Urban Energy Transition: An Introduction PETER DROEGE University of Newcastle, Australia Around the world, cities and urban communities plant the seeds to a great transformation, unprecedented in history in its reach and magnitude. The growing footprint of contempor- ary and especially wealthy cities is well documented. Their carbon belching thirst for fossil fuels, their demand for an ever rising stream of global resources, their contribution to land clearing, second to fossil fuel combustion in concentrating greenhouse gases in the atmos- phere – all these conditions are not only painfully understood, but have begun to drive important shifts in urban energy and environmental policy making. Urban communities in developing countries confront energy transition challenges that are only superficially dif- ferent from those of the more industrialized world. Their challenge is to stabilize a grow- ing hunger for secure energy supplies, avoid polluting and wasteful industries and power systems, and – not unlike their more developed sisters – shun development directions that hardwire costly and inefficient mobility patterns for generations to come. Enlightened com- munity leaders and governments are sharply attuned to the need to enhance human health and urban livelihood, and construct bridges of access, equity and empowerment. They seek to nurture more vital and autonomous rural and peri-urban regions, to help reduce and even deflect migrational pressures, but they also hope to craft new development directions that radically depart from the congested coal-and-petroleum path that has been blazed by the economically dominant world, ever since the industrial revolution as referred to by both Lenzen et al . and Kenworthy in this book. Energy, Cities, Evolution and Innovation Fundamental features in the relation between urban life and energy use are common to Southern and Northern cities. While urban settlements are often more transport-energy efficient – i.e. when looking at per capita petroleum energy expended – than suburban or peri-urban areas, given that nearly all motorized movements are oil based – their overall energy requirements soar high above those of less urbanized communities as referred to by both Lenzen et al . and Kenworthy in this book. Only in this transport sense can cities rightfully be seen to be more ‘energy-wise ’ , by affording greater functional densities and hence more compact, concentrated or combined land-use patterns. Here lies a civilization challenge that can only be satisfactorily resolved in a combination of efficiency, cultural innovations and the shift to renewable power. The vitality of cities – their very power as a cultural concentrator, market, and production-consumption engine – is based on the very 1 2 Urban Energy Transition densities, resulting synergies and serendipitous encounters they engender. Since their rise in the Bronze Age cities have been central to advanced civilization ’ s conception of cultural and economic accomplishment and supremacy. As a corollary to their exalted status in the architecture of post-agrarian societies they also engender far greater levels of energy consumption when looking at the entire energy requirement spectrum – as described by Manfred Lenzen and his colleagues in their chapter on urban energy embodiment. This elevated energy and general resource intensity of urban economies and lifestyles is hence likely always to have been a basic feature of cities – long resulting in deleterious impacts on surrounding countryside and forest areas. Yet the great difference today is not merely the very proliferation of cities against the background of the fossil-fuel charged population explosion, and not alone the conspicuous and inconspicuous levels in globalized forms of consumption – but also the basic fact that their overwhelming commercial energy input is fossil, with all of its devastating consequences. Positive signals arise from the current global energy conundrum, common to cities in more and less wealthy regions of the world. The present energy transition triggers a tech- nological and logistical innovation wave, affecting areas as disparate as personal and pub- lic transport systems; efficiency in computing, industrial processes and building design; innovations in facility construction and use; fiscal, funding and investment models; and in renewable energy generation, storage and management itself. This wave has reinforced many governments in their nascent forms of action, and mobilized business leaders in ven- ture capital finance, equity funds and infrastructure investment across Europe, India, China or the United States – yielding many new companies and a net growth in jobs and flow- on in economic benefits. Yet despite numerous and clear signals of progress and advance into new and sustainable directions of development, the folklore of traditional international energy policy has it that this type of innovation is too expensive or otherwise beyond reach of the developing world. Such statements risk being read as promoting outmoded infra- structures, rather than as genuine concern for improving the livelihood of the poor. Why should the developing world not avail itself of locally sourced, unlimited, non-polluting and income generating means of indigenous renewable energy generation – rather than fall into the trap of antiquated models of electricity supply that are cheap only because their external costs have been discounted, they are heavily subsidised, or both? A fresh generation of urban community leaders embraces new – and newly rediscovered – approaches to city planning and design, with local energy liberation in both developing and developed parts of the world in mind. Supported by experts, leading businesses and inter- national networks they move to bring about a range of related community development, production and consumption level and other economic changes of particular significance to life in cities, city regions and states. To be sure: earlier urban energy technology transitions have been dramatic, too – and none more so than the rapid, epic spread of coal and oil com- bustion that underpinned urban development as we know it, from the late eighteenth, dur- ing the nineteenth and especially throughout the twentieth centuries, yielding our present resource and climate predicaments. Over a short time span this massive, complex energy revolution spawned global electrification, the meteoric rise of motors and machines and the very age of mechanization and automation they represent, of telecommunications and petro- leum, coal and gas powered transport on the ground, across the seas and through the air. All these innovations helped boost the primacy and spread of cities, and of urban economies and their inordinately energy-draining lifestyles. The currently commencing energy transition is different. For one, a far greater level of collective consciousness underpins it: today ’s future choices seem clearer to us than what they were to observers and decision-makers one or two centuries ago. The need to change direction is more widely appreciated today than during earlier times, driven by manifest Urban Energy Transition: An Introduction 3 constraints as much as new opportunities. Our recent, fossil-fuel charged past was accom- panied by extraordinary futurist visions – the delirious genre of the cities-of-tomorrow, par- ticularly powerful during the first half of the twentieth century. Machine inspired mirages of modern things-to-come projected grand futures and dazzled champions of urban change. Yet in this very pursuit advanced civilizations stumbled into a new global reality few dared to fathom or reflect on. The implications of change did not reach public policy discourse until at least half a century after the great fossil-fuelled growth visions began to enthral, inspir- ing aspirations of ever-rising prosperity around the world. It was only in the 1970s when the global urbanization wave became too massive to ignore, and the unpleasant prospect of a sprawling, crumbling civilization started to seriously spoil the view of future horizons – the very time when the first oil supply shock hit, more than a decade after the inevitable oil decline had first been mooted by an industry insider ( Droege 2006 ). Fears over the looming climate catastrophe had been publicly expressed for a full decade longer: for instance, in the proto-Gore educational film produced by Frank Capra for Bell Labs, The Unchained Goddess (Capra and Hurtz 1958). Yet, even in these very moments of lucidity the link between the worldwide energy revolution driving progress throughout the twentieth century, the trig- gering of an unprecedented population explosion, the unfolding global urban reality and the stability of the planet ’s ecosystem had not been appreciated. Since that time, future urban development scenarios have become much more tangible, and unnervingly so. New Perspectives: Lifting the Gaze from the Ground Below This transition also differs in its philosophical and scientific outlooks, and in its very para- digms of progress. The all-consuming preoccupation with fossil and nuclear energy is rooted in the spirit of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the popular obsession with the rising science of geology, the great new frontier of that era, caricatured so succinctly by Bill Bryson in his Short History of Nearly Everything ( Bryson 2003 ). The intensive study of underground rock formations triggered a massive, mole-like pursuit of mineral mining. The