Simon Marvin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 767999 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Simon Marvin |
| NOMBRES | Simon |
| APELLIDO | Marvin |
| FIRMA | MARVIN S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Salford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5538-5102 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 84 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 755 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 84 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1991 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Snow as Urban Infrastructure
Snow is often perceived as a fleeting meteorological phenomenon, yet in urban environments, it functions as a highly engineered, managed, and contested material. This article explores the infrastructural dimensions of snow, analyzing how urban authorities and private companies actively produce, manage, and erase winter through diverse technological and political interventions. The article introduces a new atmospheric metabolism of snow, conceptua…
Brain in a chip
Biocomputing data centers are facilities that use human neurons cultured from stem cells as their computing substrate. These pose a challenge to urban governance that it is not equipped to meet. Because biocomputing is assembled through data centers, biomedical precincts, energy regimes, and experimental planning environments, it is both a bioethical issue and an urban problem of siting, infrastructural regulation, and public oversight. Focusing …
Modulating the indoor–outdoor urban boundary
This paper repositions the indoor–outdoor threshold as a neglected yet vital site of climate governance in urban studies. Examining how infrastructure modulates air, temperature, and comfort, it develops the concept of hybrid urban socio-natures as spatial assemblages formed by climate control technologies that dissolve traditional distinctions between inside and outside. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, and critical …
Illicit cultivation and urban informality
This paper examines illicit domestic cannabis cultivation as a form of urban infrastructural adaptation and informal atmospheric regulation. It introduces the concept of domesticating agritech to describe how cultivation technologies are repurposed within ordinary dwellings to produce controlled microclimates for plant growth. Clandestine home cultivation involves covertly transforming residential space into climate-controlled agronomic infrastru…
Archipelagic technonatures
This paper develops the concept of archipelagic technonatures to analyse how urban infrastructures are reshaping the geographies of global conservation. We focus on climate-controlled biomes in Paris and Zurich that simulate Madagascar's rainforest ecosystems. These enclosed environments function as infrastructural nodes in a trans-situ regime where endangered ecologies are displaced, reconstructed and managed across geographically discontinuous …
Borg urbanism
This commentary introduces the concept of Borg Urbanism to examine the urban implications of neurotechnologies that enable direct, bidirectional interfaces between human cognition and urban systems. While urban studies have engaged extensively with smart cities, platform urbanism, and neurourbanism, these literatures largely conceptualise the brain as a passive recipient of environmental influence. Borg Urbanism identifies an emergent logic that …
Cognitively enabled urbanisms
As neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science increasingly shape urban imaginaries, new visions of the ‘cognitive city’ are emerging. This commentary identifies and critically reflects on three distinct modes through which urban life is being cognitively enabled: (1) neurourbanism , where cities are redesigned to promote brain health and emotional well-being; (2) consultancy-led cognitive urbanism , which advances a post-smar…
Infrastructural Extensions
This essay explores how contemporary urban infrastructure is being conceptually and operationally extended into new domains. Across five key arenas—elemental, care, more‐than‐human, cyber‐physical and the neurotechnical—we trace how infrastructures are no longer confined to traditional networked systems but instead permeate and co‐compose atmospheres, bodies, ecologies and cognition. These extensions reconfigure what infrastructure is and does, o…
Emergent urban technonatures
Smart weather
When cities broke into the global stage
This short symposium revisits the book Cities and Climate Change by Harriet Bulkeley and Michelle Betsill and its role in establishing cities as central actors in climate change governance. The contributors to this symposium reflect on the research themes and the book’s legacy from their disciplinary perspectives. The first response explores the tensions between the elevation of cities as sites for climate action and the persistent lack of state …
Domestic technonatures
Why does urban Artificial Intelligence (AI) matter for urban studies? Developing research directions in urban AI research
New digital technologies and systems are being extensively applied in urban contexts. These technologies and systems include algorithms, robotics, drones, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and autonomous systems that can collectively be labelled as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Critical debates have recognized that these various forms of AI do not merely layer onto existing urban infrastructures, forms of management and practices of everyday life. Instea…
The urbanisation of controlled environment agriculture
This paper critically examines why urban studies should be interested in the emergence of controlled environment agriculture. Over the last decade, there has been significant commercial and urban policy interest in controlled environment agriculture systems for producing food in enclosed environments. Furthermore, there has been a significant expansion in research publications on urban controlled environment agriculture, stressing the novel chara…
Climate‐controlled conservation
This paper examines the understudied relationship between nature conservation and climate control in botanic gardens. Drawing on research conducted at Kew Gardens in West London, we analyse how the relations between climate control, techniques that allow the creation of particular microclimatic conditions in volumetric enclosures, and ex‐situ—out of nature—botanical management have changed over time. The paper shows how climate‐controlled conserv…
Regulating sidewalk delivery robots as a disruptive new urban technology
Sidewalk delivery robots are increasingly being deployed in diverse urban contexts, raising issues about the most appropriate form of regulation to maintain pedestrian flows and protect the public. This paper examines the evolution of sidewalk robot governance in a "hot spot" of urban robotic application in the State of California (USA), where different municipal authorities have experimented with prohibitive, permissive and collaborative forms o…
The rise of AI urbanism in post-smart cities
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent a…
Post‐pandemic cities
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Towards new ecologies of automation
Climate/ecological breakdown and automation are two defining challenges of the current era, yet there is little research on their conjunctural intersection. Across experimental landscapes from agriculture to conservation to mining to weather modification, automation technologies are increasingly being presented as the key to fixing, managing and even transcending the turbulent ecologies of the Anthropocene which threaten social and economic repro…
A Common Management Framework for European Smart Cities? The Case of the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities Six Nations Forum
To minimize market fragmentation, optimize efficiencies through compatible digital architectures, and encourage collaboration, high-level smart city harmonization efforts have been advocated across Europe. This paper critically analyzes attempts by the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities Six Nations Forum (EIP-SCC 6N) to constitute a common smart city management framework through application of a generic Blueprint. An…
Splintering Urbanism at 20 and the “Infrastructural Turn”
Urban smart microgrids
Increasing threats to the electrical grid are generating responses that seek to secure selected “mission critical” assets essential to the functioning and continuity of life. Focusing on military and urban domains in the United States that use the smart microgrid as a technique for securing “always-on” power during grid failure, we explore the core rationales, socio-technical configurations and wider implications of these projects. The paper argu…
Making space for drones
In contrast to their use in warfare and surveillance, there is growing interest in the potential of “drones for good” to deliver societal benefits, for example by delivering medical products and other essential goods. Yet development of medical and commercial delivery has been limited globally by restrictive regulation to protect airspace safety and security. In this paper we examine how certain African countries have become testbeds for new form…
Understanding the socio‐technical hybridisation of indoor–outdoor relations
Indoor and outdoor leisure environments are increasingly understood to be mutually constituted through merged relationships but there has been less focus on the actual forms that hybridisation can take. This paper provides an analysis of forms of hybridisation through time by focusing on the socio‐technical configurations through which three leisure environments are materially constituted. We analyse the key functional elements of these configura…
Air pollution dispersal in high density urban areas
The maintenance of urban circulation
This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with "smart" technologies. Drawing on Foucault's governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro's Operations Centre …
Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism
Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Smart urbanism discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along d…
Urban living labs
Urban Ecological Security
The term 'ecological security' is usually used in relation to attempts to safeguard flows of ecological resources, infrastructure and services at the national scale. But increasing concerns over 'urban ecological security' (UES) are now giving rise to strategies to reconfigure cities and their infrastructures in ways that help to secure their ecological and material reproduction. Yet cities have differing capacities and capabilities for developin…
Urban living laboratories
The recent upsurge of interest in the experimental city as an arena within and through which urban sustainability is governed marks not only the emergence of the proliferation of forms of experimentation – from novel governance arrangements to demonstration projects, transition management processes to grassroots innovations – but also an increasing sensibility amongst the research community that urban interventions can be considered in experiment…
Urbanism in the anthropocene
Earth scientists now argue that the current geological era should be re‐named the anthropocene to better reflect the impact of humans in reshaping planetary ecology. Urbanism encompasses the social, economic and political processes most closely linked to the rapid transformation of habitats, destruction of ecologies, over use of materials and resources, and the production of pollutants and carbon emissions that threaten planetary terracide. Conse…
The Intermediary Organisation of Low Carbon Cities
Making a low carbon economic future for the UK has been declared a key priority by both the previous Labour government and also the current coalition government. Yet there is a large gap between the symbolic representations of a low carbon future and their material manifestations in low carbon technologies and infrastructure in particular places. This paper addresses this gap through focusing on the organisation of urban low carbon transition act…
The rise of AI urbanism in post-smart cities
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an impactful feature of the life, planning and governance of 21st-century cities. Once confined to the realm of science fiction and small-scale technological experiments, AI is now all around us, in the shape of urban artificial intelligences including autonomous cars, robots, city brains and urban software agents. The aim of this article is to critically examine the nature of urbanism in the emergent a…
Urban robotic experimentation
Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and automation have the potential to transform cities and urban social life. However, robotic restructuring of the city is complicated and contested. Technology is still evolving, robotic infrastructure is expensive and there are technical, trust and safety challenges in bringing robots into dynamic urban environments alongside humans. This article examines the nascent field of ‘urban robotics’ in thr…
Post‐pandemic cities
COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban…
Making Water Work
Since the early 1990s there has been a proliferation of calls for integrated water resource management as a strategy for sustainable water management. While literatures have examined the extent to which institutions can adapt to management defined by hydrological zones, the significance of other sociotechnical spaces to sustainable water management has been overlooked in these debates. In this paper, having demonstrated the hybridity of the hydro…
Understanding the Role of the National Exemplar in Constructing 'Strategic Glurbanization
This article focuses on the tensions between economic and environmental priorities through attempts to reconfigure urban governance arrangements in a world city. We examine these tensions through the development of the hydrogen energy economy in London and through attempts to cultivate new techniques of governance in realizing this vision. Through case study material, we develop two representations of the negotiation of new forms of governance. F…
Microclimates of Urban Reproduction
Enclosed, controlled environments, stretching from sites of luxury consumption to urban food production, are proliferating in cities around the world, utilising increasingly advanced techniques for (re)creating and optimising microclimatic conditions for different purposes. However, the role of automated control systems—to filter, reprocess and reassemble atmospheric and metabolic flows with growing precision—remains under‐researched. In this art…
Cherry picking and social dumping
Why does urban Artificial Intelligence (AI) matter for urban studies? Developing research directions in urban AI research
New digital technologies and systems are being extensively applied in urban contexts. These technologies and systems include algorithms, robotics, drones, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and autonomous systems that can collectively be labelled as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Critical debates have recognized that these various forms of AI do not merely layer onto existing urban infrastructures, forms of management and practices of everyday life. Instea…
Controlled environments
Controlled environments create specialist forms of microclimatic enclosure that are explicitly designed to transcend the emerging limitations and increasing turbulence in existing modes of urban climatic conditions. Across different urban contexts, anthropogenic change is creating urban conditions that are too hot, cold, humid, wet, windy, etc. to support the continued and reliable environments that are suitable for the reproduction of food, ecol…
Researching the Sustainable City
In this paper we explore the practice of interdisciplinarity by examining how the UK research councils addressed the problem of the sustainable city during the 1990s. In developing their research programmes, the councils recognised that the problems of the sustainable city transcended conventional disciplinary boundaries and that an interdisciplinary approach was needed. In practice, however, initially radical proposals to research the city as a …
Globalisation, Neoliberalism, and Negotiated Development in the Andes
We draw on current debates about globalisation and examine the relationship between globalisation and neoliberalism in the Andes. We attempt to depart from analyses which emphasise the ways in which globalisation 'impacts' upon 'the local' and erases cultures, by asking whether, in certain contexts, the nexus between globalisation and neoliberalism can promote 'progressive' agendas. We examine the privatisation of the water industry in Bolivia an…
Urban Operating Systems
A set of software/hardware packages developed by IT companies for the urban market is transforming the way in which cities are imagined and configured. These urban operating systems (Urban OS) embody important presumptions about what constitutes appropriate knowledge and forms of decision making, pointing to how novel forms of 'smart' or 'computational' urbanism may govern urban life. Arguing that an analysis of the interface between the urban an…
An Emerging Logic of Urban Water Management, Cochabamba, Bolivia
This paper examines the emergence of a new logic of water management in developing cities. We argue that water provision is characterised by two largely disconnected circuits of water supply. Formally organised distribution networks provide a publicly subsidised service to higher-income users, while an informal system of water vendors provides a more expensive supply to marginalised communities. A new style of water management is now challenging …
Metabolisms of Obecity
Although strategies to tackle obesity have led to renewed debate about the relationship between the body and urban form the (im)mobilities of fat through bodies, cities, and infrastructure reveal a complex web of urban metabolisms. We argue that, to understand the mobilities of fat in a city context, metaphors of urban metabolism become important. The relationships between different flows are contingent and the mobilities of fat in bodies (as ind…
Constructing a universal logic of urban control
Cities are increasingly understood as systems that can be managed and transformed through scientific methods of data analysis and automated response. According to Batty (2013), cities are ‘sets of actions, interactions, and transactions’ that can be known and mapped with great precision, and it follows that their constituent components can be rearranged to interact and transact in new ways. The most visible manifestation of the ‘science of cities…
Containing Covid-19 in China
COVID-19 has generated interest in the potential of urban robotics and automation to manage and police physical distancing and quarantine. This commentary examines the intersection between COVID-19 management strategies and the technological affordances of robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence (AI) in urban pandemic control. Examples from China illustrate the possibilities for urban robotics and automation in a new era of urba…
Making space for drones
In contrast to their use in warfare and surveillance, there is growing interest in the potential of “drones for good” to deliver societal benefits, for example by delivering medical products and other essential goods. Yet development of medical and commercial delivery has been limited globally by restrictive regulation to protect airspace safety and security. In this paper we examine how certain African countries have become testbeds for new form…
The politics of smart expectations
This paper studies the performativity of smart mobility expectations in envisioning urban futures. Smart mobility, or ICT-enabled transport services, are increasingly considered a necessary ingredient for sustainability transitions in cities. Expectations of smart mobility’s contribution to such a transition are constituted by a strong belief in the transformative potential of data collection and use. These knowledge claims embedded in smart mobi…
Combined heat and power/district heating
Utility networks and urban planning
(1993). Utility networks and urban planning: An issue agenda. Planning Practice & Research: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 6-14
Policy Review Section
In this issue of the Policy Review Section, Iain Begg of the Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge, and David Mayes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research examine some of the policy issues surrounding the issue of cohesion and convergence as enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty. They argue that if insufficient priority is assigned to cohesion then inevitably political pressures will slow the pace of economic in…
Privatization of utilities
Cherry picking and social dumping
Green signals
Accessibility to utility networks
Reconfiguring urban networks
(1995). Reconfiguring urban networks: Demand‐side management in the United Kingdom. Journal of Urban Technology: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 45-58
Demand-side management in the electricity sector
Local authorities and energy markets in the 1990s
Transforming urban infrastructure provision—The emerging logic of demand side management
The provision of electricity, water and transportation forms a vital underpinning to urban development. Despite this importance, the mode by which infrastructure services are provided has been largely taken for granted and has attracted relatively little interest from urban studies and policy‐ making communities. This paper, based on the results of an 18 month ESRC Global Environmental Change programme project, reconnects urban policy to infrastr…
Privatized Utilities and Regional Governance
(1996). Privatized Utilities and Regional Governance: The New Regional Managers? Regional Studies: Vol. 30, No. 8, pp. 733-739
Consuming water
(1997). Consuming water: Evolving strategies of water management in Britain. Journal of Urban Technology: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 21-45
The New Urban Infrastructure Crisis Competition for Urban Space
British cities are now experiencing unprecedented competition for surface and subsurface urban space. Restructuring of the utilities sector has created privately owned companies that are now engaged in major programs of infrastructure renewal while massive investments are underway in retrofitting new forms of telecommunications, energy, and transportation infrastructure. Above the ground, increasing mobility has created new demands for urban road…
Infrastructure Provision, Development Processes and the Co-production of Environmental Value
This paper argues that the current debate about developer contributions in relation to infrastructure networks is blinding us to radical shifts emerging in the relationship between infrastructure providers and developers. Moreover, we suggest that conventional planning discourse about infrastructure charges, standardised service fees and impact assessment could actually hamper the emergence of this new logic. The paper illustrates how a new logic…
Environmental flows
Understanding Sustainable Cities
Making a Difference
Infrastructure management has traditionally been based on a logic of predict and provide in which rising demand was met with an increase in infrastructure capacity. However, recent changes in political, economic, and environmental priorities mean that projects such as new roads, which simply expand supply, have become more controversial, and that reducing demand is now a key challenge. This article is about the different ways in which infrastruct…
An Emerging Logic of Urban Water Management, Cochabamba, Bolivia
This paper examines the emergence of a new logic of water management in developing cities. We argue that water provision is characterised by two largely disconnected circuits of water supply. Formally organised distribution networks provide a publicly subsidised service to higher-income users, while an informal system of water vendors provides a more expensive supply to marginalised communities. A new style of water management is now challenging …
Globalisation, Neoliberalism, and Negotiated Development in the Andes
We draw on current debates about globalisation and examine the relationship between globalisation and neoliberalism in the Andes. We attempt to depart from analyses which emphasise the ways in which globalisation 'impacts' upon 'the local' and erases cultures, by asking whether, in certain contexts, the nexus between globalisation and neoliberalism can promote 'progressive' agendas. We examine the privatisation of the water industry in Bolivia an…
Constructing sustainable urban futures
This paper begins to build a conceptual framework that acknowledges the multiplicity of pathways towards different sustainable futures that often co-exist within a single city. There are three stages to the argument: the shift from the concept of a singular towards multiple models of what the sustainable city might become; the rejection of the simplistic use of models and the development of competing pathways to sustainable cities; and the recogn…
Splintering Urbanism
Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about:*globalization and the city*technology and society*urban space and urban networks*infrastructure and the built environment*developed, developing and post-communist worlds.With a rang…
Telecommunications and the City
Telecommunications and the City provides the first critical and state-of-the-art review of the relations between telecommunications and all aspects of city development and management.Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches and a wide body of recent research, the book addresses key academic and policy debates about technological change and the future of cities with a fresh perspective. Through this approach, the complex and crucial transforma…
Developing urban and regional foresight
City futures Views from the centre
Many of the problems of cities, urban governance and public policy are attributed to the absence of 'joined-up thinking' within and between levels of government. One dimension of this problem is the relationship between the functional responsibilities of ministries (health, housing, education and so on) and the need to integrate these functions in the whole diverse set of cities and regions where they operate. This paper presents an empirical stu…
Political science (46 obras) · Geography (42 obras) · Sociology (38 obras) · Business (36 obras) · Economics (32 obras) · Engineering (31 obras) · Computer Science (30 obras) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (24 obras) · Environmental planning (23 obras) · Law (19 obras)