I wa pleased to contribute to a new online, open-access course titled ‘Smart Cities for City Officials- A Social Sciences Perspective’ developed by Guy Baeten, Chiara Valli and Adriana de la Peña at the Institute for Urban Research at Malmö University. The course features interviews with world-leading researchers about current debates on Smart Cities. It is designed mainly for city officials and practitioners in Nordic European countries, but will be of interest to researchers, students, and citizens who want to know more about smart cities and their social implications.
I co-authored a new journal article with Ahlam Sherif titled ‘Supporting, tinkering, adjusting and resisting: a typology of user translations of the built environment.’ We conducted an Actor Network Theory-inspired ethnography of residential building designers and occupants at Masdar City and identified a range of user responses to the sustainable lighting scripts. The open-access article is available here.
The TRANS-PED project now has a website: https://trans-ped.eu. Thanks to Gerald Babel-Sutter and colleagues at Urban Future for the design and coordination. The project team will be adding project resources and findings on a period basis over the coming months. Check back!
I am very pleased to announce a new Formas project led by Jonathan Metzger and including Sara Brorström, Amanda Winter and me. The project, titled ‘TRANS-LEARN – Ecosystems of learning for urban sustainability transformations,’ will focus on learning intermediaries and how they facilitate urban sustainability transformations in Sweden. More information soon!
Alan Wiig and I hosted two paper sessions today at the AAG Annual Meeting on ‘Materialising Urban Infrastructures.’ Many thanks to the contributions from the following speakers:
Si Jie Ivin Yeo, National University Of Singapore, ‘Engaging with infrastructures of the future: convenience, cashlessness and connection’
Ignacio Perez, University of Oxford, ‘Assembling oligoptic visions of the Smart City: following the transport data dispositif in Santiago de Chile’
Paolo Cardullo and Ramon Ribera Fumaz, UOC, ‘Digital democracy in the making: the Decidim platform ecosystem
Mohammed Rafi Arefin, University of British Columbia, ‘Political ecologies of surveillance: the history and contemporary politics of wastewater epidemiology’
Discussant: Alan Wiig, University of Massachussets – Boston
Pauline McGuirk and Chantel Carr, University of Wollongong, ‘Orchestrating energy transitions: from ‘eco-bling’ to tuning the building’
Philip Ashton, University of Illinois-Chicago, ‘How many bankers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Chicago’s public building retrofits and the political geographies of assetization’
Charlotte Johnson, UCL, ‘Rainwater tanks & the material politics of community-led greening’
Demetra Kourri, University of Manchester, ‘A city of many worlds: tunneling between nature and technology’
Discussant: Dillon Mahmoudi, University of Maryland – Baltimore County
My colleague, Erica Eneqvist, and I published an article in a special issue of Urban Planning on the theme of Urban Planning by Experiment. Thanks to the editors, Christian Scholl and Joop de Kraker, for curating a compelling group of papers. The table of contents is as follows:
Planning from Failure: Transforming a Waterfront through Experimentation in a Placemaking Living Lab www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/3586 By Ramon Marrades, Philippa Collin, Michelle Catanzaro and Eveline Mussi
Contextualising Urban Experimentation: Analysing the Utopiastadt Campus Case with the Theory of Strategic Action Fields www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/3629 By Matthias Wanner, Boris Bachmann and Timo von Wirth
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.
Andrew Karvonen 