ABSTRACT
Urban energy futures are just one part of the processes by which cities manage their infrastructure investments. The technologies in earlier chapters provide powerful tools for inserting a more integrated approach to energy use into a city’s future. But cities are complex systems in a formal sense. They have sometimes been thought of as ‘space machines’ in the sense that they occupy or ‘consume’ the land they cover on the map, and in doing so, produce the goods and services the rest of the economy requires. For those inside the city providing those goods and services or supporting that production, it is a place to live, work and find recreation. This chapter briefly reviews the way in which cities go about planning infrastructure, principally the master planning process.
