Cities have always experimented with controlled environments designed to sustain and enhance human life. New technologies, urbanisation, and a changing climate are altering how we interact with nature in cities. There is strategic interest in creating artificial environments that enhance urban atmospheres and ecologies.
The theme examines whether controlled environments create new system-wide infrastructural responses designed to maintain and improve urban ecologies.
Research Questions
– Is the capacity to create controlled urban ecologies a key international economic, social and security priority?
– How, and where, are new processes of environmental and atmospheric enclosure developing across different domains of urban life?
– What forms of knowledge, technologies and practices support the production of controlled urban environments?
– What tensions are associated with controlled environments designed to insulate urban spaces from atmospheric and ecological turbulences?
The team
Director: Simon Marvin
UI members: Andy Lockhart | Aidan While
Associates: Jonathan Rutherford | Emma critchley | Donald McNeill | Nick Taylor-Buck
Publications
Papers and reports
- Taylor Buck N & While A (2020) The urban bioeconomy: extracting value from the ecological and biophysical. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. ISSN 0964-0568
- Bulkeley H, Marvin S et al. (2019) Urban living laboratories: Conducting the experimental city? European Urban and Regional Studies 26(4) 317–335.
- Lockhart A and Marvin S (2019) Microclimates of automated urban reproduction: The limits of automating environmental control. Antipode 52(3): 637-659.
- Marvin S & Rutherford J (2018) Controlled environments: An urban research agenda on microclimatic enclosure. Urban Studies 55(6) 1143–1162.
- Marvin S (2016) Volumetric urbanism: Artificial ‘outsides’ reassembled ‘inside’. In: Coutard O and Rutherford J (eds) Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Marvin S & Hodson M (2016) Cabin Ecologies: The Technoscience of Integrated Urban Infrastructure, In: Evans J, Karvonen A, Raven R (eds) The Experimental City. Abingdon: Routledge.
Books
- Marvin S, Bulkeley H, Mai L, McCormick K, Voytenko Palgan Y eds. (2018) Urban Living Labs: Experimenting with City Futures. London: Routledge.
Blogposts
- Marvin S and Rutherford J (2017) Artificial environments are turning the world outside in, but that’s no way to save the planet. The Independent, 15 July 2017.
Research projects
- Volumetric Urbanism (2017-2019) Discovery Project, Australian Research Council.
- Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions: Advancing the role of the living lab (GUST)(2014-2017) ESRC JPI Urban Europe.
Networks
- ‘Enclosed Ecologies – Manchester, Paris and London’, with Jonathon Rutherford (LATTS) and the visual artist Emma Critchley.
400
Estimated value in billions of global market for smart urban systems by 2020
20
The surface area of the Earth given over to greenhouses or some form of plastic cover is increasing by 20% every year.
2.5
Number of people who voluntarily wear an electronic tracking device such as a smartphone
3