Providing a global overview of experiments around the transformation of cities' electricity networks and the social struggles associated with this change, this book explores the centrality of electricity infrastructures in the urban configuration of social control, segregation, integration, resource access and poverty alleviation. Through multiple accounts from a range of global cities, this edited collection establishes an agenda that recognises the uneven, and often historical, geographies of urban electricity networks, prompting attempts to re-wire the infrastructure configurations of cities and predicating protest and resistance from residents and social movements alike. Through a robust theoretical engagement with established work around the politics of urban infrastructures, the book frames the transformation of electricity systems in the context of power and resistance across urban life, drawing links between environmental and social forms of sustainability. Such an agenda can provide both insight and inspiration in seeking to build fairer and more sustainable urban futures that bring electricity infrastructures to the fore of academic and policy attention.

Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition. Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste. Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power. Praise for Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions 'This excellent book vividly demonstrates that whilst a PV panel is a standard thing, pretty much everything else about solar energy can be different. Ask "how, why and for whom" and geography, in many dimensions, really does matter to solar energy transitions.' Gordon Walker, Lancaster University 'This volume offers a unique and pioneering knowledge resource, underpinned by comprehensive and nuanced insights into the emergent spatial and socio-economic features of the unfolding solar energy revolution. A must read for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the diverse forms of solar power governance and development across the world.' Stefan Bouzarovski, The University of Manchester

This book explores how, in the wake of the Anthropocene, the growing call for urgent decarbonisation and accelerated energy transitions might have unintended consequences for energy poverty, justice and democracy, especially in the global South. Dilemmas of Energy Transitions in the Global South brings together theoretical and empirical contributions focused on rethinking energy transitions conceptually from and for the global South, and highlights issues of justice and inclusivity. It argues that while urgency is critical for energy transitions in a climate-changed world, we must be wary of conflating goals and processes, and enquire what urgency means for due process. Drawing from a range of authors with expertise spanning environmental justice, design theory, ethics of technology, conflict and gender, it examines case studies from countries including Bolivia, Sri Lanka, India, The Gambia and Lebanon in order to expand our understanding of what energy transitions are, and how just energy transitions can be done in different parts of the world. Overall, driven by a postcolonial and decolonial sensibility, this book brings to the fore new concepts and ideas to help balance the demands of justice and urgency, to flag relevant but often overlooked issues, and to provide new pathways forward. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy transitions, environmental justice, climate change and developing countries. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003052821 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Research volume on urban energy transition that will have wide interdisciplinary appeal to researchers in energy, urban and environmental studies.

Community energy projects give their own answers to the challenges of energy system change: They are social innovations. By building new relations between local economies, communities and technical infrastructures, these projects not only change the energy system but also respective power structures. Drawing on case studies from Germany, Denmark and Scotland, this book shows the importance of community ties, and shared symbols for successful processes of transformation and develops recommendations for policy decision-makers.

This extensive Handbook captures a range of expertise and perspectives on the changing geographies and landscapes of energy production, distribution, and use. Combining established and emerging scholarship from across disciplines, the expert contributions provide a broad overview of research frontiers for the changing geographies of energy worldwide. Interdisciplinary in nature and broad in scope, it serves to answer a range of questions and provide the reader with conceptual and methodological foundations.

Energy has become a central concern of many strands of geographical inquiry, from global climate change to the effects of energy decisions on our lives. However, many aspects of the ‘black box’ of relationships at the energy-society interface remain unopened, especially in terms of the spatial underpinnings of energy production and consumption within nations, cities and regions. Debates focusing on the location and nature of energy flows frequently fail to consider the multiple geographical networks that illustrate and explain the distribution of fuels and services around the world. Providing an integrated perspective on the complex interdependencies between energy and geography, The Routledge Research Companion to Energy Geographies offers a timely conceptual framework to study the multiple facets of energy geography, including security, space and place, planning, environmental science, economics and political science. Illustrating how a geographic approach towards energy can aid decision-making pathways in the domains of social justice and environment, this book provides insights that will help move the international community toward greater cooperation, stability, and sustainability.

What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies. Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology

What kinds of expertise and knowledge relate to electricity, and where is the space for alternative voices? How can the new roles for electricity in social and cultural life be acknowledged? How can we speak about ‘it’ in its own right while acknowledging that electricity is not one thing? This book re-describes electricity and its infrastructures using insights from anthropology and science and technology studies, raising fascinating questions about the contemporary world and its future. Through ethnographic studies of bulbs, bicycles, dams, power grids and much more, the contributors shed light on practices that are often overlooked, showing how electricity is enacted in multiple ways. Electrifying Anthropology moves beyond the idea of electricity as an immovable force, and instead offers a set of potential trajectories for thinking about electricity and its effects in contemporary society. With new contributions on an emerging area of research, this timely collection will be of value to students and scholars of anthropology, science and technology studies, geography and engineering.