2025 Urbanism Lecture Series | UNWORLDING ENERGY
Please join us for a lecture series co-presented by the SMarchS Urbanism program and the LCAU. RSVP HERE.
UNWORLDING ENERGY seeks to ask how might the sense of urgency regarding the climate crisis contribute to a radical reform, not only of petro energy systems but also of the long histories of socio-environmental violence that have sustained them? Put another way, we are interested in the unmaking of inherited energy-worlds toward more just ways of world making. The issue of “energy transition” begs then the question of which theories of change are called upon in rethinking energy and repairing worlds. This urgency parallels broader calls to dismantle entrenched structures and systems, embracing collapse, entropy, and acts of undoing rather than repair, which is often complicit with the very systems it seeks to fix. These conditions ,and the voices and practices that are presenting in this lecture series, provide an initial context for a critical and speculative examination of the relations between climate, crisis, energy, transition, growth, and sufficiency. Such material accounts of energy systems invite a systemic consideration that is always situated in specific places, grounded in real peoples’ lives and labors. This process of unmaking is not an end but an opening, revealing new possibilities coiled in the ruins of what has been, pushing us toward a reimagining of worlds built on justice and sufficiency.
See lecture dates and details below. All lectures are open to the public.
February 24th | Cara Daggett | ON WASTING ENERGY
Associate Professor, Political Science, Virginia Tech
Watch Cara's lecture via Vimeo here.
This talk will meditate on what it means to waste energy, as a distinct phenomenon from waste as a material and spatial arrangement. In discard studies, waste often refers to material objects or bodies and how they relate to power. A waste of energy, however, points to something different - a relation more temporal than spatial. The close relationship between energy and waste becomes clear when looking at energy as a historical construction, rather than a scientific or natural term. Energy is not a material thing, but an epistemology, a set of calculations for understanding change in the world. The science of energy emerged in the 19th century through efforts to understand how steam engines worked, as they were highly inefficient – one might even say, wasteful. Waste came to be defined against an imperial culture of productivism, where work and waste were treated as universal categories, but were administered through gendered and racialized regimes. The science of energy also helped to usher in the notion that nature itself tended toward wast(ing) from the perspective of productive work. Waste remains central to how people think about the problem of energy today. Reducing energy waste, through the pursuit of efficiency, is often described as a central pillar of a low-carbon energy transition. However, this history of energy and waste suggests that a focus on waste can be unhelpful, and even insidious, in the pursuit of energy justice. The talk will start by exploring what waste means in the history of energy and entropy. Using this history, I will propose four different meanings of wasting energy, and the institutions that each proposes for solving the problem of waste. And finally, I will suggest a different politics of wasting energy.
March 5th | Marina Otero Verzier | COMPULSIVE DESIRES
Architect, Researcher, Lecturer @ Harvard GSD, Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor @ GSAPP
Watch Marina's lecture via Vimeo here.
Through scientific and technological undertakings, as well as the mundane activities of everyday life, both humans and artificial intelligences are amassing data at an unprecedented rate, with significant social and environmental consequences. While data centers are the primary focus of concern regarding the extractive practices of digital storage, archives, institutional repositories, supercomputing centers, cold storage facilities are also contributing to this relentless drive for more data, leading to what has been referred to as the "Zone of Potential Insufficiency"—a point at which the rate of data production will outpace the scalability of existing storage solutions. This looming prospect challenges the illusion of the cloud as an infinite reservoir of unaltered information preserved across time and prompts new questions: Who will decide what knowledge will be preserved? What practices of erasure and mourning will emerge as the unraveling of worlds forces humans to confront the fragility of institutions, environments and their stories?
March 17th | RVTR | BECOMING BIOMASS: Thinking Regional Futures for a Biomaterial Transition
Kathy Velikov, Geoffrey Thün, Faculty @ University of Michigan Taubman College
This talk will present regional design research as a speculative world-building project with a focus on Thün and Velikov’s recent Becoming Biomass: a project that envisions a future cooperative-managed agroforestry and biomanufacturing transformation in the Tennessee Valley region as part of the U.S. decarbonization effort. The project deploys methods of narrative and scenario building to design a multi-scalar and multisystemic regenerative future for the region and its human and nonhuman constituents.
Watch RVTR's lecture via Vimeo here.
March 31st | Nicholas Pevzner | Envisioning Post Carbon-Futures: Design and the Spatial Politics of Energy Transition
Urban Designer, Landscape Architect, Educator, University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Nicholas Pevzner is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where his research and teaching spans the topics of energy landscapes, socio-ecological systems, and climate policy. He has led studios looking at design responses to wildfire threat in Western forests, post-hurricane energy democracy in Puerto Rico, and speculative designs for energy transition. He is interested in exploring how climate policies carry implications for the physical built environment, for cultural attitudes about infrastructure, and for spatial justice. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union.
Watch Nicholas Pevzner's lecture via Vimeo here.
April 14th | Abby Spinak | In Search of Energy Democracy: Infrastructural Citizenship for a Just Transition
PhD, Lecturer @ Harvard GSD
Abby Spinak is an environmental historian and planning scholar whose work focuses on energy histories, with a particular interest in utility ownership politics and the influence of infrastructure on economic ideologies and public policy. She is completing her book tentatively titled, "Democracy Electric: Energy and Economic Citizenship in an Urbanizing America," which explores the evolution of rural electrification in the United States and its impact on capitalism and cooperative models. Abby received her PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT (2014) and has held prestigious fellowships, including at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and Rice University’s Energy Humanities program. She is currently a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches courses such as “Climate Justice” “The Idea of Environment” and “Experimental Infrastructures.”
Watch Abby Spinak's lecture via Vimeo here.
April 23rd | Kabage Karanja | Reading the Surrealities of Geothermal Power on Mt. Suswa
Architect & Co-Founding Director, Cave_bureau | Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design @ Yale School of Architecture
Kabage Karanja is a Nairobi-based architect, researcher, and educator. He studied art and architecture in the United Kingdom, where he qualified in 2011 under the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He leads the research and aesthetic direction of Cave_bureau that charts explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. This work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the postcolonial African city to confront the challenges of our contemporary rural and urban lives.
In 2022 he was an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, and has recently been appointed a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University. His work has been published widely on platforms such as e-flux, The New York Times, Wallpaper, Elle Decor, Dezeen, Archdaily, The Architect’s Newspaper, CNN, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Architectural Review.
In 2025 he will be co-curating the British Pavilion for the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale. While in 2017 he conceived and curerntly co-curates “The Anthropocene Museum” which has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, and twice at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where in 2021 Cave_bureau received a special mention for the installation “Obsidian Rain” under “Anthropocene musuem 3.0”. In 2023, he participated in the final series of “The Architects Studio” solo show, featuring cave_bureau’s compendium of work at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. More recently a section of “the Anthropocene Musuem” collection that includes the ‘mbai bronze’ has been aquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.