Urban Energy Lecture: Building transformative capacities to accelerate the urban energy transition

Lecture by Harald Rohracher, Professor of Technology and Social Change, Linköping University
Hosted by the Urban Energy Institute
Date: 9 February
Time: 4-5pm CET
Moderator: Thomas Hoppe

Energy transitions are moving into a new phase shifting from small-scale experimentation and initiatives to the demonstration and implementation of systemic change. While this requires new forms of collaboration across all levels of governance, cities have been recognised as key actors for driving such processes and implementing change. This is not least expressed in the new EU mission-programme to reach 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. Governing this new phase of transformative change requires new capacities and capabilities at the municipal level ranging from the design and implementation of mission-oriented policies to the development of infrastructures for learning across multiple experiments and testbeds, from new forms of process-oriented monitoring of transformative change to building portfolios of different types of projects and system demonstrators. Building on experiences and examples from the Swedish strategic innovation programme Viable Cities and its initiatives for Climate-neutral Cities 2030 as well as Positive Energy Districts, this presentation will analyse the capacities needed to better deal with such challenges of urban transformative change.

About the Speaker

Harald Rohracher is Professor of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, since 2012. He has been co-founder and director of the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ), Graz, Austria (1999-2007), Joseph A. Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University (2009-10) and Simon Visiting Professor at Manchester University (2013). He is Associate Editor of the journal ‘Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions’. In his research he is interested in innovation policy, sustainability transitions and more broadly the governance of socio-technical change.