Erica Eneqvist where she summarised her on-going research on ‘Governing through Experiments: Local Authorities, Innovation and the Public Good’. Erica is developing novel empirical and theoretical insights on how the City of Stockholm is involved in innovation activities. Thanks to Sara Brorström from Gothenburg University for serving as an opponent and critical friend in the seminar. Looking forward to further development of this research!

I contributed to the Regional Studies Association Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR) Workshops on Water Infrastructure and Regional Governance in Pittburgh with a keynote on ‘Thinking Regionally, Acting Strategically: New Approaches to Governing Regional Water Infrastructures.’ Thanks to Michael Glass, JP Addie and Jen Nelles for organising the workshops. The full line-up of presentations is here.

I contributed a commentary to a special issue of Science as Culture on urban techno-politics. This is an inspiring collection of articles on smart cities imaginaries, mobility and inequality, renewable energy agendas, action research challenges, and urban obduracy. Thanks to Rider Foley and Thad Miller for the invitation!

I was pleased to participate in Master’s defenses (via Zoom) by Nicholas Smart and Jamie Zouras today. Nicholas presented his project on Street Trees Across Culture and Climate: A Comparative Analysis of Density and Distribution while Jamie presented her study of Collaborative Decision-making in Green and Blue Infrastructure Projects: The Case of Copenhagen’s Hans Tavsens Park and Korsgade. Both studies focused on the sociocultural aspects of urban ecology. And thanks to Karin Bradley and Tigran Haas for their feedback.

I was honoured to participate in Daniele Valisena’s doctoral defense yesterday as a member of the grading committee. Daniele’s thesis, Coal Lives: Italians and the Metabolism of Coal in Wallonia, Belgium 1945-1980, is an ambitious and far-reaching study of how migration, landscape, and capitalism all combined into a multi-faceted socio-eco-technical assemblage in Belgium immediately following World War II. Don Mitchell (Uppsala University) provided many insightful and challenging questions as the opponent while Patrizia Dogliano (University of Bologna), May-Brith Ohman Nielsen (University of Agder) and I participated as members of the grading committee. The defense was conducted entirely on Zoom with about 50 attendees from around the world and the grading committee was unanimous in its decision to pass Daniele’s thesis. Congratulations to Dr Valisena and his supervisors, Marco Armiero and Sverker Sörlin, for a job well done!

I have posted an advertisement for a doctoral studentship on smart cities and urban planning. This is a four-year position in the Division of Urban and Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. More information about the position is available here. The application deadline is 28 May 2020. Please email me if you have any questions about the position.