Jonathan
Rutherford, LATTS (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech)
As we all
go busily about our daily lives, only very rarely do most of us consciously
think about or visualize the flows, networks, uses and implications of energy
underpinning our very existence and the functioning of the cities in which most
of us live and work. This backgrounding or taken-for-grantedness is reflected
in the urban studies literature where a sustained focus on energy has been,
with a few notable exceptions, conspicuous by its near absence.
A recent Special Issue of Urban Studies on ‘Urban energy
transitions: places, processes and politics of socio-technical change’
contributes to thinking through the complex, diverse, always emerging and
situated relations between energy and cities at a time when these are (re)appearing
on political and policy agendas for a host of reasons. Security of energy
resources and supply lines, climate change, affordability and accessibility,
and governance and management of utilities are some of the ‘big’ stakes and
issues through which energy systems are being rethought and reconfigured across
North and South, implicitly or explicitly in relation to built environments and
urban lives and lifestyles. But, in contrast to much of the normative policy
agenda, taken as a whole, the Special Issue does not reduce the urban to a
specific location, context, administrative level or actor, and nor does it view
the urban as a readily available instrument or tool through which transitions
of energy systems (on ‘other’ scales) can be easily deployed. Instead, we study
an urban which is a constitutive and inseparable component (or set of
intersecting components) of very diverse processes and practices of energy
transition across North and South. By reflecting on the urban materialities,
imaginaries, controversies and politics through which energy systems do and can
change, and thus on what is, but also what might be, a specifically urban socio-technical transition, from
Cape Town to London and Amman to Freiburg, we open up theory and practice to
actualities and possibilities of urban energy relations which are other than
black-boxed, bounded, pre-set and confiscated by governmental actors or
transnational utility companies.
In the
introductory essay, and prompted by the excellent contributions to the Special
Issue, we suggest five potential, interconnected areas of reflection (riffs may
be a better description) on urban energy transitions around materiality,
relationality, socio-technical change, temporality and politics. There are
undoubtedly (and hopefully) other ways in, but already these five together seem
to us to begin to sketch out a framework for furthering critical urban energy
research and analysis, and in the process both help to recover the notion of ‘energy
transition’ (from its increasingly instrumentalised and univocal use in policy
circles) through an explicitly urban lens, and to rethink the urban through a
focus on socio-technical change.
To this end, the Special Issue does
not separate out ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’ but speaks across these
categories/binaries/boundaries to seek out and uncover how the urban is
constantly produced and reproduced by assemblages of diverse actors, infrastructures,
systems and metabolic circulations (of energy, but also its associated money,
expertise, best practice models, social norms, etc) which all make an active
difference to the nature, possibilities and (still uneven) outcomes of change
and transformation. The papers show how various socio-technical components
of energy systems become politicised in different ways and at different times,
whether it be tariffs, heating plants, air conditioning, ‘green’ objectives or demand-side
management. Energy is not
an anodyne urban artifact – its own material make-up and physical properties
do, for example, play a role in shaping how its flows connect and
disconnect differently and unevenly as they pass through the urban fabric and become
integrated into the practices, routines, cultures and affects of urban lives. Crucially,
these urban energy flows and relations now crisscross the planet, incorporating ever more distant and
diverse landscapes, localities and natures into the energetic functioning and
reproduction of particular cities, often with stark consequences, as, for
example, the photo of the tar sands landscape of Alberta on the front cover of
Neil Brenner’s (2014) new edited collection powerfully implies.
Fruitful
next steps require thinking about what might be a potentially progressive and
inclusive political ecology of urban energy transition. This cannot neglect
(analysis of) urban governmental actors and their very contrasting mandates and
responsibilities around energy. At a time when more than a thousand European
cities are pushing for more stringent energy efficiency and renewable energy
objectives than those adopted by the European Commission (Energy Cities
website, 18 February 2014), metropolitan governments in a range of cities
across the South struggle to position themselves and create room for policy
maneuver in energy systems dominated by powerful national actors (see Jaglin
and Verdeil 2013). So there is clearly still much to be gained from study of
local policy conflicts and the role of cities in ‘multi-level’ negotiations and
struggles over resources and flows. But, at the same time, critical work on
urban energy transitions might also continue to open up (to) questions of
agency, subjectivity, knowledge and power, and their networked constitution and
reproduction, thus enrolling a whole realm of local and not so local, formal
and informal, human and more-than-human actors and perspectives, as well as a
myriad array of material and imagined sites of displacement, disruption and
deviation of given pathways of socio-technical change. Through this kind of
approach, critical analysis envisioning energy as at once a hybrid and
political object and flow, infrastructure and demand, collective convention and
site of contestation can surely contribute to advancing urban theory and
practice more generally.
References
Brenner, N.
(ed.) (2014) Implosions/Explosions:
Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Berlin, Jovis Verlag.
Jaglin, S. and Verdeil, E. (2013)
Énergie et villes des pays émergents: des transitions en question.
Introduction, Flux 93-94, pp. 7-18.
