Last week at the Urban Institute at Sheffield University

This is my last week at the Urban Institute at Sheffield where I have more or less been based for most of my sabbatical these past three months. Headed up by Prof Simon Marvin (co-author of the seminal work on urban infrastructures and many other publications on infrastructure transitions), this is a newly established institute that aims to connect the different disciplines at Sheffield interested in urban research. I’ve had a nice quiet working space in the ICOSS building in the centre of Sheffield, and cycled there each day from the two different places I have stayed – houses in Crooks and Sharrow. I have enjoyed working in an open-plan office, with windows that open (ok, only slightly – this is the UK after all). Coffee shops, restaurants and bookstores all around – the University seems to dominate the town. Sheffield is hilly, and everyone likes to get out to walk in the Pennines – a beautiful range of mountains that separates Yorkshire from North West/East England. During the rare days that the sun shines, they rush out to turn themselves into lobsters. I have used all my writing time here to complete the first draft of a report for the International Resource Panel entitled Resource Requirements of Future Urbanization (REFURB) based on work by teams in different parts of the world who have been working together for nearly three years. I have loved writing it, and hopefully it will be published after the 6 peer reviewers have done what they need to do by early 2017. I think its going to make a positive impact based on the reactions to some of the thinking during various talks. I have also worked with John van Breda to complete our journal article on transdisciplinary research – the basis for a well-received talk at Coventry University. I have also worked with Simon Marvin and his great new team here to develop a proposal for some mega-funding to take the REFURB work to the next stage. We secured the pre-funding while I was here, and all the people who we have invited to a workshop in November here have responded extremely positively – as Simon put it, we are assembling a dream team to take forward the REFURB agenda as a core project of the Urban Institute. The Institute will also have its official launch during this workshop, and Simon has invited Maarten Hajer to deliver the keynote. Stitching together strong partnerships with Simon’s Urban Institute and Maarten’s newly established centre at Utrecht University called the Urban Futures Studio is vitally important for the success of my new centre, the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (that I co-director with Jannie Hofmeyr). It will be sad leaving here on Thursday, but so looking forward to being back in Stellenbosch and to teaching a brand new course that starts on Monday on ‘new economic theory’. In such a fast changing world, it is vitally important for African academics to circulate as much as possible, ensuring that we don’t lose sight of the global challenges as we obsess about our own – we must at all costs avoid the mistakes others have made which is costing them billions to undo.