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A study of urban stormwater runoff that explores the relationships among nature, technology, and society in cities. When rain falls on the city, it creates urban runoff that cause flooding, erosion, and water pollution. Municipal engineers manage a complex network of technical and natural systems to treat and remove these temporary water flows from cities as quickly as possible. Urban runoff is frequently discussed in terms of technical expertise and environmental management, but it encompasses a multitude of such nontechnical issues as land use, quality of life, governance, aesthetics, and community identity, and is central to the larger debates on creating more sustainable and livable cities. In this book, Andrew Karvonen uses urban runoff as a lens to view the relationships among nature, technology, and society. Offering theoretical insights from urban environmental history, human geography, landscape and ecological planning, and science and technology studies as well as empirical evidence from case studies, Karvonen proposes a new relational politics of urban nature. After describing the evolution of urban runoff practices, Karvonen analyzes the urban runoff activities in Austin and Seattle--two cities known for their highly contested public debates over runoff issues and exemplary storm water management practices. The Austin case study highlights the tensions among urban development, property rights, land use planning, and citizen activism; the Seattle case study explores the city's long-standing reputation for being in harmony with nature. Drawing on these accounts, Karvonen suggests a new relational politics of urban nature that is situated, inclusive, and action-oriented to address the tensions among nature, technology, and society.

Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond traditional role of the state in environmental governance. These activities provide a real world evidence base for how a low-carbon world could be realised and they have the potential to fundamentally change the way that cities are conceived, built, and managed. Most urban climate change experiments are designed to be geographically and temporally bounded to accelerate innovation activities and realise actual changes on the ground. But what if urban experiments did not scale up? What if, instead of informing existing modes of urban governance, they became the dominant approach to governing cities? What would a 'city of permanent experiments' look like and how would it function? This chapter speculates on the implications of experimentation as the new mode of governance for twenty-first century cities. Here, experiments are not interpreted as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision; instead, they are emerging as a new mode of governance in themselves. This emerging form of urban governance is characterised by uncertainty, recursive learning processes, and spatial fragmentation with multiple unknown implications on the politics of cities in the future. ; QCR 20171211

Seattle has long been considered a city in harmony with nature, a metropolis inseparable from and infused with the dramatic and picturesque Pacific Northwest landscape. Today, the city is frequently cited as a leader in sustainable urban development and this is due in large part to its unique relationship with its natural surroundings. However, the historical record of Seattle reveals this harmonious relationship between humans and nature to be a social construction. The founders of Seattle adopted an urban development approach similar to other North American cities and implemented large-scale engineering projects to rationalise the landscape while solidifying the municipal government as the ultimate arbiter of human/nature relations. The unintended economic, environmental, and social consequences of this so-called 'Promethean' approach to urban nature would be debunked in the 1950s, catalyzing a wide array of approaches by the municipality and residents to restore, protect, and live with nature in more benign ways. In this article, I examine the politics of nature in Seattle to understand how changing perceptions of the urban landscape are related to different forms of expertise, governance, and citizenship. I focus specifically on activities to reorient urban water flows because they reveal the multiple tensions between humans and nature. The article adds to contemporary scholarship in landscape architecture, human geography, and environmental history on the dilemma of urban nature while highlighting the central role of technical experts, practices, and networks as well as issues of governance, citizenship, and management. Seattle's reputation as a green metropolis serves as an entry point to interpret the various relationships between humans, technology, and nature while also suggesting potential routes to realise more sustainable urban futures. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

Seattle has long been considered a city in harmony with nature, a metropolis inseparable from and infused with the dramatic and picturesque Pacific Northwest landscape. Today, the city is frequently cited as a leader in sustainable urban development and this is due in large part to its unique relationship with its natural surroundings. However, the historical record of Seattle reveals this harmonious relationship between humans and nature to be a social construction. The founders of Seattle adopted an urban development approach similar to other North American cities and implemented large-scale engineering projects to rationalise the landscape while solidifying the municipal government as the ultimate arbiter of human/nature relations. The unintended economic, environmental, and social consequences of this so-called 'Promethean' approach to urban nature would be debunked in the 1950s, catalyzing a wide array of approaches by the municipality and residents to restore, protect, and live with nature in more benign ways. In this article, I examine the politics of nature in Seattle to understand how changing perceptions of the urban landscape are related to different forms of expertise, governance, and citizenship. I focus specifically on activities to reorient urban water flows because they reveal the multiple tensions between humans and nature. The article adds to contemporary scholarship in landscape architecture, human geography, and environmental history on the dilemma of urban nature while highlighting the central role of technical experts, practices, and networks as well as issues of governance, citizenship, and management. Seattle's reputation as a green metropolis serves as an entry point to interpret the various relationships between humans, technology, and nature while also suggesting potential routes to realise more sustainable urban futures. ; QC 20161110

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.

Social housing providers have recently emerged as unlikely innovators of low carbon transitions in the UK residential sector. They tend to have a significant amount of influence over large housing stocks, opportunities to access funding to retrofit on a large scale, can make explicit connections between reduced carbon emissions and improved quality of life for low-income residents, and foster a close relationship with the place and communities they serve. In effect, social housing providers are 'middle actors' who not only facilitate but also realise low carbon transitions through various strategies. This paper uses empirical findings from interviews with social housing providers in Greater Manchester to understand the different ways that low carbon and energy efficiency innovation is being undertaken in this sector. The findings reveal that as middle actors, social landlords influence upstream to policy makers and regulators, downstream to individual households, and sideways to other actors in the social housing sector as well as to other building and energy professionals. The findings reveal opportunities for governments to supplement their existing policies with recognising and supporting middle actors to accelerate low carbon transitions of the built environment.

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. © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited.

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. ; QC 20161110