How should we understand the energetics of urbanization under capitalism? In what ways do capitalist forms of urbanization intensify the dissipation of entropy, and with what consequences? How do the infrastructures of urbanization mediate and exacerbate capital’s metabolic rifts, and with what consequences? In what ways might exploration of such questions reframe contemporary debates on postcarbon energy “transitions”? In this collaborative project, derived from a UTL Research Practicum conducted in Spring 2018, we confront these questions through frameworks that transcend fuel-centric understandings of energy and city-centric understandings of the urban, leading to new horizons for theory, historical analysis, spatial representation and contemporary design practice.

Inherited approaches to the study of energy and urbanization both exhibit epistemological and methodological limits. These limitations constrain not only how we understand and investigate the topics of energy and urbanization, but how we project theory, policy, pedagogy and practice. This exploratory seminar and research practicum aims to reckon with these limitations in order to explore the relationship between energetics and urbanization processes under capitalism.

Two significant scholarly discourses on energy and urbanization are converging, with increasingly parallel questions and concerns. First, a discourse on extended urbanization and global capitalism has begun to stage energy as a central parameter through which to understand historical and contemporary relations of territory, accumulation and urbanization. In contrast to inherited citycentric approaches to the urban question, energy has emerged in this discourse as a key reference point for deciphering the variegated geographies and scales of capitalist industrial urbanization. Second, questions concerning energy in architecture are rapidly cycling up to the scale of urbanization and longue durée historical periodizations. Recent, empirically grounded approaches to ecological accounting of the built environment (at the scale of buildings and cities) emphatically suggest that larger and longer cycles of energy and material use are more appropriate indicators for pursuing programs of environmental “sustainability.” Taken together, these epistemological reorientations open up the prospect for a fruitful exploration of the energetics of urbanization in which (a) urbanization processes and their geographies are understood to be constituted through energy regimes, across diverse territories, scales and ecologies; and (b) energy regimes are explored with reference to macroscopic spatial and temporal system boundaries, as well as with reference to their proper energetic hierarchies, thus providing an entirely new basis for more ecologically, architecturally and politically cogent approaches to urbanization.

The course is framed as a shared inquiry with students into the new terrains of theory, research and visualization that are opened up by these conceptual reorientations. Opening weeks are devoted to establishing deep theoretical foundations in relation to fundamental literatures on urbanization, energy and their geographies. We then explore the historical geographies of urbanization and energy regimes in relation to one another. This leads, in the second part of the course, to team-based research projects on specific sites and contexts of urban/energetic transformation during the last 150 years and prospectively. Each research team follows weekly protocols to advance their work in relation to a shared set of questions under exploration by the entire class.