My research agenda is currently focused on the pace of the sustainability transformation. Science tells us we need to transform rapidly to avoid disasterous climate change and ecological collapse. How do we reconcile this rapid change with societal structures, democratic process and justice, which are often show to change? 

I am founding director for the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, an interdisciplinary research centre based at the Faculty of Social Science. Here I am working, with good colleagues, to build an environment that stimulates high-level research and critical thinking. We are focused on creating what we call ‘actionable knowledge’ – knowledge that is produced and communicated in ways that help shape society. I believe that rigorous research and critical thinking are essential contributions the University can make towards a better and more sustainable world.

Currently I am PI of the ECOBUDGETS project (funded by the Research Council of Norway), and partner in a range of ongoing or recent projects. These include DEMOCLIM (RCN), Times of a Just Transition (British Academy), CITYFREIGHT (RCN), CIRCULAR (RCN), VARCITIES (EU H2020), CINTRAN (EU H2020), and others. Between 2016 and 2020 I was fellow of the Trond Mohn Foundation, which provided a generous Starting Grant to establish the SpaceLab research group. 

I have been part of establishing the Nordic Journal of Urban Studies, and I am associate editor in the journal. For eight years (2016-2024) I was on the the Norwegian Board of Technology, an independent body for technology assessment appointed by the Norwegian Government. Currently I am external board member of the Faculty of Social Science, University of Stavanger. I am also active in project proposal assessments for a range of international research councils. 

I am teaching in multiple courses in the Department of Geography, and occasionally in other departments and faculties. My main teaching competence is within urban sustainability, urban planning and urban politics. From 2026 I will be responsible for the course GEO222: Sustainability in an Urbanising World. 

My forthcoming text-book in Norwegian, Å studere bærekraftig byutvikling (“Studying sustainable urbanism”), on Fagbokforlaget (2025), provides an accessible introduction to the urban-related topics I teach. It covers urban development at a range of scales, from global challenges and system perspectives, to human scale urban design.  

I have supervised around 30 Master's students and 8 PhD candidates to completion. I supervise Master’s and PhD students on topics related to my ongoing research activities and projects. Currently I am particularly welcoming student projects on climate and nature budgeting (related to the ECOBUDGETS project), the populist backlash against green policies, and temporality in planning and urban change.

My publication activity is spread across the projects I am part of, and mostly co-authored with colleagues. An updated overview publications can be found at my Google Scholar page. Some recent publication outputs include the following: 

With colleagues at CET I have analyzed C40 Climate Action Plans, which has resulted in papers in Nature Cities and Cities. 

I have a forthcoming text-book in Norwegian, Å studere bærekraftig byutvikling (Studying sustainable urbanism), on Fagbokforlaget (2025). 

With Siddharth Sareen and colleagues, I published an article on the future research agenda on energy communities: Watt sense of community? A human geography agenda on energy communities (Progress in Environmental Geography, 2024). 

I contributed to the Trust in Science and Science-related Populism-survey, organised by Many Labs at Harvard University, alongside Silje Kristiansen. The main research article coming out of that is soon coming out in Nature Human Behavior. 

With Per Gunnar Røe, Kristin Kjærås and Kristian Tveiten, I wrote an agenda-setting article on compact cities, published in Dialogues in Human Geography, which was followed by commentary articles by four leading scholars, and a response from us. 

In the book Haste: the slow politics of climate urgency (UCL Press, 2023), we collected various contributions on speed and slowness in the climate transformation. The book is open access and downloadable. 

A number of papers on the politics of urban logistics have come out of the CITYFREIGHT-project, co-authored with Rafael Rosales and Subina Shrestha. One example is Freight Logistics and the City, published in Urban Studies (2023). 

Mahir Yazar and are working on populist responses to climate policies, which has so far resulted in the article Populist far right discursive-institutional tactics in European regional decarbonization (in Political Geography, 2023), and others in progress. 

The DEMOCLIM project has resulted in a number of articles on climate-related protests, including the paper Democratic limitations of urban climate governance (2024), in Urban Geography. 

With Tarje Wanvik, I have written on the instability and societal transformations from an assemblage perspective, in papers in Progress and Human Geography and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.