‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Lower Your Carbon Footprint!’ — Urban Laboratories and the Governance of Low-Carbon Futures
By James Evans, Andrew Karvonen. 2014
317 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low-carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low-carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the city's future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public-private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low-carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfdc0749464b28d8132c4ae46efa6a5b5df3f3c2
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Climate adaptation as strategic urbanism: assessing opportunities and uncertainties for equity and inclusive development in cities (2017, background): “…coordination in cities dominated by fragmented interests and power, it also requires innovations to overcome the barriers of the sector-minded, single-issue approaches typical of municipalities organised according to territorial jurisdictions (Chu, 2016c; Evans & Karvonen, 2014; Salet, 2007).”
- Competitive urbanism and the limits to smart city innovation: The UK Future Cities initiative (2017, background): “…have stimulated a significant wave of city experiments, mainly initiated by national governments seeking to promote innovation or private-sector companies seeking to demonstrate their goods and services (Batty et al., 2012; Evans and Karvonen, 2014; Gabrys, 2014; Karvonen and van Heur, 2014).”