Speaker
Description
Transformative change of the local urban energy system towards renewable energy consumption and energy efficiency is needed to diminish urban GHG emissions and pave the way towards climate-neutral cities. To secure carbon neutrality in cities, neighbourhoods offer critical sites for local action for climate mitigation and decarbonisation policies. An emerging body of literature on climate-neutral neighbourhoods and positive energy districts (PEDs) addresses how the district level unlocks potential for collective action by allowing for increased energy efficiency, flexibility and energy production. While technological interventions of the built environment are needed, pathways to PEDs need to be understood considering their social and behavioural dimensions. Therefore, it is a common understanding within the literature and as addressed within EU directive for PEDs framework that PEDs should include multidimensional objectives for ecological, social and economic sustainability. Nevertheless, most PED literature so far is technological in nature.
To understand the different social enablers and barriers to PEDs, a deeper understanding of social acceptance could provide a social lens on PEDs. An understanding of social acceptance PEDs and its social elements such as trust relations, local attitudes, social inclusivity, and behavioural change is still lacking. At the same time, a place-based approach by looking at the neighbourhood level is needed to allow for addressing context-specificities of complex sociotechnical configurations, relevant to understanding social acceptance processes. Moreover, as urban localities face different challenges such as high-density housing, limited available energy sources and a lock-in in existing local energy networks, understanding the social elements of PEDs could also further contribute to multiple approaches to social acceptance. Furthermore, neighbourhoods form complex interdependent social processes, social networks and power relations shaped by everyday practices and social interactions. Whereas traditional social acceptance literature has mainly focused on large-scale energy technologies, understanding acceptance of small-scale, decentralised and urban interventions has been limited discussed. Considering social elements such as energy vulnerability and energy justice, a local or even bottom-up renewable energy implementation could offer the possibility to empower communities while implementing technological interventions towards carbon neutrality. Nevertheless, it could also become contested spaces, addressing issues of heritage loss, displacement and social exclusion. These different elements can display the complexity of sociotechnical transformative trajectories but also address potential synergies that take place for drivers or barriers to effective energy policy implementation.
Therefore it will be argued that there is a need to incorporate a social understanding of transformative pathways to climate-neutral cities, by combining insights from PEDs literature with the wide body of social acceptance literature. While the technological focus within PED literature could benefit from social energy research, the urban context could provide new insights into social acceptance theories, by addressing the question how the urban context influences social acceptability of new energy systems. Additionally, a further critically analysis and elaboration on the meaning of the neighbourhood as site for local action is needed. As it is expected that by 2050 70% of the global population will be living in urban areas, the city as a location of renewable energy implementation will raise different encounters of resistance or potential enablers.
| Keywords | postive energy districts; social acceptance; neighbourhood planning; literature review |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
