City / Energy Relations in Transformation

The Symposium “City / Energy Relations in Transformation”  looks at the responses of actors from various fields, such as the nation-state, municipal, civil society, business, community, and cultural sector to the accelerated risks for multi-species habitats in Europe due to the intersection of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, environmental crisis, and ongoing energy transition. It focuses on the visions and emerging infrastructural politics for energy generation, transmission, storage, and consumption, conceived and put into practice to tackle this triple-faceted fragility related to energy/society relations. It shares the idea about the profoundly political nature of energy infrastructures (Boyer 2018) in terms of their role as enablers for socio-political processes and in terms of their potential to disrupt established modes of power and coercion. Thus, the Symposium examines the impact of socio-political values and institutions on ongoing and anticipated transformations in the energy sector. And at the same time, it reflects on and discusses the role of energy infrastructures and the interdependencies they create in the socio-political reality. The city in its connection to other spatial units is the central arena of this reciprocal process.