Since the late 1960s, landscape architects such as Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn and Michael Hough, as well as urban planners such as Ralph Knowles, Vladimir Matus and Dean Hawkes, have increasingly become aware of the urban dimension of energy. Hough, for instance, pioneered ‘an ecological view that encompasses the total urban landscape’. In his analysis, buildings are understood within a systematic relationship to the city and its nature. The dominant perspective of the self-sufficient building was abandoned in favour of a more cooperative view of the city. The consciously designed urban space was seen as an important means for enabling energy savings. Vladimir Matus, on the other hand, was concerned with the complex connection between indoor and outdoor environmental conditions and the need to carefully design this connection through the ‘manipulation of ambient energy’.

In this context, the notion of an energy landscape emerges as a fundamentally significant concept for the development of an urban and multi-scalar understanding of energy in architecture. Working from a discourse history of the disciplines mentioned, it is possible to outline an archaeology of the notion of energy landscape – one that envisions the future decarbonisation of cities and their hinterlands. This article highlights two key aspects derived from earlier inquiries: first, urban ecologies, which are shaped both by energy commons and energy infrastructures, and second, energy hinterlands as a sine qua non of city centres. With regard to future energy landscapes (that extend beyond the energy infrastructure paradigm), these two aspects must be taken into careful consideration.

Modern Energy Infrastructures

The distribution of energy in the modern city has always been closely intertwined with the development of infrastructures. Modern cities – as they emerged over the course of the twentieth century – represent patterns of enormous densification while at the same time depending on the energy sources of a globalised hinterland. Architects such as Tony Garnier and Antonio Sant’Elia envisaged the architecture and urban layout of the infrastructure-dependent city as early as the beginning of the century. In Garnier’s cité industrielle, the interplay between the city and its energy hinterland is illustrated by dams and power stations. Today’s cities use ‘more than two-thirds … of the technical primary energy … while covering less than two percent of the terrestrial planetary surface’.

The notion of energy infrastructures refers mainly to ‘oil-derived urban environments’ (Carola Hein) and the legacy of ‘carbon modernity’ (Elisa Iturbe). Such infrastructures are often important promotors of ‘explosive rates of urbanisation’, which are closely linked to the consuming areas of transportation and architecture, and ‘much of what is modern in the modern city is … the by-product of oil’. The energy hinterland as the resource basis of the modern city comprises ‘refineries, gas plants, petrochemical plants, export terminals’, as well as ‘oil-producing regions’ (such as Baku, Houston, Luanda, Murmansk and Odessa), ‘hubs of corporate power’ (such as Irving, Texas) and cities that are the ‘products of vast oil wealth’ (such as Dubai). Taking these energy hinterlands into account, architecture is always part of a superordinate hierarchy of city and world, and the energy infrastructures comprise global (transnational), regional (nation-wide), local (city-wide) and micro-scale (cross-building) dimensions.

However, between 1969 and 1971, the new significance of ecology for architecture and urban design became apparent, with energy emerging as one of the linchpins of the ecological rationale. In the design disciplines, these three years saw the release of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969) and Peter Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (1971). McHarg promoted a new understanding of an ‘ecology of the city’, grounded in interdisciplinary scientific knowledge. As Lewis Mumford wrote in the introduction to McHarg’s book, ‘The name of this effort, in so far as it draws upon science, is “ecology,” a body of knowledge that brings together so many aspects of nature that it necessarily came late upon the scene’. Banham on the other hand explored the human-made ecologies of Los Angeles, drawing on the notion of ‘urban ecology’ which had been developed earlier on by the Chicago School of Sociology. In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham describes the vast, sprawling urban landscape of the Californian metropolitan area in terms of specific ecologies (rather than neighbourhoods), which developed over time in response to their natural and infrastructural features. These publications are exemplary of two schools of thought in urban ecology that, taken together, can lead to a new way of infrastructural thinking in architecture, based on the idea of future energy landscapes.

Urban Ecologies in Ethnographic Research

The 1970s saw the publication of several books that highlighted the complexities and contradictions of urban ecologies in major American cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and New York – while emphasising the critical role of urban infrastructures in architecture and urban development. These studies provided an innovative framework for analysing energy in cities, adopting an almost ethnographic approach. Not surprisingly, the writings of architectural critics were geared toward an ‘empirical urban sociology’ as founded by Jane Adams, Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and John Dewey at the beginning of the twentieth century to understand the social transformation of these rapidly growing cities. Having internalised the pictorial turn of 1960s, these critics fused research in urban ecology with Kevin Lynch’s concept of the imageability of the city. In Delirious New York, for example, Rem Koolhaas presents the artificial landscapes of the Downtown Athletic Club as just another synthetic layer, and nature no longer stands in opposition to the city, but merely expands the possibilities of the skyscraper: ‘nature is now resurrected inside the Skyscraper as merely one of its infinite layers, a technical service that sustains and refreshes the Metropolitanites in their exhausting existence. The Skyscraper has transformed Nature into Super-Nature.’

Alvin Boyarsky, Banham, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and eventually Koolhaas provided new insights into urban ecologies from an architectural perspective. Their phenomenological readings of the American city bristle with coruscating humour, sarcasm and the desire to explore the modern city as a new cabinet of wonders. By showcasing the pictorial universe of urban landscapes, they revealed both the sublimity and the inadequacy of modern energy infrastructures. In simultaneously bringing the anonymous urban infrastructures and the magnificent skyscrapers by famous architects into focus, the blueprint for a specific type of urban narrative was created, which in turn shaped a new type of energy ecology.

In ‘Chicago à la carte: The City as an Energy System’, Alvin Boyarsky articulated a sense of the human-made, multi-layered topographies of urban energy landscapes.‘The energy system of expressways, railway, industrial and institutional land use produce characteristic residual rectangular residential pockets,’ he wrote, thus forming the infrastructural blueprint of urban development. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chicago already ‘possessed the basic hardware and Dionysian qualities’ of the futurist visions of Marinetti, Sant’Elia and Boccioni; Boyarsky’s descriptions are reminiscent of Umberto Boccioni’s painting The City Rises from 1910. If one views the architecture of Chicago through the lens of these visions, the city emerges as a single interconnected infrastructure – ‘the city as a building’ – with urban landscapes comprising spatial layers that are underground, on the surface, and in the air. Boyarsky opened up a three-dimensional account of energy landscapes, emphasising the ‘complexity of Chicago’s multilayered infrastructure’. The ‘multi-layered section’ represents in essence the spatial and temporal dimensions of Chicago’s energy landscape:

Frayed edges and entrails reveal the anatomy of its multi-layered section which, plunging storeys deep into the earth, has been further tuned in recent decades by lower level expressways gathering up traffic and service vehicles, and a subway system, complete with accessible sewers, water supply, electric cables, communication lines, threaded through an already complex matrix, giving access to public and commercial buildings, and eventually to the commuting railway stations and massive underground parking facilities.

‘The City as an Energy System’ positions infrastructures as the main drivers and victims of rapid modernisation. In Boyarsky’s account, Chicago is portrayed as ‘a masterpiece of junk culture’. Infrastructure, as a critical installation of modern society, is threatened by obsolescence at any given moment, subject to ‘its own mechanistic cycle of growth, redundancy and replacement, quite different from typical European experience which, at its best, represents an uninterrupted history in stone.’

Using postcards as representational media, Boyarsky introduced an anonymous history of large technological systems as the basis of urban history. In contrast, Banham emphasised the urban palimpsest generated by the perception of infrastructure and topography. His four ecologies – Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id and Autopia – depict distinct socio-spatial fabrics and architectural styles related to specific lifestyles on the coast, in the hills, on the city’s plains, and along the vast highway network. Banham was intrigued by LA’s infrastructures and their ability to simultaneously generate architectural form and nature. Early railway lines led to the urbanisation of the hills and mountains, but the specific LA type of infrastructure can only be explained, he argued, by the way the ‘views over the sea’ are constructed. In his book, Banham connects the culture of automobility with the individual’s perception of the environment. In the double-page spread that forms part of the book’s prelude, he writes, ‘LA has beautiful (if man-made) sunsets.’ The statement concludes a short series of perceptions of the city. The infrastructure of the territory is also framed as an infrastructure of perception. The vanishing point of this narrative about nature and infrastructure is always the sea and the sunset, which must primarily be experienced. With this in mind, Banham introduced the notion of ecology by emphasising the human-made quality of the sunset, accessed through the infrastructure of Sunset Boulevard. The built environment is mirrored by the psychological dispositions of the inhabitants, and vice versa. The psychology of the inhabitants offers a vast reservoir of imagination, one that architects interested in new urban ecologies must tap into.

The dual reading of the urban landscape as both an outer and inner-world experience was the leading approach of the phenomenologists of the big city of the 1970s. It is from this intellectual heritage that the contours of what I would term ‘energy ecology’ emerge. Explorations of energy ecologies reveal the interplay not only between technical infrastructures and patterns of urbanisation, but also between urban nature and human-made structures. Similar to Banham’s ‘four ecologies’, energy ecologies create epistemic entities that transcend the conventional political and natural units of the city. In the narratives and images of Boyarsky, Banham and Koolhaas, ecologies emerge not least as visual entities, mediated and shaped through infrastructures of perception.

Urban Ecologies in Scientific Research

In Design with Nature, Ian McHarg emphasised the ‘public good’ quality of natural forces and urban landscapes. Common pool resources offer alternatives to the infrastructural thinking of modernity by distinguishing a natural ‘typology of goods’ that are shared. These goods are in turn linked to the concept of the commons, which has been widespread in Europe for centuries, serving as an important precursor to the new types of energy commons we see today.

Over the course of twentieth century, the commons progressively morphed into public parks and recreational areas within (growing) cities. Their enclosed, insular nature made urban commons important spaces within the city where urban nature predominates. Large green spaces also function as important microclimatic islands, serving as a reservoir for pleasant thermal conditions. Besides offering ‘thermal diversity’, they also exemplify the biodiversity of urban habitats. Ian Laurie describes urban commons in Wimbledon (London), Southampton and Clifton (Bristol) as ‘representative of many of the best qualities that these forms of open space create. All are situated … in comparatively sheltered climates within the large city “heat envelope”, and they are not seriously affected by industrial pollution’. The commons’ microclimates – serving as common pool resources – however, remain dependent on effective environmental management.

McHarg distinguished ‘the ecological method’ from conventional approaches to the design of public spaces in the city. ‘The ecological method would suggest that the lands reserved for open space in the metropolitan region be derived from natural-process lands, intrinsically suitable for “green” purposes: that is the place of nature in the metropolis.’ According to McHarg, ‘the problem of determining the form of metropolitan growth and open space’ is critical. ‘The hypothesis … is that the distribution of open space must respond to natural process.’ In a similar vein, Michael Hough and Anne Whiston Spirn criticised the unproductive nature of the city’s green spaces, which results from a one-dimensional focus on recreation. As argued by Hough, ‘leisure has become the prime function of urban parks, while other environmental and productive functions that the city’s land resources must serve have largely been forgotten.’ Spirn called for a new epistemological framework, one that transcends the mere greening of the inner cities. Rather than focusing on control or defence, she introduced the idea of making natural processes in cities productive.

The city must be recognised as part of nature and designed accordingly. The city, the suburbs, and the countryside must be viewed as a single, evolving system within nature, as must every individual park and building within that larger whole. The social value of nature must be recognised and its power harnessed, rather than resisted. Nature in the city must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than ignored or subdued.

Both Spirn and Hough analysed the role of various natural parameters such as climate, soil, water, plants, wildlife and agricultural management, in the urban landscapes. Their 1984 books provide a comprehensive reception (and rare synthesis) of contemporary urban climate research, while also setting key trends by integrating scientific ecological research. A comparison of the structure of Spirn’s and Hough’s books reveals the striking parallels between their approaches and subjects, and both publications ultimately aim to develop new methodological approaches to urban nature as commons.

In contrast to conventional energy infrastructure, the notion of the commons proved to be accessible to low-tech forms of environmental management. Rather than being technological entities, energy commons rely on the architecturalisation of vegetation, topography, the sun and wind. While energy infrastructures have historically been tied to the remote extraction of carbon-based energy sources, energy based on the commons is centred around the local use of natural forces present within cities. An early urban example of decentralising energy provision can be found in the Solar Collectors and the Windmill, built in 1976 in the Lower East Side of New York (519 East 11th Street). These installations represent a new form of bottom-up activism towards decentralising the heat and electricity network of a large city like New York. The possibility of decentralising the network empowered the residents to find their own solutions for the energy they needed. While ‘the oil and gas industry’ generates ‘a landscape of lines, axes, nodes, points, blocks, and flows’, the city, viewed through the lens of the commons, primarily emphasises the natural components, be it the urban landscape or the local urban climate.

Bridging the Gap: Rethinking Centre-Hinterland Relations

The emergence of regional planning played a decisive role in connecting the city with its hinterland. In this context, the work of Patrick Geddes was pivotal in reconnecting the different scales of the urban landscape. With the first publication of what he termed his ‘valley sections’ in 1909, he introduced a proto-ecological ‘graphic tool’ for planning urban landscapes. As McHarg emphasised 60 years later, the hinterland of cities is not only the area where fossil fuels are extracted and processed, but also where clean air is to be found; a cool air supply system can be based on both technological and natural resources. McHarg proposed the establishment of ‘airsheds’ – ten to fifteen miles in length – in order to discharge the polluted and heated air from large cities. These airsheds ‘would create fingers of open space penetrating from the rural hinterland, radially into the city’ and would have a fundamental impact on the environmental conditions of a city. By highlighting natural forces as energy sources, his approach aimed at closing a fundamental research gap. McHarg differentiated three types of lands:

[T]he hinterland of a city is the source of the clean air that replaces the pollutants discharged by the city. The rural hinterland also contributes to a more temperate summer climate. Can we use this information to discriminate between lands that should remain in their natural condition, lands that are permissive to certain uses but not to others and those lands that are most tolerant to urbanisation – free from danger, undamaging to other values?

The Italian architectural groups Superstudio and Archizoom both investigated the logic of an unbroken continuity of landscapes through innovative design explorations. Their main goal was to transcend the dichotomy between the city and the country and instead foreground the productive dimension of territories. As Charles Waldheim suggests, this approach can be described as ‘an urbanism of continuous mobility, fluidity, and flux … without qualities, a representation of the ‘degree-zero’ conditions for urbanisation’ and ‘a deliberately ‘nonfigurative’ urbanism’. In the Archizoom concept of the Non-Stop City, the interconnection between countryside and city was expanded into an uninterrupted development of landscapes in general. Superstudio, on the other hand, developed supranational infrastructures – or ‘supersurfaces’ – to foster an understanding for media practices in urban landscapes. Based on the analysis of new technological possibilities for communication and the human senses, they launched an infrastructural thinking that also had implications for the conception of microclimates.

Playing with ‘bigness’ and new megastructures, Superstudio made a playful proposal in 1972 for the reinterpretation of a famous bridge. A cubic forest was superimposed onto a postcard depicting San Francisco Bay, with the cube placed exactly in the middle section of the Golden Gate Bridge. With its rigid geometry, the artificial forest oscillates between architecture and landscape architecture. Conceptually, Superstudio’s proposal evokes Marcel Duchamp’s work L.H.O.O.Q. from 1919, in which the artist superimposed a moustache onto a postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Upon closer inspection, however, the dadaist gesture reveals itself as a trenchant commentary on the urban-climatic conditions of the site, which makes use of the exceptional microclimates. In its interplay with the city’s summer fogs, the forest cube goes beyond the mere gesture of megastructure, instead recalling Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s 1972 illustrations of closed systems, such as the Small Tropical Forest in an Arctic Landscape. The pronounced fog formation in San Francisco Bay would turn the forest cube into a rainforest (at low temperatures), leading to an enhanced experience of this bioclimatic phenomenon. It would architecturally transform under urban climatic premises and the bridge would become a means of accessing this microclimatic sensation.

Historically, the bridge has served as an architectural leitmotif in the context of emerging environmental awareness in the design disciplines. A bridge floats as a structure above the landscape and is only connected to it at certain points. The convergence of structural and infrastructural requirements is taken to the extreme in the projects of Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti.In the case of the University of Calabria, built near Cosenza between 1978 and 1980, a bridge literally acts as the infrastructural backbone providing public access to the adjoining buildings, which house teaching and research spaces along with halls of residence. In a 1976 housing project for Cefalù, near Palermo, eight double buildings span a valley, incorporating not only residential units but also other community facilities, including parks and car-parking spaces that were planned on the roofs. In view of the semantic indeterminacy of peri-urbanised environments, the potential of (bridging) infrastructures must be considered for their defining qualities. By integrating structure, infrastructure and landscape, new strategies of environmental design have emerged.

The public baths complex in Bellinzona, Switzerland, designed by Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat-Roncati and Ivo Trümpy (1967–70), is notable for its seamless integration of a public pathway (infrastructure), which is accessible to everyone, and the baths’ facilities, including changing rooms (architecture). In the valley, which was still largely undeveloped at the time, the bridge formed a connection between the Ticino River and the city of Bellinzona and spanned the new express road. The river’s course and the green belt were tied together with the bridge-like infrastructure. The six-metre-high passageway cuts across the valley and creates a new kind of connection, while providing access to the baths. The steel structure was clad with thermolux panels for the walls; wooden lattices were used for the floors. The changing rooms of the baths are suspended from the concrete passageway, and the water basins and sprawling lawn connect to the bridge structure.

Architectural historian Margaret Crawford emphasised the novelty associated with such projects that promoted unprecedented interactions between infrastructure and landscape. ‘Supported by a sustainable energy grid that can accommodate and distribute both large- and small-scale energy sources, this would be a green environment, with energy and transportation infrastructures, dwellings and workplaces, agricultural and natural spaces interwoven in new and still to be imagined combinations.’

Conclusion: Future Energy Landscapes

Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw describe a ‘re-naturing [of] urban theory’, that was reignited from the late 1960s onwards in the works of McHarg, Hough and Spirn as part of an emerging ecological urbanism. ‘While late-nineteenth-century urban perspectives were acutely sensitive to the ecological imperatives of urbanisation, these considerations disappeared almost completely in the decades that followed (with the exception of a thoroughly “de-natured” Chicago School of Urban Social Ecology).’ In terms of a history of theory, however, the re-naturalisation of the city has also led to an urbanisation of the concept of nature and thus to a transformation of what nature is understood to be, as the publications of Boyarsky, Banham and Koolhaas show – ‘the Skyscraper has transformed Nature into Super-Nature’. Accordingly, Matthew Gandy emphasises that ‘the design, use, and meaning of urban space involve the transformation of nature into a new synthesis’.

Referring to the writings of Anne Whiston Spirn, historian of technology Thomas Hughes speaks of the ‘overlapping natural and human-built systems found in cities’. Such a synthesis in the tension between nature and artefact was the central theoretical challenge faced by an urban design practice that was newly oriented towards ecological forms of modernisation. Energy ecologies, as discussed above, do not simply follow evolved political structures of the city; instead, they highlight the need to consider fundamental conceptual re-orderings within the urban landscape. Energy ecologies indicate conceptual shifts, paving the way for tomorrow’s energy transition. In this respect, they are to be understood as an important contribution to a new type of energy landscape of the future.