Controlled Environments
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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?
People
Theme Lead: Simon Marvin
UI members: Aidan While
Associates: Nick Taylor-Buck | Andy Lockhart
Visitors: Emma critchley | Donald McNeill | Jonathan Rutherford
Interrogations
Publications
- Journal articles
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- 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
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- Marvin S, Bulkeley H, Mai L, McCormick K, Voytenko Palgan Y eds. (2018) Urban Living Labs: Experimenting with City Futures. London: Routledge.
- Book chapters
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- 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.
- Reports and other outputs
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- 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.