Emerging Techno-ecologies of Energy: Examining Digital Interventions and Engagements with Urban Infrastructure
Résumé
This chapter explores how digital technologies, processes and practices are constituting new ways of knowing urban natures and novel subjective engagements with the constant infrastructural remaking of cities. We analyse recent interventions in energy infrastructures in Bristol, a UK city where a variety of stakeholders have sought to advance greater sustainability by both increasing the city’s capacity for renewable electricity generation and improving the energy efficiency of the city’s housing stock. They have done so notably by mobilizing and managing digital and ecological flows and processes in tandem. We draw attention therefore to digital-physical material processes through which actors’ capacity to intervene in, and understanding of, the techno-ecological flows of energy systems appear to be shifting. The digital intervention enables non-human entities to be crucially entangled in these processes, forging infrastructural futures that emerge across an evolving plane of intelligibility between ecological and digital flows and human activities.