Global infrastructuralization has generated complex supply chains, and international policies which have transformed energy extraction, production and distribution. This system is made up of sites of production in the global periphery and sites of consumption in the global urban cores, connected by essentially invisible network of infrastructure and instruments, decoupling many of the costs of energy, or field of externalities, from spaces of consumption. The inability for the current global economic system to account for these externalities has created a context of scarcity, increasing socio-spatial inequality, cycles of boom and bust and environmental destruction bringing our planet to the brink of collapse.
Where before geography determined patterns of human habitation and movement, today nature has become malleable. The ecological carrying capacity of a region once determined the ability for a civilization to grow and flourish or alternatively overextend itself and collapse. The first industrial revolution brought about the ability to harness, deploy and transport nature’s capital, energy, which irreversibly distorted and abstracted natural flows/ patterns of energy creation and release, transforming our relationship to nature which was originally one of dependency and fear to one of management and control.
The growing global awareness of climate change and concern for energy security brought about by the 1970 oil shocks caused a shift towards complex systems thinking, territorial metabolism and ecological consciousness. Increasingly physical infrastructures/systems are overlaid and integrated with digital and soft systems generating new datascapes and further mediating our daily experience with energy and nature. Centralization of control of these complex systems has lead to a lack of agency by individuals and communities. The rise of renewables, emerging energy storage capacity, and ICTs make decentralization possible, however social infra structure and soft systems are barriers to their large scale implementation.
In order to recouple sites of consumption to those of production it is imperative to foster digital literacy and territorial awareness of this space of flows and datascapes. In doing so we create the opportunity for value articulation and agency by the collective and the potential for new local energy ecologies to emerge and integrate territorially. This requires us to reconsider the existing interfaces we use to access energy and information which are currently biased towards consumption and circumvent collective experience and action.
I examine these processes in the context of western Canada where the proximity of urban and natural space forces a negotiation between resourcist and conservationist views of nature. Furthermore, population growth, aging infrastructure, emerging Asian markets, and the federal government’s bid to make Canada an energy superpower are mobilizing divergent interest groups at an international scale making this territory a catalyst for the future energy landscape.
MSc in Architecture Thesis - Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino
Vancouver - Calgary, Canada - 2015
thesis advisors: Elisa Cattaneo (PoliMi) and Giancarlo Cotella (PoliTo)