Energetics of Urbanization - Urban Theory Lab -...

| Energetics of Urbanization2

Energetics of Urbanization

Tuesday 8th May 2018 9:00am-6:00pm,Gund Hall, Porticos 123

Professors: Neil Brenner and Kiel Moe

Harvard GSD Spring 2018

Urban Theory Lab Research Practicum

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, 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.

Please join us for a discussion of student research on these and related questions with reference to research projects produced by student teams in this year’s Urban Theory Lab Research Practicum. Critical reactions and discussion will be animated by four distinguished scholars of capitalism, energetics and ecology: Professor Hannah Holleman, Amherst College; Professor Julie Klinger, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University; Professor Jason W. Moore, Department of Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton; and Professor Damian White, Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Rhode Island School of Design.

Urban Theory Lab Research Practicum | 3

SCHEDULE

9:00-9:30am | IntroductionWelcome and Introduction by Neil Brenner and Kiel Moe.

9:30-10:50am | Group 1The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism: analyzing the energetics of urbanization in Mato Grosso, Brazil, by Angeliki Giannisi and Anne Hudson.

11:00am-12:20pm | Group 2How Bottled Water Intensifies the Metabolic Shift: A case study in the planetary urbanization of Fiji’s potable water through an energetic analysis, by Aurora Jensen and Pamela Cabrera.

1:40-3:00pm | Group 3Dissipatory Circuits of Power: A Systems Ecology Approach to Analyzing the Energetics of Urbanization, by Bohan Zhang, Iain Gordon and Zlatan Sehovic.

3:10-4:30pm | Group 4Green Infrastructure as the Respatialization of Planetary Carbonscapes, by Peter Osborne and Ryan Beitz.

Roundtable discussion | 4:45-6:00pmA conversation with Hannah Holleman, Julie Klinger, Jason W. Moore and Damian White


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 city-centric 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 has followed weekly protocols to advance their work in relation to a shared set of questions under exploration by the entire class. In this final colloquium, we discuss the results of our work and critically reflect on their implications for theory, research and practice.

5373 Energetics of Urbanization : Urban Theory Lab Research PracticumInstructors: Neil Brenner (Dept of Urban Planning & Design) and Kiel Moe (Dept of Architecture)


Critical reactions and discussion will be animated by four distinguished guests:

• Professor Hannah Holleman, Department of Sociology, Amherst College, author of Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism (Yale, 2018)

• Professor Julie Klinger, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, author of Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

• Professor Jason W. Moore, Department of Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015).

• Professor Damian White, Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, co-author of The Environment, Nature and Social theory: Hybrid Approaches (Palgrave Macmillian, 2015).


The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism: analyzing the energetics of urbanization in Mato Grosso, BrazilAngeliki Giannisi and Anne Hudson | 9:30 - 10:50am

Amidst concerns about the precariousness of both ecological and social sustainability on a global scale, there is a growing demand for an analytical framework that transcends the nature/society duality and offers a novel and integrated platform from which to understand both. In pursuit of that goal, our analysis draws on the tools of both energetics and urbanization theory to understand agricultural production as an area that serves as perhaps the most representative nexus between society and nature. The integration of the two theories -and thus an analysis of the energetics of urbanization under capitalism- allows for a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the socio-spatial and environmental transformations that have been instigated across global scales. Specifically, we explore the ‘soyification’ of Brazilian agriculture. Agricultural intensification and GMO-dependence in Brazil have resulted in an agricultural monoculture, extensive herbicide use, an unsustainable reliance on genetic engineering, a tenuous socio-spatial re-organization and, perhaps most importantly, widespread deforestation. All of the above have contributed to an ecological situation that is inherently unstable in the long-term. Perhaps ironically, this intensification is driven largely by international meat demand as GDPs increase internationally; 80% of the soybeans that are produced in the Amazon region are used for animal feed. Soybean production in Brazil exhibits prime symptoms of an unequal ecological exchange: Brazilian natural resources are being depleted in the service of luxury consumption elsewhere. An application of the metabolic rift thus lies at the core of our analysis and enables us to spatialize and uncover one of the soybean’s main contradictions: a seemingly stable production system that is, however, founded upon inherently unstable and contradictory processes.

Anne Hudson is a dual-degree masters student in MIT’s Urban Studies & Planning and Science in Transportation departments. Her research focuses on city planning for autonomous vehicles. Prior to her time at MIT, she worked for several years as an energy policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, honing an expertise on energy transitions in Europe as well as ‘frontier’ energy innovations. Following her time in DC, she spent several years in Seattle where she worked in communications for a wide variety of urban mobility clients, ranging from car-sharing company Zipcar to bike-sharing company Zagster. She received her bachelors in world politics and German literature from Hamilton College. Annie is currently a fellow with the MIT Automated Mobility Policy Project.

Angeliki Giannisi is graduate architecture student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. While earning her bachelors degree in architecture at the Technical University of Munich, she worked for architecture firms in Germany and Greece. During her exchange year at the University of Texas at Austin she focused on Latin American studies and undertook research on low-cost housing in the southern part of India. During her graduate studies, she had the chance to spend a summer working for MASS design in Kigali, Rwanda, where she was responsible for the schematic design of the housing facilities in a new agricultural university campus. During her architecture studies she has focused on housing projects and has developed an interest for the context of Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia. Following her stay in Rwanda, she got particularly interested in matters of urbanization processes and the discipline of political-ecology.


REPUBLICA FEDERATIVA DO BRASIL

MINISTERIO DA AGRICULTURA

The unstable stability of soybean production under capitalism:

analyzing the energetics of urbanization in

MATO GROSSO

2018

Image showing deforestation in Mato Grosso from The Wall Street Journal, https://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2014/07/08/paradise-lost-aerial-images-of-deforestation-in-the-amazon-rainforest/?ns=prod/accounts-wsj,


How Bottled Water Intensifies the Metabolic Shift: A case study in the planetary urbanization of Fiji’s potable water through an energetic analysis Aurora Jensen and Pamela Cabrera | 11:00am - 12:20pm

In the last 30 years, the staggering metabolic shift between people and their water resources has been intensified with the rise of plastic bottles. Companies have actively augmented this shift by disseminating advertisements that undermine local municipal water supplies and convince the public that bottled water is the safest water available. These tactics have successfully normalized the purchasing of bottled water to the point that Americans are willing to pay 2,000 times more for bottled water than they pay for potable municipal water. Through the study of water, a basic resource for human survival, this paper reveals the extent of the metabolic shift between humans and their water resources. By restricting and monopolizing access to local supplies of potable water, water-bottling companies reinforce this metabolic shift, encouraging the consumption of water as a commodity. In the case of FIJI Water, owned by The Wonderful Company based in L.A., their marketing is a perverse narrative built on the false exoticism of a Fijian aquifer while local Fijian populations lack access to potable water. This narrative externalizes the processes of industrialization indispensable for the manufacturing and distribution of the bottle. The inclusive account of FIJI Water developed in this paper negates the company’s narrative about pristine, healthy water. Instead, it exposes that importing bottled water from Fiji is contingent on global reserves of petroleum, the economics of polyethylene plastic production, and the logistics of international trade. Odum’s emergy-based ecosystem analysis was used to track the energetic processes that enable the global commodity chain of a water bottle. This case study then reveals the metabolic transactions that are presupposed by this supply chain and how these transactions are acts of uneven ecological exchange. Finally, the work examines the ways in which this commodity chain operationalizes diverse global landscapes in service of The Wonderful Company’s profit imperative, creating numerous sites of extraction and an accumulation of waste in the sea.

Aurora Jensen holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College where she engaged spatial analysis and urban research. Her passion for environmental modes of design led her to work for KieranTimberlake, where she continued to hone her interest in design research. Now at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she aims to design buildings that consider emergy and environmental degradation in their material constitution, and operate in nuanced passive ways to increase thermal comfort. She is currently working on her Master’s in Design Studies in Energy and Environments at the GSD.

Pamela Cabrera is a Peruvian architect currently pursuing a Master’s in Design Studies degree in Energy and Environments at the Harvard GSD. Her research is centered in the sustainable growth of rural communities within fragile environments and economies. Specifically she is focused in new material and energetic typologies that deploy passive vernacular design. Her professional experience has alternated between New York and Peru, where she co-founded C.E.A.D. and worked closely with communities in the Amazon under the NGO Construye Identidad. She received her B.Arch from Cooper Union in 2012 where she graduated with honors.


Dissipatory Circuits of Power: A Systems Ecology Approach to Analyzing the Energetics of Urbanization Bohan Zhang, Iain Gordon, and Zlatan Sehovic | 1:40 - 3:00pm

Large-scale technological systems such as power generation plants and the electrical grid are relatively small parts of much larger and more complex processes of urbanization. This study uses systems ecology to demonstrate the limitations of city and fuel-centric theoretical frameworks for investigating urbanization. Through emergy analysis, we examine the power grid and electricity-generating plants as crystallized formations of labor and energy in order to spatialize the metabolic rift and to illuminate the uneven ecological exchange between cities and their hinterlands. A historical analysis of the Ameren Corporation, one of the largest utility companies in the United States, provides an empirical basis for establishing a system boundary across which energy, material and capital flows can be traced. Using the study of Taum Sauk, Ameren’s only hydroelectric pumped storage station, we highlight key linkages between seemingly disparate geographies and complex circuits of production and consumption. By shifting land uses, reshaping natural landscapes, and reconfiguring social and physical pathways within the urban fabric, Ameren expanded its power network in order to diversify load utilization and exploit increasing quantities of natural resources fueling urbanization in Missouri and Illinois. The extraction of fossil fuels, damming of rivers, clearing of forests, and destruction of mountaintops made way for large scale utility infrastructures. These transformations yielded greater electricity outputs and increased profits as nature provided new energy sources and subsidized production costs.These findings demonstrate that the complex circuits of the electrical grid are neither isolated nor autonomous. They operate within a larger political, economic, and socio-cultural network that can be studied through a systems ecology approach of smaller scale circuits such as Taum Sauk or the Ameren power network.

Bohan Zhang is a current Master in Design Studies, concentration in Energy and Environment candidate at Harvard GSD. His professional interests focus on architecture design with a goal of embracing energy and the environment in the projects. He holds a Bachelors of Architecture degree and a Master of Architecture degree from Tongji University Shanghai China.

Iain Gordon is a Master in Design Studies in Energy and Environments candidate at the Harvard GSD. He is interested specifically in forestry and the increasing use of wood as a building material in all contexts through the study of ecological systems management and community engagement. He has worked in the local agriculture sector and as a supply chain manager and creative director of a sustainable timber products company based in Latin America. He holds a BA in History and Earth Science from Vassar College.

Zlatan Sehovic is a Bosnian-American architect and a current Master in Design Studies in Energy and Environments candidate at the Harvard GSD. His scholarly and professional interests focus on understanding ways in which the built and natural environment can be better integrated through technology and design. Zlatan previously worked as a Project Designer in the Architecture Department at Johnson Fain in Los Angeles from 2013 to 2017. He holds a Bachelors of Architecture degree with a concentration in Urban Policy and Planning from the University of Southern California.


St. Louis

St. LouisEnergy Flows2015

St. LouisEnergy Flows1975

St. Louis Energy Flows1905

636,000Customers

stock energy

animate energy

CoalPlants

Labor

Money

Electricity

Coal

Powder River Basin, WY

Soil

Ameren Missouri

Coal Plants

St. Louis, MO

Mississippi River

5,353 MWLabadieMeramecRush IslandSioux

32,000 tons coal/day

5 tons coal waste/day

108,000 tons CO2 emissions/day

Powder River Basin, WY

Soil

Ameren Missouri

Coal Plants

St. Louis, MO

Mississippi River

St. Louis832,000Customers

CoalPlants

Labor

Money

Electricity

Coal

4,171 MWLabadieMeramecSioux

25,000 tons coal/day

Local coal resources

Soil

Ameren MissouriCoal Plant

St. Louis, MO

Mississippi River

St. Louis305,000Customers

CoalPlants

Labor

Money

Electricity

Coal

36 MWAshley

215 tons coal/day

.1 Wh/person

5 Wh/person

8.5 Wh/person

Three-dimensional systems diagram representing the metabolism between St. Louis and its hinterlands.


Green Infrastructure as the Respatialization of Planetary Carbonscapes Peter Osborne and Ryan Beitz | 3:10 - 4:30pm

Today, various forms of so-called “Green Infrastructure” are promoted as viable environmentally-friendly and socially-just alternatives to traditional carbon-intensive fossil fuel infrastructures. One of the most popular examples of these alternative forms of infrastructure is that of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are marketed under the promise to free us from our reliance on highly-polluting petroleum-based forms of transportation. However, as our research shows, once the externalities within the production process and lifecycle of BEVs are taken into account, not only are BEVs revealed to be effectively as carbon-intensive as their fossil fuel counterparts, but more importantly, their social impact is, to put it mildly, unjustifiably negative.In order to defend these claims, we synthesize a variety of approaches and concepts deployed throughout the disciplines of energetics and urban studies in order to fully account for the various effects of BEVs. Implicit to the methodology we are calling the “energetics of urbanization” is the premise that planetary-scale urban infrastructures and processes are productively understood as dissipative structures which organize the flows of energy on Earth. The upshot of such a premise is the elimination of accepting any kind of “externalization” from the analysis of any specific process of urbanization today. Thus by detailing the production, use, and decommissioning of the Lithium-Ion (“Li-ion”) batteries used in Toyota and Tesla’s popular BEVs, a primary source of post-carbon and sustainability claims within the automotive industry. Through this, we are able to show that Capitalism’s putatively “Green Economy” is anything but. Rather, the BEV urban-energy regime is little more than a respatializing of our current planetary carbonscapes, shifting the burden of carbon production onto sacrificial landscapes throughout the global south.

Peter Osborne is currently Knox Fellow pursuing a Master in Design Studies in the Energy and Environment concentration at the Harvard GSD. His scholarly and professional interests include the design of digital techniques and material-energy exchanges as well as repair and maintenance within architecture. He previously worked in the design offices of NADAAA, RDH Architects, and Michael Maltzan Architecture. He holds a previous Master in Architecture from the University of Toronto as a Daniels Scholar and a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University, Kingston.

Ryan Beitz is currently a Master in Design Studies candidate in the History and Philosophy of Design at Harvard’s GSD. His scholarly interests are primarily in the construction, application, and effects of epistemological frameworks in design thinking and the history of ideas more generally. Before coming to the GSD, he spent a year in Helsinki, Finland as a Fulbright Research scholar. Ryan also holds an MA in Philosophy from LMU Los Angeles as well as a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies and a B.A. in English from the University of Idaho.


373 HYBRID ELECTIRC VEHICLES WITH 3 kWh BATTERY

PLUG-IN HYBRID ELECTIRC VEHICLES WITH 25 kWh BATTERY 1

PLUG-IN HYBRID ELECTIRC VEHICLES WITH 100 kWh BATTERY

1500BATTERY POWER TOOLS

2000LAPTOPS

20,000LITHIUM EQUIVALENTSFOR 90 KG OF LITHIUM

MOBILE PHONES

Lithium Alternates Diagramme.

Energetics of Urbanization

Harvard GSD Spring 2018

Urban Theory Lab Research Practicum

Energetics of Urbanization - Urban Theory Lab -...

Documents

Transcript of Energetics of Urbanization - Urban Theory Lab -...