Energetics of Urbanization

Neil Brenner, Kiel Moe, and UTL students

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. 

DOWNLOADS:

• Introduction and overview, by Neil Brenner and Kiel Moe
• Program for the final colloquium '18
• Final colloquium '18 presentation, by Neil Brenner and Kiel Moe

The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism, by Angeliki Giannisi and Anne Hudson

• 1: Presentation & final panels.

How Bottled Water Intensifies the Metabolic Shift, by Aurora Jensen and Pamela Cabrera.

• 2: Presentation & final panels.

Dissipatory Circuits of Power, by Bohan Zhang, Iain Gordon and Zlatan Sehovic.

• 3: Presentation & final panels.

Green Infrastructure as the Respatialization of Planetary Carbonscapes, by Peter Osborne and Ryan Beitz.

• 4: Presentation & final panels.