The Symposium “City / Energy Relations in Transformation” will look at the responses
of actors from various fields, such as the nation-state, municipal, civil society, business, community, and cultural sector to the accelerated risks for multi-species habitats in Europe due to the intersection of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, environmental crisis, and ongoing energy transition. It will focus on the visions and emerging infrastructural politics for energy generation, transmission, storage, and consumption, conceived and put into practice to tackle this triple-faceted fragility related to energy/society relations. It shares the idea about the profoundly political nature of energy infrastructures (Boyer 2018) in terms of their role as enablers for socio-political processes and in terms of their potential to disrupt established modes of power and coercion. Thus, the Symposium examines the impact of socio-political values and institutions on ongoing and anticipated transformations in the energy sector. And at the same time, it reflects on and discusses the role of energy infrastructures and the interdependencies they create in the socio-political reality. The city in its connection to other spatial units is the central arena of this reciprocal process. The Symposium welcomes spatial scholars and practitioners of various conceptual and applied orientations and of all career stages, dealing with the topics of energy infrastructures and their socio-political dimensions. The Baltic Sea region is the primary focus, but presentations from other contexts are very welcome in order to build comparative perspectives. The Symposium highlights, but is not limited to the following themes:

▪ Fossil modernities
▪ Energy in the industrial city
▪ Emergent energy politics
▪ Energy, landscapes and cultural values 
▪ Crises of energy interdependencies
▪ Energy populisms
▪ Solarpunk
▪ Planetary lens and visions of urbanity

In these contexts there is a Call for Papers:

Paper abstracts (up to 250 words, including presenters’ affiliation and contact details), as well as registrations without a paper (with an expression of interest) are accepted at urbanism@ehu.lt by December 14, 2023.
Letters of acceptance are to be sent by December 19, 2023.

The Symposium is organized in cooperation with:

Nordic Summer University
Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at European Humanities University
CityIndustries International Research Network
Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, ZIRS, at University Halle-Wittenberg Department of Cultural Analysis at the University of Klagenfurt
LABLAB research and design think tank
Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network at OSUN

For further information, please take a look at the attached file. The program and network meeting agenda will follow in due time.