Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infrastructural Design Challenges in Municipal Planning Efforts Aimed at Maximizing Energy Efficiency

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

In 2007, half of the global population became concentrated in cities for the first time in human history. By 2050, nearly 90% of global population growth and 60% of aggregate energy consumption will occur in cities. Climate scientists suggest that efforts combat anthropogenic climate change will be won or lost in cities, especially through the large-scale transformation of urban transit networks. As municipal planners worldwide reckon with the ecological and public health hazards of mass automobility, a transition to decarbonized transit has emerged as a significant concern for municipal planners and engineers. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, explores what factors contribute to the cultural and social efficacy and effectiveness of municipal planning efforts aimed at improving energy efficiency and optimizing mobility around urban infrastructures. Through an ethnographic study of energy efficient infrastructure design, Rebecca Journey, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Fisch of the University of Chicago, will investigate the social and cultural factors that shape urban planning efforts. Tasked with retrofitting ever-sprawling cities with energy efficient transport infrastructure, urban planners are looking increasingly to Northern Europe for models. Within this context, the Danish capital and self-styled "eco-metropolis" of Copenhagen has surfaced as a prototype. At a municipal scale, this ambition is outlined in the Climate Plan, Copenhagen Municipality's long-range, comprehensive planning initiative to build the world's first carbon-neutral capital, and by extension, to shape a citizenry that might prove capable of mitigating climate concerns. To that end, this project will track a range of infrastructure design, development, and retrofit projects prescribed by the Climate Plan. Through participant-observation, multimedia documentation, and ethnographic interviews with city planners, architects, policymakers, and citizens, this research will investigate the sociocultural drivers and experiential dimensions of sustainable transport technology. For good reason, mobility studies have tended to focus on cars, trains and planes. Such studies have illuminated the inequitable distribution of resources in transit networks as well as the environmental and geopolitical hazards of fossil-fueled mobility. Yet in addition to rendering the harms of carbon-based transit apparent, mobility studies should attend to the modes by which alternatives become a thinkable and practical dimension of everyday life. This research takes up precisely this charge by enriching the social scientific study of infrastructure and mobility with the understudied regional and cultural perspective of Scandinavia.