Toward an Energy Urbanism with Jake Boswell

Historically, urban forms and architectures directly reflected the interplay of climate, technology, and resource availability. Industrialization—and subsequently globalized post-modernity—obscured this relationship, creating spatial logics that now impede the renewable energy transition.

While the technical capacity for a global transition exists, modern distributed generation and storage technologies often conflict with ingrained spatial, cultural, and urban patterns. Contemporary urbanism may prioritize energy conservation, but it still fails to adapt to—let alone celebrate—the material, spatial, and temporal dimensions of renewable energy. Merely forcing new energy logics into old spatial frameworks is a missed opportunity to foster a more just transition and restore a legible connection between cities and the energy that sustains them.

Drawing on documentation of community-owned distributed energy resources in Scotland built since 2009, this talk explores how these localized infrastructures reveal new ways to integrate energy into the built environment. The presentation is structured in three parts:

A brief historical reflection on urbanism across past energy regimes

An analysis of the spatial and material logics of Scottish community energy projects

Early design proposals applying these logics toward a 21st-century energy urbanism