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Spatial Agencies of Energy Transition

Sascha Roesler, Silvia Balzan and Lorenzo Fabian Stieger
p. 21-26
Translation(s):
La spazialità della transizione energetica [en]

Editor's notes

DOI: 10.17454/ARDETH13.02

Full text

1This “Ardeth” issue promotes the conceptual framework of “energy landscape” to question energy as cheap, abundant, and at the disposal of urban development; it critically examines concepts and methods for shaping future energy landscapes. Understanding energy transition as practice of broad spatial transformation, the issue looked for contributions that uncover the mutual dependency between energy and urbanization, analyzing the possible influences of settlement structures on promoting renewable energy production. The issue conceives energy futures as intrinsically tied to a broader discussion on space-making futures and highlights “the spatial elements through which urban energy systems evolve [...] and the spatial consequences of [energy] transition” (Rutherford, Coutard, 2014: 1354). For example, how do different densities of the built fabric contribute to and limit the emergence of post-carbon energy landscapes?

2The editors of this issue, Sascha Roesler, associate professor for theory of urbanization and urban environments, together with Silvia Balzan and Lorenzo Fabian Stieger, postdoctoral researchers, conduct a theory-driven, empirically and historically-informed comparative research on global forms of urbanization, in order to provide an evolutionary approach to architecture and urban design. By integrating the perspectives of “high” architecture and popular forms of construction, the Professorship fosters a cross-cultural understanding of architecture (as a discipline) and low-tech building methods. With its real-life problems and profile, the city is the centre of gravity in the Professorship’s research interests. To foster sustainability in the built urban environment, both the real complexity of the contemporary city and the concepts that are currently available to improve it are scrutinized. The Associate Professorship for Theory of Urbanization and Urban Environments addresses the conflict-laden goals of sustainable development – in short, to provide at the same time for a green city, a growing city, and a just city (Campbell, 1996) – while exploring innovative sustainable concepts in theory and practice.

3With such approaches in mind, the editors prompted contributions that offer a transdisciplinary view of energy landscapes, considering actors (companies, institutions, people), technologies (carbon-based and renewable), flows (of resources, energy, money), scales (from buildings to the globe), and patterns of urbanization. As the selected contributions in this issue show, the transdisciplinary view is also about critically scrutinizing energy and landscape concepts and examining how they are interrelated. Scholars in the field of urban and architectural design have contributed recent findings and novel methods at the intersection of archival, ethnographic, and design-driven approaches for studying energy landscapes in transition. The contributions of this issue explore new forms of energy governance and spatial regimes, propose alternative approaches to zoning regulations and building codes, and highlight inevitable challenges related to issues such as liability and safety.

4The issue opens with a conversation and a visual commentary, which together represent the overarching framework of this special issue on energy landscapes. Sascha Roesler, Elke Beyer, Kim Förster – the recent initiators of the international “Network on Urban Energy Landscapes” – and Daniela Russ identify three main themes through a meta-reflection on the concept of the “energy landscape”: first, the need to think about the energy transition in spatial terms and across different scales; second, the unprecedented challenges of the energy transition and the constraints of historical research in this context; and third, the role of cities as primary sites of energy consumption, alongside the inevitable realities of energy hinterlands.

5The visual commentary by Milica Topalović, Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning at ETH Zurich, and Jan Westerheide with photographs taken by artist Bas Princen, captures a physical model produced by students from the design research studio “Power to the People: Energy and Territory in the Rheinland.” The design studio’s inquiry focused on the German region of the Rheinisches Revier, which surrounds the Tagebau Hambach surface mine; it investigated the ownership and governance of energy sources during the energy transition and how communities can rally for alternatives to fossil fuel reliance.

6Following this overarching framework, which combines conceptual with visual reflections, the collection of peer-reviewed articles consists of five essays and three visual essays, all of which deal with the dynamics of energy landscapes (in transition). The papers and essays contribute to a contemporary environmental theory in architecture and build on a number of core themes outlined in the original call for papers and further refined after submission. These themes encompass the spatio-temporal dynamics of energy transitions, new models for net zero cities, the agency of networked energy landscapes, and the socio-cultural dimensions of energy hinterlands. In light of the recent geopolitical situation surrounding the war in Ukraine, which has highlighted Europe’s dependence on external energy sources, this issue focuses on European territories and calls for exploring new strategies of self-sufficiency that improve on those discussed in the past.

Spatio-temporal frameworks

7The energy transition is inevitably processual and non-linear. It is a continuous process beyond the “net zero goal.” As sociologist Lucius Burckhardt (2015) noted, planning must be understood as a paradox, as it seeks to define a non-finite future state. Leonardo Ramondetti’s article and the visual essay by Elena Vigliocco, Paolo Mellano, Elena Guidetti, and Riccardo Ronzani contribute to the thematic thread that explores spatiotemporal energy transition processes.

8Ramondetti discusses the transformation of Ravenna’s port on the Adriatic Sea coast of Italy into a landscape that supports green energy initiatives. He outlines the challenges of this transition, emphasizing the current technocentric approach, which focuses on technological solutions, in contrast to an ecocentric approach that prioritizes ecological considerations.

9Through a visual essay, Vigliocco et al. portray the energy transition of Salento’s Borgo Monteruga in Italy. They detail its evolution from a dormant site to an agrivoltaic landscape, which combines agriculture with solar energy production. The transformation is illustrated with a timeline segmented into four periods, each representing distinct landscapes and showing the influence of changing energy demands, both local and global, on Borgo Monteruga’s solar landscape.

Net Zero Cities

10Future energy landscapes will bring a new kind of political ecology of energy production, which will also entail a change in the perspective of social actors from energy consumers to energy producers. The globally discussed political goal of net zero emissions is only one aspect of a resource-conscious approach to energy, which goes hand in hand with the pressing issue of climate change. Two contributions examine the role of urban dwellers as energy producers, owners of the infrastructure, and/or energy shareholders, as well as the state and other actors’ roles as energy service providers concerning off-grid rights.

11Fabrizio D’Angelo contributes to the issue with an in-depth discussion of a project in Rome’s Ostiense area, engaging with the theme of reconceptualizing energy efficiency strategies into energy sufficiency. The ongoing research project PED4ALL aims to convert the Ostiense area into a positive energy district. It prioritizes the concept of energy sufficiency – a strategic shift from merely using energy efficiently to ensuring it meets all needs without excess. Importantly, the project moves away from a strictly technocratic focus on optimization, highlighting instead the need to alter the socio-spatial practices of Ostiense’s residents as part of a broader energy transition strategy. D’Angelo critiques EU policies for their shortcomings, noting their focus on energy’s economic and technical aspects rather than on the everyday behaviors of people who actualize energy transitions.

12Andri Gerber’s contribution examines models of net-zero cities, highlighting overlooked scale differences between individual buildings and broader urban contexts. To address this, the article suggests creating a simulation game that incorporates elements from past games to offer a playful yet educational experience. The game’s rules aim to be user-friendly, bridging different scales by assigning energy-related data to various architectural and urban elements, representing the Swiss landscape in a simplified form for gameplay.

Relational landscapes

13Following Ian McHarg’s “Design with Nature” (1969), the exploration of energy production ecologies unveils the manifold intersections of political, infrastructural, social, and natural conditions. Two papers examine novel renewable and low-carbon energy production strategies in the context of the existing urbanization patterns and address the consequent tradeoffs between green, growing, and equitable urban development, also highlighting frictions between green technologies and ecosystems. The contributions present proto-ecological approaches in the context of the postwar socialist city of Warsaw (Poland). Adam Pryzwara’s contribution examines urban circular mining as a process that addresses the embodied energy in the built environment and turns urban landscapes into energy-producing spaces. The second, by the architecture collective CENTRALA (Małgorzata Kuciewic and Simone de Iacobis), uses historical insights to understand Warsaw’s current necessities to adapt to the (changing) urban microclimates.

14Pryzwara traces the emergence of a unique energy conservation paradigm in Warsaw’s post-war urban landscape. Using original archival documents, he discusses the city administration’s methods for assessing and utilizing the embodied energy in the rubble left after wartime destruction for Warsaw’s post-war reconstruction economy. His historical analysis of energy conservation and reuse adds to current discussions on the circular economy in architecture by applying them within the context of energy landscapes.

15Małgorzata Kuciewic and Simone de Iacobis explore how Warsaw’s post-war urban design of open spaces has influenced living conditions and perceptions of the city, especially during heat waves. They argue that these spaces were intentionally designed by the Warsaw Reconstruction Office (1945-1949), headed by landscape architect Alina Scholtz, to manage the local microclimates. By contrast, they suggest that modern market-driven developments treat urban spaces as “voids,” prioritizing the utilitarian potential of green and blue infrastructure as lucrative opportunities rather than for their climate-regulating functions.

Energy hinterlands

16The most important aspect of the 20th-century energy system has been urban centers’ dependency on the global “energy hinterland” (Hawkes, 1996). The remoteness of energy sources such as oil and natural gas has led to a global distribution network and the idea of energy abundance regardless of location. The contributions explore urban strategies related to decentralization and centralization.

17Lorenzo Fabian, Susanna Pisciella, and Chiara Semenzin’s article addresses the theme of energy hinterlands by exploring the northeastern region of Triveneto. Informed by the European Green Deal and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) trend projections, the article analyzes two potential scenarios for the future energy transition in the region. Given its unique geographic and settlement configuration, along with the current energy sector arrangement, the authors propose a centralized and vertically integrated one for the industrial sector and a decentralized and horizontal one for the residential landscape.

18Closing the issue, Jacqueline Maurer’s essay delves into Swiss dams through a selection of visuals from documentary films and the author’s photographs. These visuals critically analyze the narratives surrounding the planning and construction of hydropower infrastructures in Switzerland. They revisit Karl Sauer’s 1930s study of Lake Sihl and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1950s documentation of the Grande Dixence dam, which was instrumental in preventing electricity shortages in Switzerland. Maurer’s photographs of the Grande Dixence dam engage in a dialogue with Godard’s documentary, prompting a reflection on massive landscape infrastructures as objects of commercial tourism and their comprehensive cultural, economic, political, and environmental implications for natural resources.

19This issue of “Ardeth” questions the prevailing focus in contemporary architecture on the self-sufficiency of individual buildings and is thus dedicated to a new understanding that embeds strategies of energy saving and production in the broader urban and territorial context. The papers and visual essays of this issue promote a transversal view of energy landscapes, integrating the urban and architectural scales and the transition from energy consumption to production. To conceive of urban territories and the architectural project itself as sites of future energy production requires a new way of thinking about design, as urban scholar Dean Hawkes emphasized in 1996: “The city that produces all of the energy it needs for its buildings and the urban infrastructure is of course, only a vision. To take the first steps towards its realization would transform the agenda for research and practice in architecture more radically than any idea since the advent of the modern movement.”

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Bibliography

Burckhardt, L., Ritter, M., Schmitz, M. (eds) (2015), Why Is Landscape Beautiful? The Science of Strollology, Basel, Birkhäuser.

Hawkes, D. (1995), The Environmental Tradition. Studies in the Architecture of Environment, London, Taylor & Francis.

Rutherford, J., Coutard, O. (2014), Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-technical Change, “Urban Studies”, n. 51, p. 1354.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Sascha Roesler, Silvia Balzan and Lorenzo Fabian Stieger, Spatial Agencies of Energy TransitionArdeth, 13 | 2023, 21-26.

Electronic reference

Sascha Roesler, Silvia Balzan and Lorenzo Fabian Stieger, Spatial Agencies of Energy TransitionArdeth [Online], 13 | 2023, Online since 01 December 2024, connection on 13 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/4137

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About the authors

Sascha Roesler

Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana – sascha [dot] roesler [at] usi [dot] ch

Silvia Balzan

Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana – silvia [dot] balzan [at] usi [dot] ch

By this author

Lorenzo Fabian Stieger

Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana – lorenzofabian [dot]stieger [at] usi [dot] ch

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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