ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the broader sense of infrastructural landscapes by focusing on the embedding of energy demand in urban settings. Energy infrastructures take many different material forms. Transport infrastructures – roads, rail networks, canals, airports – and their relation to the spatial forms of urban settlement have been particularly significant in the creation of energy dependencies and growing levels of global energy demand. Energy infrastructures link and divide peoples and places in ways that create distinctive landscapes of energy circulation. In more wealthy and infrastructurally developed settings, self-provisioning can, however, also be driven by an active sense of self-reliance and resilience, an intent to be 'off-grid' and disconnected from commercial systems. In the global South local networks continue to be a feature of early-stage infrastructural developments, including local community scale electricity networks set up as part of rural electrification projects powered by solar panels.
