Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infrastructural Design Challenges in Municipal Planning Efforts Aimed at Maximizing Energy Efficiency

2007年，全球一半的人口在人类历史上首次集中在城市。到2050年，全球近90%的人口增长和60%的总能源消耗将发生在城市。气候科学家认为，在城市中，对抗人为气候变化的努力成败在先，尤其是通过城市交通网络的大规模改造。随着世界各地的市政规划者都在考虑大规模汽车出行对生态和公共健康的危害，向脱碳交通的过渡已经成为市政规划者和工程师们关注的一个重要问题。本项目旨在培养一名研究生进行基于经验的科学实地考察的方法，探讨影响城市规划工作的文化和社会效率和有效性的因素，旨在提高能源效率和优化城市基础设施周围的流动性。在芝加哥大学迈克尔·费施博士的指导下，丽贝卡·Journey将通过对节能基础设施设计的人种学研究，调查影响城市规划工作的社会和文化因素。城市规划者的任务是用节能的交通基础设施改造不断扩张的城市，他们越来越多地向北欧寻求模式。在这种背景下，丹麦首都、自诩为“生态大都市”的哥本哈根作为一个原型浮出水面。在城市层面，气候计划概述了这一雄心。气候计划是哥本哈根市政府的一项长期综合规划倡议，旨在建设世界上第一个碳中和首都，进而塑造一个可能证明有能力缓解气候问题的公民。为此，本项目将跟踪《气候计划》规定的一系列基础设施设计、开发和改造项目。通过参与式观察、多媒体文献和对城市规划者、建筑师、政策制定者和市民的人种学访谈，本研究将探讨可持续交通技术的社会文化驱动因素和经验维度。有充分的理由，流动性研究往往集中在汽车、火车和飞机上。这些研究揭示了交通网络中资源分配的不公平，以及化石燃料交通对环境和地缘政治的危害。然而，除了让碳基交通的危害变得显而易见之外，流动性研究还应该关注那些使替代方案成为日常生活中可想象和实用的方面的模式。这项研究正是通过丰富社会科学对基础设施和流动性的研究，以及对斯堪的纳维亚地区未被充分研究的区域和文化视角，来承担这一责任。

In 2007, half of the global population became concentrated in cities for the first time in human history. By 2050, nearly 90% of global population growth and 60% of aggregate energy consumption will occur in cities. Climate scientists suggest that efforts combat anthropogenic climate change will be won or lost in cities, especially through the large-scale transformation of urban transit networks. As municipal planners worldwide reckon with the ecological and public health hazards of mass automobility, a transition to decarbonized transit has emerged as a significant concern for municipal planners and engineers. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, explores what factors contribute to the cultural and social efficacy and effectiveness of municipal planning efforts aimed at improving energy efficiency and optimizing mobility around urban infrastructures. Through an ethnographic study of energy efficient infrastructure design, Rebecca Journey, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Fisch of the University of Chicago, will investigate the social and cultural factors that shape urban planning efforts. Tasked with retrofitting ever-sprawling cities with energy efficient transport infrastructure, urban planners are looking increasingly to Northern Europe for models. Within this context, the Danish capital and self-styled "eco-metropolis" of Copenhagen has surfaced as a prototype. At a municipal scale, this ambition is outlined in the Climate Plan, Copenhagen Municipality's long-range, comprehensive planning initiative to build the world's first carbon-neutral capital, and by extension, to shape a citizenry that might prove capable of mitigating climate concerns. To that end, this project will track a range of infrastructure design, development, and retrofit projects prescribed by the Climate Plan. Through participant-observation, multimedia documentation, and ethnographic interviews with city planners, architects, policymakers, and citizens, this research will investigate the sociocultural drivers and experiential dimensions of sustainable transport technology. For good reason, mobility studies have tended to focus on cars, trains and planes. Such studies have illuminated the inequitable distribution of resources in transit networks as well as the environmental and geopolitical hazards of fossil-fueled mobility. Yet in addition to rendering the harms of carbon-based transit apparent, mobility studies should attend to the modes by which alternatives become a thinkable and practical dimension of everyday life. This research takes up precisely this charge by enriching the social scientific study of infrastructure and mobility with the understudied regional and cultural perspective of Scandinavia.