Book Review: The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence by Justin Parkhurst

In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence, available open access, Justin Parkhurst provides a detailed synthesis of the debates surrounding evidence-based policy (EBP) as well as a governance framework for managing EBP. This is a comprehensive overview of the advantages and limitations of this approach that offers constructive insight into ensuring the judicious and careful use of evidence, writes Andrew Karvonen

Book review: eco-cities and the transition to low carbon economies

Eco-cities have emerged as a response to the ‘Age of Crisis’ that author Federico Caprotti argues we are living in via his book Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies. Through a study of two well-known projects, Tianjin Eco-City in China and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, Caprotti explores the upside of this new urban design, writes Andrew Karvonen, but also finds the normative vision of eco-cities promoted by the scientific and technical elites to be severely limited

Book review: Thinking like a climate: governing a city in times of environmental change by Hannah Knox

In Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, Hannah Knox offers a new ethnographic study of the local dynamics of climate change, focusing on the city of Manchester. This detailed analysis of local climate politics illustrates the need for a wholesale reconfiguration of how we think about human-nature relations and act collectively to make the world a better place, writes Andrew Karvonen. Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Hannah Knox. Duke University Press. 2020

Towards systemic domestic retrofit: A social practices approach

The UK housing stock will play an important role in achieving the 2050 national carbon reduction targets. Upgrading the energy performance of the existing housing stock is a significant challenge because retrofit activities are shaped by a wide range of fragmented policies, programmes and actors. Existing approaches to housing retrofit focus on regulations, financial incentives and information provision, but it is argued these are insufficient to realize large-scale, deep changes in energy consumption. An agenda is proposed for systemic domestic retrofit to realize radical changes in the housing stock through community-based partnerships. These programmes are based on a social practices approach that promotes social innovation. Wide-ranging energy-efficiency upgrades can be achieved through the development and realization of customized solutions to local groups of houses through facilitated engagement between occupants, housing providers, community groups, local authorities and construction professionals. Community-based domestic retrofit programmes serve to reframe the governance of household energy performance and suggest alternative routes for realizing significant reductions in energy demand through changes in the socio-technical configuration of materials, competences and images of domestic energy practices.QC 20161117</p

Book review: Thinking like a climate: governing a city in times of environmental change by Hannah Knox

In Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, Hannah Knox offers a new ethnographic study of the local dynamics of climate change, focusing on the city of Manchester. This detailed analysis of local climate politics illustrates the need for a wholesale reconfiguration of how we think about human-nature relations and act collectively to make the world a better place, writes Andrew Karvonen

Book review: The City by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess

Andrew Karvonen revisits the classic urban studies book The City by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, originally published in 1925, and argues that contemporary scholars can take inspiration from the bold scientific agenda promoted by these influential authors from the Chicago school of sociology

The City – book review

Revisiting the classic urban studies book, originally published in 1925 - reviewed by Andrew Karvone

Experimental Governance and Urban Planning Futures: Five Strategic Functions for Municipalities in Local Innovation

Experimental governance is increasingly being implemented in cities around the world through laboratories, testbeds, platforms, and innovation districts to address a wide range of complex sustainability challenges. Experiments often involve public-private partnerships and triple helix collaborations with the municipality as a key stakeholder. This stretches the responsibilities of local authorities beyond conventional practices of policymaking and regulation to engage in more applied, collaborative, and recursive forms of planning. In this article, we examine how local authorities are involved in experimental governance and how this is influencing their approach to urban development. We are specifically interested in the multiple strategic functions that municipalities play in experimental governance and the broader implications to existing urban planning practices and norms. We begin the article by developing an analytic framework of the most common strategic functions of municipalities in experimental governance and then apply this framework to Stockholm, a city that has embraced experimental governance as a means to realise its sustainability ambitions. Our findings reveal how the strategic functions of visioning, facilitating, supporting, amplifying, and guarding are producing new opportunities and challenges to urban planning practices in twenty-first century cities