Energy communities and ordinary urban making: cross-cutting analysis from France, Germany and the United-Kingdom

Renewables development in urban areas has sparked growing interest, stemming from professionals as well as from civil society as a whole, in sharing locally generated energy. Setting out such an objective regularly relies on local energy initiatives. As the energy industry was previously aiming to be invisible in the urban world, deployment of such energy initiatives raises questions on how urban making will relate with such projects. In this thesis, we hypothesized that these local energy initiatives contribute, in their own way, to make reappear energy systems in the urban area, as well as reconfigure its organization and its operation. This research work is built on four case studies located in three countries: Germany, France, and the United-Kingdom. Chosen cases are as follows: Les Colibres, a participatory housing in Forcalquier (France), Klimakommune in Saerbeck (Germany), European project on electrical storage named Sensible in Nottingham (United-Kingdom), and collective self-consumption project Smartmagne in Marmagne (France). The aim of this work is to understand these projects' making, thus, beyond their materiality, to analyse actors and mechanisms that are at stake in the on-going action. The results of the study are threefold. First, while 'energy community' is a widely used notion in scientific literature and in national, European communications, the concept of assemblage is more relevant to characterize the energy initiatives this thesis is focused on. The object of study is at the crossover point between actors (enterprises, researchers, collectives of residents, promoters, collectivities, different groups of interests, etc.) and material and technical objects within a specific energy project: 'local and urban socio-energetic assemblages' (LU-SEA, or ASE-LU in French). Their links are not based on social nor political affinities but are generated by the further realization of the project itself. From the four case studies analysed in this thesis, it is possible to link these projects and their effects in the field of what we call the ordinary urban making. As a matter of fact, such developments, which common objective can be cast as mutualization of locally generated energy, are usually not within large development schemes. In this ordinary urban making, the project holders choose to avoid a socio-political confrontation that would be aimed at changing regulations, laws, or the making' conditions. They rather take advantage of margins and cracks left open by the ordinary urban making to advance their project and process a social and material reality out of it. Lastly, this work is a mean to discuss the convergence of the outcome of the case studies and their analysis with commons. ASE-LU and urban and/or energy commons share similar issues: legal blocking, flaws and interstices mobilisation. They shape social organizations and spatio-technical sets that challenge at least the standard legal and social structures of the energy industry on the one hand, and of the field of urban making on the other hand. (author)