The Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab) Research Group of the IN3 organises this research seminar by James Angel, PhD Candidate in Geography at King's College London and IN3 Visiting Scholar.
Venue
Room -1B, UOC 22@ building
Rambla Poblenou, 156
08018 Barcelona
Espanya
When
13/06/2017 12.00h
Organized by
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, TURBA Lab Research Group of the IN3
Program
If the political project of urban political ecology is to "enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction" (Swyngedouw 2003, 914), how might we begin to think about the democratisation of urban natures in more concrete terms? With this question in mind, his research seeks to learn from and develop the agenda of "energy democracy" emerging from social movements, trade unions and progressive political parties.
Specifically, he explores the diverse ways in which energy democracy is being built across two variegated European urban contexts: London and Barcelona. In the former, the "Switched On London" campaign is pushing the Greater London Authority (GLA) to implement its demand for a "clean, fair and democratic" municipal energy supply company. In Barcelona, meanwhile, the city's new "radical municipalist" led-government is purporting to build "energy sovereignty" through such a new municipal energy supply endeavour. Yet, here, urban movements relate to this initiative ambiguously, instead prioritising the re-municipalisation of electricity distribution, and everyday struggles over energy access and disconnections.
Putting these processes of urban energy contestation into conversation with "relational" theories of the state (Jessop 1982, Painter 2006) and materialist feminist work on social reproduction (Federici 2012, Strauss and Meehan 2015), he argues that two distinct approaches to urban energy democracy are evident. On the one hand, we might seek to democratise the governance of energy through the integration of greater citizen-control over local state decision-making. On the other hand, we might seek to democratise the concept of energy by translating "energy" as an exclusive technocratic fetish into "energy" as a necessity of daily reproductive struggle. These diverging approaches close and open different political possibilities, with important implications for the democratisation of energy and urban space more broadly.
The seminar will be held in English.