3rd Seminar: Low Carbon Transitions: Relevant Lessons from the 1970s Crisis?

[Gavin]

Low Carbon Transitions: Relevant Lessons from the 1970s Crisis?

SURF/SPRU Workshop in the ESRC Sustainability Transitions Seminar
Series, with additional support from the Sustainable Practices
Research Group and Mistra Urban Futures
(http://sustainabilitytransitions.info/)

25 April 2012, CUBE Building, Portland Street, Manchester

Rationale
Everyone, it seems, is interested in low carbon transitions. But
haven’t we been here before? The 1970s was a period of economic,
ecological and state crisis that spawned conflict, contestation and
debate about the future direction of society, of which alternative
technologies and re-directed strategies were a critical part. Yet such
solutions remained largely at the demonstration or experimental stage
and were seen as exemplars of new technologies, lifestyles and diverse
forms of social control over what might have been an alternative socio-
technical transition in housing, infrastructure, design and cities. By
the 1980s it was clear that this space of experimentation was closed
down and the emerging logic was the dominance of neo-liberalism. In
2011 we are once again in a period of significant structural change.
But what are the similarities and differences between these periods
when thinking about low carbon transition? How might similarities
suggest deeper, fundamental mobilisations in transitions and how can
differences make us more sensitive to the context specificities of
transitions?

Purpose of the workshop
This workshop’s purpose is to create a context for thinking
reflexively and constructively about the wider lessons and insights of
the crises in the 1970s for the challenge of creating a low carbon
transition today. The workshop is aimed at practitioners and
researchers working on contemporary transitions, with a view to making
productive use of some historical perspective. To do this the
questions that the workshop is organised around are as follows:

i. What are the similarities and differences between the economic,
ecological and political crises we are facing now and those we faced
in the 1970s?
ii. How were/are ‘experimental’ responses in both periods - new
technologies, governance arrangements, patterns of consumption, modes
of financing, forms of planning etc - mobilised as responses to crises
and what problems were they seeking to address?
iii. Were/are these experimental responses seeking to produce
‘alternatives’ to dominant modes of economic activity, in forms of
urbanism and housing and also in the organisation of energy
infrastructures and technologies?
iv. If so, in what ways did/do these new ideas, responses and
alternatives challenge, transform or even reinforce the pre-existing
regime and modes of organisation?
v. What are the critical insights, limits and opportunities, societal
lessons of a comparison of the relations between alternative and the
dominant mode of organisation for current concerns about a systemic
low carbon transition?

Style of Workshop
The workshop will be highly interactive. Andy Beckett author of When
the Lights went out: Britain in the Seventies will reflect on the
contemporary relevance of his book. Then a pair of researchers will
reflect on the questions above through the lenses of economic
development, green urbanism, architecture and housing, energy
technologies and infrastructures. There will be plenty of time for
audience involvement through questions and discussion. We are pleased
that our speakers also include Fred Steward and Tim Jenkins, Patsy
Healey and Aidan While, Pat Borer and Jenny Pickerill, Dave Elliott
and Joanne Wade.

Booking:
If you are interested in booking a place on the workshop please email
Vicky Simpson at v.si...@salford.ac.uk