2025/04/10 by Andrew Karvonen, Dieter Bruggeman, Dick Magnusson +2 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Energy and Environment Impacts #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11625-025-01676-w
openalex publication_date 2025/04/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) have rapidly emerged as a dominant policy instrument in Europe to accelerate urban climate transitions. PEDs target the district scale to optimise energy system performance through a combination of technical and social interventions. These activities are driven by an engineering logic that considers energy infrastructures to be rational, integrated, and governable. In practice, PED stakeholders engage with heterogeneous infrastructure configurations that are influenced by multiple historical, political, and social specificities. In this article, we use the notion of ‘sociotechnical dispositif’ to characterise the processes of reconstituting the heterogeneous infrastructures of three PEDs in Sweden, Belgium, and Austria. We compare and contrast processes of layering the components in each district as well as processes of orchestrating stakeholders towards shared end goals. The findings contribute to critical infrastructure studies by revealing how European policy ambitions for energy transformation collide with heterogeneous infrastructures and by identifying the situated, contingent, and emergent characteristics of reconfiguring infrastructures at the district scale. The study of layering and orchestrating also highlights opportunities for PED stakeholders to develop and practice new forms of decentralised governance within each district that have the potential to influence broader urban transformations.