Infrastructural urbanism that learns from place: Operationalising Meta Material Practices to Guide Renewable Energy Planning in Greenland

Publications: Book / Anthology / Thesis / ReportPh.D. thesis

Abstract

The development of renewable energy infrastructures in response to climatic change, calls of ‘peak oil’, environmental degradation, and geopolitical instabilities is a global challenge, and innumerable organisations and disciplines are working towards a transition to zero-carbon energy systems. Conventionally, energy ‘infrastructure’ denotes a physical system of pipes, cables, generators, plants, transformers, sockets, and pylons, however recent architectural research emerging within the loosely defined movement of Infrastructural Urbanism has reframed infrastructure as a symbiotic system of flows and relationships, proposing that landscape itself is infrastructural with the capacity to simultaneously host and connect ecological, economical, and environmental processes. Concurrently, cultural anthropology has critically revised understandings of infrastructure to encompass semantic and sociocultural dimensions, pointing towards not only the cultural impact of infrastructure, but also the influence of culture on infrastructure. With some notable exceptions these two bodies of research have, however, remained largely disconnected: architecture pushing towards the ‘systemic’, and anthropology pulling towards the lived experience. Both perspectives significantly contribute to nuancing how infrastructures are assessed and approached, and offer renewable energy development meaningful guidance for achieving a genuine sustainability. Yet architecture’s prevalent ‘systemic’ approach provokes criticisms of neofunctionalism and a failure to engage with the people, places, and cultures that it seeks to benefit.
Employing domestic renewable energy in west Greenland as a single, ‘extreme’ case study, this research fosters connections between ‘systemic’ and experiential approaches to infrastructure, drawing upon cultural anthropological and cultural geographical findings to evolve architectural theories and practices. Triangulating hermeneutical analysis, fieldwork, and research-through-design workshops, the mutual prioritisation of practices in progressive understandings of place; cross-disciplinary comprehensions of infrastructure; and existing infrastructures in Greenland, is asserted as significant. Building on this overlap, this thesis proposes that architects and planners can learn from place by operationalising Meta Material Practices – abstractions of the logic underlying quotidian, micro-scale, material practices. Meta Material Practices mesh with the processual nature of Infrastructural Urbanism, expanding its scope and scale, rendering it capable of guiding how renewable energy infrastructures are spatialised at the scale of urban design without predetermining solutions. A variant of Infrastructural Urbanism tailored to discontiguous, low-density, peripheralised regions is identified as particularly compatible with Meta Material Practices as they can facilitate cohesion between urban ‘islands’ through a multiplicity of micro-scale interventions that are effective through diffusion, building cultural sustainability into the technoeconomically dominated field of renewable energy. Six Meta Material Practices are indexed in west Greenland – bricolage, switching, modularity, polysyntheticity, adjustability, and collectivity – and examples of how they might be interpreted in renewable energy interventions at the scale of urban design presented. This thesis therefore contributes to renewable energy, infrastructural design and planning, and Arctic discourses, offering a theoretically motivated praxis for architects and planners.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages257
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Artistic research

  • Yes

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