LSE has been awarded one of the prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education for LSE Cities’ broad range of research, education and outreach activities. The Prize, which is part of the UK honours system, is given biennially to institutions across the UK, recognising excellence in a number of key academic areas which have had impact on society and the wider community. The Queen’s Anniversary Prize for 2016-2018 is awarded in recognition of LSE Cities’ work on ‘training, research and policy formulation for cities of the future and a new generation of urban leaders around the world.’ A version of the submission document is on our website.

Marco Di Nunzio, Urban Age Research Officer at LSE Cities, will chair the second in a series of research seminars hosted by LSE Cities. The Urban Africa Seminar will take place at 4pm on 30 November 2017 at the London School of Economics. Priya Manwaring from International Growth Centre’s Cities that Work programme will speak on “‘Making the most of urban land”. The seminar will look at trade-offs and challenges associated with formalising land rights, land use planning and land taxation for developing cities. For more information please contact m.di-nunzio@lse.ac.uk.

Alexandra Gomes, Research and Project Coordinator of Resource Urbanisms: Asia’s divergent city models of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Hong Kong and Research Officer at LSE Cities spoke at Newcastle University’s School of Engineering on 27 November 2017. Gomes shared lessons learnt from contrasting Asian cities. The two-year research project examined multiple aspects of how natural resources, urban form and infrastructure affect each other and potentially lead to the establishment of divergent forms of urbanism.

Megan Groth, Urban Age Book Coordinator, LSE Cities, spoke at the Sheffield School of Architecture Theory Forum 2017 on 22 November 2017. Groth’s talk focused on values in education and practice. In addition to working at LSE Cities, she is an associate lecturer in architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests include the relationship between architecture practice, context and theory; the development and design of public spaces; and issues of social inequality in the built environment.

Nuno da Cruz, Research Fellow at LSE Cities and contributing to the Centre’s New Urban Governance research, will give a lecture entitled “From Local Government to Local Governance: the implications for transparency and beyond” at Transparency International Ukraine. The discussion will be chaired by Kateryna Tsybenko, project manager of Building Transparency in Ukrainian Cities. The event will take place with the support of UNDP.

Marco Di Nunzio, Urban Age Research Officer at LSE Cities, will chair the first in a series of research seminar series hosted by LSE Cities. The Urban Africa Seminar will take place at 4pm on 23 November 2017 at the London School of Economics. Wendy Willems, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE will speak on “‘The politics of things’: digital media, urban space and the materiality of civic engagement”. Drawing on research carried out in Lusaka during the 2011 and 2016 Zambian elections, this paper proposes a material, mobile and spatial approach to political communication. For more information please contact m.di-nunzio@lse.ac.uk.

Nuno da Cruz, Research Fellow at LSE Cities and contributing to the Centre’s New Urban Governance research, will give a lecture entitled “From Local Government to Local Governance: what are the implications for transparency?” at the Faculty of Economics of University of Coimbra on 17 November. The talk is part of a seminar series on accountability, transparency and participation in the public sector organised by the Centre for Research in Political Science (CICP), University of Minho.

Philipp Rode, Executive Director at LSE Cities will speak on the “Decarbonising the Transport Sector” panel at the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2017 in Bonn on 13 November 2017. The COP23 panel will discuss new approaches for clean and efficient transport solutions. Rode will draw on a range of LSE Cities research, including publications for The Global Commission for the Economy and Climate and Towards New Urban Mobility.

Marco Di Nunzio, Urban Age Research Officer at LSE Cities will be convening the workshop “Inside a Construction Boom: Politics, Responsibility and the Temporalities of Urban Development” at the Université libre de Bruxelles on 14 November 2017. Di Nunzio will also be talking about his work on architecture, responsibility and inequality in Addis Ababa. The workshop is funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (Belgium).

Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities, launched Resource Urbanisms: Asia’s divergent city models of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Hong Kong in Kuwait on 7 November 2017. The report consolidates key findings of the Resource Urbanisms project that LSE Cities led between 2015 and 2017. This research, supported by the Kuwait Programme at the LSE Middle East Centre investigates questions of urban form, geography and sustainability in Kuwait and the Gulf States as part of a broader comparative analysis of divergent forms of urban growth in Asia. Rode was joined by Research and Project Coordinator, Alexandra Gomes.