Some colleagues and I (Gary Bridge, Graham Brown, and Paul Milbourne) have been awarded some seed-fund money, from the GW4 research consortium for a little project on the theme of Alternative Urbanisms. GW4 is an initiative across the ‘regional’ cluster of Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter (everything around these parts gets branded ‘GW’, from research alliances to pubs). The Alternative Urbanisms project is one of a bunch awarded under the Building Communities initiative – basically, funding to enable people across the four institutions to make friends with each other and develop shared research programmes and ambitions. Our project starts from the established fields of expertise across these institutions in fields such as geography, urban and regional studies, and development studies, and is going to provide some space to think about the myriad ways in which, as the title suggests, alternative models of urban life are currently proliferating: from obvious ‘technical’ examples such as smart cities initiatives, to more ‘moralistic’ versions such as innumerable climate change experiments, and in particular, some more ‘political’ and/or contentious attempts to enact just, equitable and democratic forms of practice through urban spaces (whatever those might be – pipes and wires, municipal bureaucracies, suburbs, squatter settlements, etc, etc). In the spirit of the overall initiative, we will of course be making lots of train journeys.