Socio-technical Change and the Politics of Urban Infrastructure: Managing Energy in Berlin between Dictatorship and Democracy
Open Access
- 21 August 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Urban Studies
- Vol. 51 (7), 1432-1448
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013500086
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the trajectory of energy efficiency policies in Berlin from the 1920s to today in order to illustrate how the shifting political and socioeconomic conditions of a city can shape urban energy provision and consumption. Taking a long-term perspective on the relationship between urban transitions and energy policy, it investigates how the geo-political turbulence, regime diversity and socioeconomic volatility experienced by 20th-century Berlin influenced strategies of electricity generation and use in the city. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising change to socio-technical systems in the literature, the paper’s findings present a more differentiated picture of urban energy transitions than notions of path dependency and transition pathways imply, highlighting the importance of non-linear trends, political contestation and crisis discourses in and beyond the city and their relevance for reconfiguring urban energy systems today.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- Energy transition and city–region planning: understanding the spatial politics of systemic changeTechnology Analysis & Strategic Management, 2010
- Divided City, Divided Infrastructures: Securing Energy and Water Services in Postwar BerlinJournal of Urban History, 2009
- Conceptualizing the Political Ecology of Urban Infrastructures: Insights from Technology and Urban StudiesEnvironment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2009
- Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the CityInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008
- Urban Governance and the Transition of Energy Systems: Institutional Change and Shifting Energy and Climate Policies in BerlinInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2007
- Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion between Technology Studies and Urban StudiesScience, Technology, & Human Values, 2005
- Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of PoliticsAmerican Political Science Review, 2000
- The Ethnography of InfrastructureAmerican Behavioral Scientist, 1999
- Regime shifts to sustainability through processes of niche formation: The approach of strategic niche managementTechnology Analysis & Strategic Management, 1998
- Infrastructural Improvement in Nineteenth-Century CitiesJournal of Urban History, 1986