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Articles by Simon Marvin
Capitalising urban futures: digital twin cities and the simplification of urban prototyping
Abstract Digital Twin Cities (DTCs) are promoted as the next frontier of urban governance, promising real-time simulation, predictive modelling, and frictionless management of urban futures. This paper argues that DTCs exemplify a profound simplification of urban prototyping. Rather than expanding experimentation and participation, they transpose the messy, material, and political work of city-making into closed systems of computation and control.
Snow as Urban Infrastructure: Engineering, Extending, and Eliminating Winter
ABSTRACT 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.
World's First Biological Computers: Are Cities Ready for Living Data Centers?
By Simon Marvin Published in Urban Geography The dawn of a new era in computing has arrived with the development of the world's first biological computers. These cutting-edge systems, based on living organisms, are poised to revolutionize the way data is processed and stored. However, as these living data centers become a reality, the question arises: Are cities prepared to accommodate and harness the potential of this groundbreaking technology?
Brain in a chip: biocomputing infrastructure and the limits of urban governance
ABSTRACT 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.
INFRASTRUCTURAL EXTENSIONS: Rethinking Infrastructure in Urban Studies
Introduction Infrastructure is no longer merely the hidden substrate of modernity working through the pipes, cables and roads that quietly support urban life. Over the past two decades, infrastructure studies research has redefined infrastructure as, among other things, affective, ecological, cognitive and atmospheric.
Smart weather: Why does it matter for urban studies?
ABSTRACT Smart weather services involve the collection, analysis and utilization of weather data through technology, and are now reshaping how cities govern their atmospheres. Operating through sensors, digital platforms, and municipal infrastructures, these systems promise hyperlocal, real-time responses to weather volatility.
Neurotechnology draws the hive mind closer to reality
THE CONVERSATION Elon Musk’s brain implant company offers an intriguing glimpse of an internet connecting human minds. But its use and implications need much more discussion across sectors. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, launched in 2016, aims to implant a piece of technology in people’s brains that would allow them to control a computer or phone by thought alone. This is otherwise known as a brain-computer interface.
Elon Musk's brain implant company offers an intriguing glimpse of an internet connecting human minds
Elon Musk's company called Neuralink, launched in 2016, aims to implant a piece of technology in people's brains that would allow them to control a computer or phone by thought alone. This is otherwise known as a brain-computer interface. After years of experimenting on animals, Neuralink recently announced the implantation of one of their devices in the brain of a person.
Elon Musk’s brain implant company offers an intriguing glimpse of an internet connecting human minds
Elon Musk’s company called Neuralink, launched in 2016, aims to implant a piece of technology in people’s brains that would allow them to control a computer or phone by thought alone. This is otherwise known as a brain-computer interface. After years of experimenting on animals, Neuralink recently announced the implantation of one of their devices in the brain of a person.
Elon Musk’s brain implant company offers an intriguing glimpse of an internet connecting human minds Original
Elon Musk’s company called Neuralink, launched in 2016, aims to implant a piece of technology in people’s brains that would allow them to control a computer or phone by thought alone. This is otherwise known as a brain-computer interface. After years of experimenting on animals, Neuralink recently announced the implantation of one of their devices in the brain of a person.
The urbanisation of controlled environment agriculture: Why does it matter for urban studies?
Introduction Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) utilises digital technologies and artificial environments to produce enclosed indoor farms that seek to transcend the climatic, seasonal and territorial constraints of the city (Bidaud, 2019).
Towards new ecologies of automation: Robotics and the re-engineering of nature
Skip to navigation | Skip to main content | Skip to footer A research article exploring the use and interaction of automation technologies and robotics in the environment including in engineering nature. Towards new ecologies of automation: Robotics and the re-engineering of nature Image from Unsplash
Towards new ecologies of automation: Robotics and the re-engineering of nature
A research article exploring the use and interaction of automation technologies and robotics in the environment including in engineering nature. Written by Andrew Lockhart, Simon Marvin and Aidan While Climate/ecological breakdown and automation are two defining challenges of the current era, yet there is little research on their conjunctural intersection.
Making space for drones: The contested reregulation of airspace in Tanzania and Rwanda
Abstract 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.
Urban robotic experimentation: San Francisco, Tokyo and Dubai
Introduction There is growing interest amongst researchers, technologists and policy-makers in the reimagining and remaking of urban infrastructure and urban social life through advances in robotics and autonomous systems (Del Casino, 2016; Macrorie et al., 2019; Marvin et al., 2018b; Nagenborg, 2018; Royakkers and Van Est, 2015; Tiddi et al., 2019).
Are Smart Cities a Wise Idea?
The development of a Smart City in Toronto, in partnership with Google, should be the realization of the tech utopia we’d been imagining. Complete with robots, autonomous cars, and the latest tech integrated into the city itself, it seems as if the residents are the lucky beneficiaries of Life 2.0. When the project was announced with great excitement in 2017, it seemed as if Canadians would be the luckiest, most advanced citizens on the planet.
Controlled environments: An urban research agenda on microclimatic enclosure
Introduction Taking over a former industrial building in Newark, New Jersey, the AeroFarms company has almost 70,000 square feet of space for growing salad greens and other plants on 12 stacked layers each 80 feet long.
Urban living laboratories: Conducting the experimental city?
Introduction The recent upsurge of interest in the experimental city as an arena within and through which urban sustainability is governed (Bulkeley and Castan-Broto, 2013; Evans et al., 2016) 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...
Mettre la nature sous cloche, une fausse bonne idée
Enterrée à quelque 130 mètres de profondeur sous une montagne, la Réserve du Svalbard a été conçue pour protéger les graines les plus précieuses des catastrophes et assurer ainsi l’avenir alimentaire de la planète. Mais cet espace, entièrement configuré pour la sauvegarde écologique, n’est désormais plus épargné par la transformation et la dégradation des écosystèmes naturels à l’heure du changement climatique.
Artificial environments are turning the world outside in, but that's no way to save the planet
When meltwater breached the global seed bank near Svalbard in May, after unusually warm weather, it served as a stark reminder of the need to safeguard humanity’s future in the face of increasing turbulence. Buried 130 metres deep inside a mountain, the vault was designed to protect the world’s most precious seeds from disaster, to ensure the future of the global food supply.
Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach
This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in sub-Saharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reflect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North.
After Sustainable Cities?
By Mike Hodson, Simon Marvin Routledge, 2014 A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet, the most common understanding is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Central to this vision are two ideas: cities should meet social needs, especially of the poor, and not exceed the ability of the global environment to meet needs.
An Emerging Logic of Urban Water Management, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Abstract 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.
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