This paper reviews an idea of vital local high-street places with their walking spaces and economies founded in interfaces between neighbourhood and city (between walking and public transport/bicycle movement infrastructures). It then extends this idea to higher scales, considering interfaces between city and region, which have already been theorised as ‘mobility environments’ (Bertolini & Dijst 2003) focusing on places and modal transfer points in new regional cities of high mobility. High-streets and mobility environments are both central places and our way of describing them suggests a new definition of central places as interfaces between normative (but also technically-infrastructually supported) political spaces (neighbourhood, city and region). It also clarifies the role of scale in place theory and we will deal with this in a following paper. Here we introduce ideas of ‘modality places’ and ‘modality environments’. The ‘modality environment’ is concerned with areal and network transportation forms in whole fabrics and resulting conditions of sustainability and urbanity. Modality environments are understood in terms of transportation networks and the social and functional factors (like sustainability and urbanity) they produce. Modality environments are seen as lived environments built around movement infrastructure grids that distribute everyday urban functions. Ideally modality environments would be simple clear grids that distribute all or close to all the functions of everyday life so that a walking grid or a bicycle grid that gets adults to work, their children to school and includes shopping and recreation would be walking or bicycle modality environments. They would be expected to have high levels of direct visibility-legibility in the way urban elements present themselves to a mobile community. Modality environments would also include the central places (like high-streets or mobility environments like stations) at which people would transfer to other modality environments. We will use a notion of ‘movement culture’ to indicate the convergence of land uses and mobile communities mediated in information-rich networks. We are concerned first with how modality environments (for cycling or walking for example) may afford more sustainable lifestyles. We are concerned in addition with the ways they can be designed to include central places as zones of urbanity and vitality and as socially and culturally mixed centres. We start not with a principle of accessibility of/from nodes in an extensive space but with the idea that particular social and political territories (communities and polities) are already articulations of distinct modality environments. We demonstrate using the case of the Amsterdam metropolitan area. ... Read more

Our present economy is high-energy and demand-intensive, demand met through the use of high energy yield fossil fuels. Energy efficiency and renewable energy sources are proposed as the solution and named the ‘twin pillars’ of sustainable energy policy. Increasing energy efficiencies are expected to reduce energy demand and fossil fuel use and allow renewables to close the ‘replacement gap’. However, the simple fact is that fossil fuel use is still rising to meet increasing global demand and even when demand is stabilised, the substantial energy efficiencies achieved are not delivering the expected reductions in energy demand. The net effect is that efficiencies are gained and renewable energy use is increasing, even though the replacement of fossils is not an immediately plausible possibility. This points to the under-theorised problems in the ‘efficiency and replacement’ formula. We argue the need to pay closer attention to the ‘systemicity’ of the problem and to the technical and practical systems involved in energy demand. There are a number of detailed reasons why the ‘efficiency and replacement’ equation has become problematic (‘globality’, energy yield, ‘rebound’ and ‘momentum’ effects) and we include a short review of these and relate them to our ‘systemicity’ argument. We argue there is a need for better thinking, but also for a new primary instrument to drastically reduce energy demand and fossil fuel use. Attention should be urgently shifted from gains in energy efficiency to substantial year-over-year reductions in demand. ... Read more

Transition towards becoming Energy smart city integrating different areas of energy production, distribution and use in a community requires a spectrum of capabilities. The paper reports on findings from the EU planning project PLEEC, involving six medium sized European cities. The purpose of the paper is to describe innovation capabilities and challenges in the complex, systemic innovation journey of cities in the transition to sustainability. A case of implementing an innovative project for electrical vehicles in Eskilstuna is presented illustrating both technological potentials and innovation challenges. ... Read more

Transition of energy systems has been under-theorised. We have argued previously that energy efficiency as a strategy for fossil fuel replacement is inadequate as energy demand is not being reduced by efficiency alone. This paper is intended to elaborate further on the reasons. We require better answers to better questions about the nature of energy regimes and how they resist change. Our present-day socio-technical energy regime is a global integrated technical arrangement based on cheap high-yield energy sources (fossil fuels) with built-in ‘progressive’ social and economic directions. This ‘progressive’ change relies on cheap energy as a resource towards ever greater global integration and economic efficiency. Energy regime change will be not a tinkering at the edges but will require a dismantling of this ‘progressive’ tendency with radical retrogressive economic and social consequences. We conclude a change of our relationship with energy will require the reversal of a contingent ‘progressive’ tendency that is as old as mankind and the necessarily modest building of a new infrastructural apparatus designed to a new ‘end’, or the reversion to previous low or lower demand apparatus based on non-fossil energy sources. Both solutions would imply major social and economic changes which we will deal with in another paper. ... Read more