Providing a global overview of experiments around the transformation of cities' electricity networks and the social struggles associated with this change, this book explores the centrality of electricity infrastructures in the urban configuration of social control, segregation, integration, resource access and poverty alleviation. Through multiple accounts from a range of global cities, this edited collection establishes an agenda that recognises the uneven, and often historical, geographies of urban electricity networks, prompting attempts to re-wire the infrastructure configurations of cities and predicating protest and resistance from residents and social movements alike. Through a robust theoretical engagement with established work around the politics of urban infrastructures, the book frames the transformation of electricity systems in the context of power and resistance across urban life, drawing links between environmental and social forms of sustainability. Such an agenda can provide both insight and inspiration in seeking to build fairer and more sustainable urban futures that bring electricity infrastructures to the fore of academic and policy attention.

’Urban studies has switched on to energy at long last. In Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid, Luque-Ayala and Silver have gathered together a dynamic group of young scholars and an exciting array of case studies from across the global urban landscape which advance our knowledge of the inequalities, infrastructures and indignations through which energy comes to matter in the urban arena. From everyday encounters with wires, meters and generators to the assembling of resistances and alternatives, the electricity grid is shown to be highly charged with political power and possibility.’ Jonathan Rutherford, LATTS, Paris Est University, France

Andrés Luque-Ayala is a Lecturer at Durham University’s Geography Department. His research examines the emergence of a local governance of energy and the interface between urban infrastructures, climate change and development modes in the global South.

Jonathan Silver is a postdoctoral research associate at Durham University’s Geography Department. His research works at the intersection of urban infrastructure, politics and socio-environmental inequality.