UNWORLDING ENERGY | 2025 URBANISM LECTURE SERIES

Please join us for a lecture series co-presented by the SMarchS Urbanism program and the LCAU

UNWORLDING ENERGY seeks to ask how might the sense of urgency regarding the climate crisis contribute to a radical reform, not only of petro energy systems but also of the long histories of socio-environmental violence that have sustained them? Put another way, we are interested in the unmaking of inherited energy-worlds toward more just ways of world making. The issue of “energy transition” begs then the question of which theories of change are called upon in rethinking energy and repairing worlds. This urgency parallels broader calls to dismantle entrenched structures and systems, embracing collapse, entropy, and acts of undoing rather than repair, which is often complicit with the very systems it seeks to fix. These conditions ,and the voices and practices that are presenting in this lecture series, provide an initial context for a critical and speculative examination of the relations between climate, crisis, energy, transition, growth, and sufficiency. Such material accounts of energy systems invite a systemic consideration that is always situated in specific places, grounded in real peoples’ lives and labors. This process of unmaking is not an end but an opening, revealing new possibilities coiled in the ruins of what has been, pushing us toward a reimagining of worlds built on justice and sufficiency.

See lecture dates and details below. All lectures are open to the public. 

Watch via Zoom here.

February 24th | Cara Daggett | On Wasting Energy

Associate Professor, Political Science, Virginia Tech

Cara Daggett is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg,Virginia and a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. Her research explores energy and ecological politics through an intersectional feminist framework. She is particularly focused upon interrogating global North attachments to productivity and intensive energy use, and more recently, on envisioning what feminist energy systems could look like. Her award-winning book, The Birth of Energy:Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, has been translated into multiple languages, as have several of her articles. As a co-editor of the Critical Energy Studies book series at MIT Press, she is helping to support the growing field of social and humanistic approaches to energy. In addition to academic research, Daggett has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around question sof energy-especially how human activities are organized and valued.

March 5th | Marina Otero Verzier |Compulsive Desires

Architect, Researcher, Lecturer @ Harvard GSD, Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor @ GSAPP

Dr. Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. At Columbia University GSAPP she leads the 'Data Mourning' clinic, an educational initiative focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe, by invitation of Dean Jaque. In 2022, Otero received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for storing data, such as the prototype Computational Compost, first presented at Tabakalera. Otero was also invited by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to participate in the development of Chile's first National Data Centers Plan, together with "Resistencia SocioAmbiental – Quilicura" and other local communities on the front lines of extractivism. Otero is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), a book on data storage and sovereignty in the AI era. The book proposes new paradigms and aesthetics for data storage, integrating architecture, preservation, and digital culture. Otero was the Head of the MA Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven from 2020-2023. From 2015 to 2022, she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Otero has curated exhibitions such as 'Wet Dreams' at Mayrit, Madrid Biennial of Design and Architecture, CentroCentro (2024), ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains’ at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023), ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and ‘After Belonging’ at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016). She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), A Matter of Data (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. Since 2023, Otero has been a member of the newly founded Architecture Advisory Committee of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) in Madrid.

March 17th | RVTR | BECOMING BIOMASS: Thinking Regional Futures for a Biomaterial Transition

Kathy Velikov, Geoffrey Thün, Faculty @ University of Michigan Taubman College

Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün are Professors of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan where Kathy serves as Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice, and Geoffrey serves U-M as Associate Vice President for Research: Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. They are founding partners in the research-based practice RVTR (www.rvtr.com). Their work operates across scales from the material to the urban, advancing environmentally, technologically, and socially focused built environments through analysis, prototyping, and visualization for architectural material assemblies and urban infrastructures. Projects engage in a systems-based approach and foreground experience and interaction alongside climate adaptation and resilience. RVTR's projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally and have received multiple awards and recognition. Thün and Velikov are authors of Infra Eco Logi Urbanism, and Velikov is editor of Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural.

March 31st | Nicholas Pevzner | Envisioning Post-Carbon Futures: Design and the Spatial Politics of Energy Transition

Urban Designer, Landscape Architect, Educator, University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Nicholas Pevzner is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where his research and teaching spans the topics of energy landscapes, socio-ecological systems, and climate policy. He has led studios looking at design responses to wildfire threat in Western forests, post-hurricane energy democracy in Puerto Rico, and speculative designs for energy transition. He is interested in exploring how climate policies carry implications for the physical built environment, for cultural attitudes about infrastructure, and for spatial justice. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union.

April 14th | Abby Spinak | In Search of Energy Democracy: Infrastructural Citizenship for a Just Transition

PhD, Lecturer, Harvard GSD

Abby Spinak is an environmental historian and planning scholar whose work focuses on energy histories, with a particular interest in utility ownership politics and the influence of infrastructure on economic ideologies and public policy. She is completing her book tentatively titled, "Democracy Electric: Energy and Economic Citizenship in an Urbanizing America," which explores the evolution of rural electrification in the United States and its impact on capitalism and cooperative models. Abby received her PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT (2014) and has held prestigious fellowships, including at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and Rice University’s Energy Humanities program. She is currently a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches courses such as “Climate Justice” “The Idea of Environment” and “Experimental Infrastructures.”

April 23rd | Cave Bureau | Kabage Karanja, Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design @ Yale School of Architecture