Speakers
Description
The transition to clean energy systems is key to meeting carbon neutralisation targets. Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) emerged to promote local energy autonomy and flexibility. PEDs present an energy transition roadmap multifaceted with social, spatial, and technical aspects. Social aspects include the identification of stakeholders and initiating community collaboration. Establishing energy communities addresses inequalities of energy and mobility poverty by providing access to clean and reliable services. Spatial factors involve the assessment of feasible areas for implementing positive energy infrastructure. The implementation of active systems for energy generation, low-carbon mobility options, and strategies to reduce energy consumption are technical components. Although there is a roadmap for establishing PEDs, lack of public interest, resistance to change, high costs, and lack of participatory processes prevail as challenges.
Community participation approaches are essential to achieve PEDs. Hewitt et al. (2020) put forward participatory tools are more common to support the implementation of environmental policies in many fields but are less common in the energy field. Participation involves the co-creation of energy, mobility, and climate comfort scenarios, co-monitoring of energy use, and shared governance to tailor energy goals. This has the potential to enhance social acceptance as well as develop a user-centered approach to technologies. Given the diverse disciplines involving the built environment, it is essential to identify the obstacles and opportunities of PED in an inclusive and participatory way.
This paper presents a bibliometric review that aims to explore the potential uses of digital participatory processes in energy transition initiatives. Bibliometric analysis is useful for detecting key publications and mapping research fields (Passas, 2024). The publications queried using digital, urban design, participation, and citizen engagement keywords. Keywords are chosen based on key research themes including synonyms and related concepts. The queries from databases have resulted in 565 publications. A total of 127 duplicates and 20 publications with different fields were eliminated. 418 publications obtained at this stage were uploaded to Bibliometrix software to conduct author, citation, and impact analysis. The most relevant 50 articles are detected using bibliometric analysis based on the author's local and global impact and the most relevant authors based on co-occurrence and co-citation analysis. This was followed by the snowballing technique to enhance the scope of the review, and 12 more articles were added. In the end, a total of 62 articles are examined for the literature review.
The literature review presents the advantages and limitations of digital participatory tools for establishing PEDs. Digital tools are effective in disseminating information and reaching more people in a limited time. New visualizations provided by virtual technologies can support energy transition projects by enhancing communication (Spieker, 2018). The findings suggest that digital participatory approaches can be integrated into processes as communication channels to evaluate alternatives (Spieker, 2018). Wilson et al. (2024) emphasize developing long-term trust between stakeholders using digital and analog methodologies. However, relying on a single tool to fulfill expectations on energy transition poses limitations. Although hybrid models offer bottom-up participation, digital literacy barriers, maintaining interest, and managing the alignment of views are challenging (Chaves et al., 2021). Wilson et al. (2024) refer to the capabilities of tools in terms of time, interaction, communication, and learning processes. This review paper concludes by suggesting exploring the potential of hybrid methodologies incorporating digital and analog tools in energy transition projects. The integration of social, spatial, and technical aspects would inform experts working in different fields and encourage the integration of human-centered approaches and evidence-based strategies. The direction of future research emphasizes a need for applying hybrid methodologies to address time and space constraints, level of participation, and integration of tools.
References
Chaves, R., Schneider, D., Motta, C., Correia, A., Paredes, H., Caetano, B., & De Souza, J. M. (2021). Crowdsourcing Urban Narratives for a Post-Pandemic World. 894–900. Scopus. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCWD49262.2021.9437759
Hewitt, R.J., de Boer, C. and Flacke, J. (2020). Participatory development of digital support tools for local-scale energy transitions: Lessons from two European case studies. Global Transitions, 2, pp.138–149. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glt.2020.07.003.
Passas, I. (2024). Bibliometric Analysis: The Main Steps. Encyclopedia, [online] 4(2), pp.1014–1025. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia4020065.
Spieker, A. (2018). Stakeholder dialogues and virtual reality for the german energiewende. J. Dispute Resol. Available from: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/jdr/vol2018/iss1/9.
Wilson, A., Rodger, S., Bowen, S., & Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2024). Public engagement, digital technology and transport: Engaging through open, early and experience-centred perspectives at scale. Contemporary Social Science. Scopus. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2024.2343880
| Keywords | Positive Energy Districts; community participation; spatial planning; hybrid tools |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
