Smart Energy Academy: the missing link in the energy transition?

Following a successful second edition, the Smart Energy Academy will be back once again in 2018.

A different location, different accents but the same primary goal: an intensive crash course in the subject of energy.

This year, the focus is squarely on the role of energy in buildings and construction. And in true Flux50 style, the location is also a sign of this: it will be taking place on the 23rd floor of World Trade Centre I in Brussels as part of the exhibition and work programme ‘You Are Here’. The exhibition itself is part of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam ‘2018-2020 The Missing Link’.

We caught up with co-curator and co-founder of the Architecture Workroom Brussels, Joachim Declerck, for a quick Q&A session:

‘What do you believe the missing link is in energy transition?’

I’d be all too happy to answer that considering the title of our exhibition. But I don’t want to do it without recognising the fundamental challenge that we are facing today. I believe in the search for and meaning behind the words ‘missing link’. But a much more pressing question is which capacity and social movement there is today to bridge it, or to ‘hack’ the missing link.

Today, we see two things happening at once.

- There is a widespread sense of urgency around the climate. The end measurement and horizon was set with the signing of the Paris Climate Accord, with Sustainable Development Goals, and with equally ambitious and necessary national and regional goals.

- At the same time, the number of experiments is multiplying, as are the living labs in which citizens, policymakers and industry are investing in the social change process. And the transition race still doesn’t appear to have hit its stride: between these major goals and the change that we are making today, there is a huge hole, a missing link. In an optimistic scenario, this tempo will only see the 2050 goals for renewable energy by 2250. Which is two centuries too late.

The reason this is going so slowly and is difficult is because we can’t achieve these and other goals without fundamentally rethinking and adapting our ways of living, working and moving.

The future is practice.This is about how we can be collectively right and develop a critical mass of force for change.

The first and most important question is therefore which way we can go and want to go: do we run the race and therefore develop real strategies for changing more quickly with citizens, companies and government together? Or is the task before us so inconceivable and demanding that are we going too slowly and will to have to turn our backs on it? For example, the self-declared ‘best American president ever’ has made that second scenario his political story: he offers comfort to a segment of the population by publicly stating that we can put aside the need for change. In this sense, we are standing on the split and it can go in either of two directions: speed up towards a snowball effect, or being literally and figuratively met with disaster, before falling dry and drowning because the task asks too much of us.

‘How do we prevent this implosion of the climate and energy transitions?’

Are we not being a little bit too preoccupied with being right instead of acting collectively? There is already a great deal of energy going towards the formulation and negotiation of major agreements and intentions, and to experiments. On this basis, we are now sitting in a situation where a lot of policymakers and experts are suggesting that it’s clear what needs to happen, while at the same time stating that it isn’t happening. Even as experts, we need to shift our sights: being right about what needs to happen is too easy, because it is clearly not enough to activate all social actors and bring the transition up to speed.

That also means that covering every new and existing building with solar panels will not be enough. We need to work more fundamentally and design our homes and buildings differently so that their interior design and orientation make maximum and direct use of the heat from the sun.

We need to dedicate all our energy towards answering the questions of ‘how’: together with social actors, we need to develop methods and transformation programmes that don’t all lead to a single exception experiment at once, but that lead to a snowball effect. By doing so, we will not just have a Paris Climate Accord, but also a ‘Path to Paris’: that way we can all be collectively correct.

That means that the safe position of the intelligent, individual view of how society needs to change needs to be changed for a high-risk entrepreneurial position in which experts and non-experts in society build on this change.

‘But aren’t there enough organisations and players who are striving for these collective realisations?’

There are even more. And if I hear about what Flux50 is doing, I can only encourage it and hold out my hand to collaborate. But I do wonder aloud whether an industrial collective will be strong enough to realise this energy transition. Are citizens, citizen initiatives, local governments and other social players involved enough in this? Don’t we need them just as much?

Within diverse social sectors and segments, I see experiments and platforms merging, often alongside each other, yet completely separate to each other. Each of these platforms is ambitions and fragile. They all work on exceptional demonstration projects, pilots and roadmaps. But we must admit that these experiments are often ‘the exceptions that prove the rule’: the lean towards renewables is important, but at the same time, it’s still a niche and not yet dominant. The light is often extinguished after the experiment because either replicability is difficult or simply not thought of in advance.

Just note, I don’t necessarily have to be right about this. This is about how we can be collectively right and develop a critical mass of force for change. With our collective, the non-profit think-and-act-tank Architecture Workroom Brussels, we are convinced that we can only do that by adding up the insights and breakthroughs of different platforms and initiators, to subsequently draft and launch even better structured change programmes together.

That’s why the Smart Energy Academy is also so welcome here, in what we have christened the ‘World Transformation Centre’. It’s a social workplace at the service of the collective transformation programme. The future is practice.

‘You’ve brought up a great many points that Flux50 and its members are sensitive about. As an architect, what do you see that others don’t see?’

Nothing on its own of course. But as an architect and town planner, I think from a different perspective, name from the possibilities and power for spatial transformation. In the whole climate project, for me, space is the underlying dimension. It is the crucial social denominator between the various climate problems. It is the limitation that our finite planet gives us, but it is also the glue and the integrating work method for what comes next.

Our overconsumption of space and raw materials is at the roots of the climate problem and is probably also at the roots of the solution. Our social and industrial (r)evolutions have brought new questions with them. And we have adapted our living environments to them. For example, look at our homes and you’ll see how the division of living spaces has evolved with every ‘energy change’. From homes organised around the fireplace, around the ‘stove’, to eventually – during the short period of the fossil era – heating any room using central heating. In this phase, it doesn’t matter, because we can bring heat and energy to every room. Energy actually no longer determines how we divide or use the space available to us. Thanks to – or at the cost of – fossil fuels, we have been able to ignore this issue of space and energy for a long time.

But we can’t do that any longer: renewable energy demands that we reconsider the division of our homes and residences. That also means that covering every new and existing building with solar panels will not be enough. That’s just looking for places to produce renewable energy on buildings that are not energy efficient themselves.

We need to work more fundamentally and design our homes and buildings differently so that their interior design and orientation make maximum and direct use of the heat from the sun. Only by doing so will we reduce the energy demand from our housing, which is an absolute must and a factor in all energy agreements that have already been made. This logic applies on the scale of the building, but also the neighbourhood, the city and the landscape: renewable energy demands different spatial configurations

The (re)design of our space is therefore just a work method: no energy transition without spatial transformation, from the scale of the house to the neighbourhood to the urban region. And that design is not served by continuing to talk about what should be done, because we have already done that more than enough. Space and spatial transformation are – I believe – the mechanism by which we will realise the goals we stand for.

‘Space and spatial transformation are the mechanism for realising goals sounds good. Can you explain exactly what you mean?’

The understanding of space has several dimensions. You can look at it from the perspective of scale: your house, your street, your neighbourhood, your town or suburb, your city, your country, and the list goes on. Compare it with those Russian matryoshka dolls: for every doll and on every scale, we will need to ‘make place’ for the energy transition, and with the involved actors, reconfigure the space to being able to realise the large transition goals.

Do we run the race and therefore develop real strategies for changing more quickly with citizens, companies and government together?Or is the task before us so inconceivable and demanding that are we going too slowly and will to have to turn our backs on it?

Back to the building: the elevator shaft in the middle of an apartment building is seen as efficient today, but to harvest the most from renewable energy, it’s more logical that the south side has deeper apartments, with apartments that aren’t as deep on the north side. As such, in a completely different manner, it’s more energy efficient to move the elevator shaft to the north. Another example: how do we turn the insulative layer in a renovation into an extra liveable space, as the French architects Lacaton – Vassal have already been doing?

Now think about how to apply these concepts to the neighbourhood and the city itself. And don’t stop there: if you ask me, we will have to go to the level of the Belgium-Dutch delta.

‘The thought of space as a dimension for reorganisation is especially refreshing. However, thinking of energy on different scales is not completely new to Flux50 members. What do architects and spatial planners bring to the table, apart from this view of space?’

If you limit design practices, our area of expertise, to the best possible answer to questions that are formulated by others, you’ll find very limited value in architects and planners. Designers have the ability to look ahead, not into emptiness, but from and for concrete places, and have the expertise to join and integrate different spatial questions in a project or strategy that is able to be broadly implemented.

The question of (energy) transition is very complex – as I said at the beginning. For many people, it is frighteningly unclear. So, there is a challenge in the understanding and breaking up of that unmeasurable demand for concrete, manageable projects – projects that, in turn, are scalable or can be multiplied. That is only possible – and is best taking place – in close collaboration with the players who are also problem-owners, and who want to help realise the change. From that design, it’s possible to build coalitions. And finally, design makes it possible to imagine, and to envision what the future could be. We are not just talking about what should change; we are proposing the future as we might want it to be.
Why don’t we put design-thinking, a management-understanding that industrialists are promoting, in as well? And allow design-thinking to be just one of the strong skills used by architects and spatial planners. By visualising future possibilities, you can work away complexity and the fear linked to it.

‘And that is what you want to bring to this exhibition?’

That’s right. With the power of design, you can support diverse social actors, their ideas and solutions can be put on the table and tied to new transformation concepts, with the related expertise, policy and resources. And that is also what this social workspace and the supporting work has been set up for: designing the future.

For clarity, and to make sure there are no misunderstandings: architects and planners alone cannot conjure up strategies to bridge the missing link like they’re pulling rabbits from a hat. In the contrary: they bring a capacity or skill to the table of diverse players. This helps us to move from a shared problem and chance definition to a shared strategy for change, and to implement this on the ground. That is why I believe so strongly in the pooling of ideas, of people and projects. It’s required to work with the agriculturalists, energy providers, public initiatives, experts and academics, policymakers and others to leverage the spatial transformation of the social transitions that we all stand for. And to make effective transformation projects on the ground from them.

In my eyes, this interaction between spatial thinking, the collective, visualisation and acting instead of planning, that is a promising answer to the missing link. This is the only way the energy transition will go viral – with a return on the investment as a cherry on top. (Laughs)

And now, at the very end, I’ve answered your question.

In my eyes, this interaction between spatial thinking, the collective, visualisation and acting instead of planning, that is a promising answer to the missing link.