Short description:

This edited collection critically engages with an important but rarely-asked question: what is energy for? This starting point foregrounds the diverse social processes implicated in the making of energy demand and how these change over time to shape the past patterns, present dynamics and future trajectories of energy use. Through a series of innovative case studies, the book explores how energy demand is embedded in shared practices and activities within society, such as going to music festivals, cooking food, travelling for business or leisure and working in hospitals.

Demanding Energy investigates the dynamics of energy demand in organisations and everyday life, and demonstrates how crucial an understanding of spatiality and temporality is in order to grasp the relationship between energy demand and everyday practices.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of energy, climate change, transport, sustainability andsociologies and geographies of consumption and environment.

Chapters 1 and 15 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Long description:

This edited collection critically engages with an important but rarely-asked question: what is energy for? This starting point foregrounds the diverse social processes implicated in the making of energy demand and how these change over time to shape the past patterns, present dynamics and future trajectories of energy use. Through a series of innovative case studies, the book explores how energy demand is embedded in shared practices and activities within society, such as going to music festivals, cooking food, travelling for business or leisure and working in hospitals.

Demanding Energy investigates the dynamics of energy demand in organisations and everyday life, and demonstrates how an understanding of spatiality and temporality is crucial for grasping the relationship between energy demand and everyday practices. This collection will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of energy, climate change, transport, sustainability and sociologies andgeographies of consumption and environment.

Chapters 1 and 15 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Table of Contents:

1. Demanding Energy: An Introduction.- Part 1 - Making Connections.- 2.Demanding Connectivity, Demanding Charging: The Co-production of Mobile Communication Between Electrical and Digital Infrastructures.- 3. Constructing Normality Through Material and Social Lock-in: The Dynamics of Energy Consumption Among Geneva?s More Affluent Households.- 4. Understanding Temporariness Beyond the Temporal: Greenfield and Urban Music Festivals and their Energy Use Implications.- Part 2 ? Unpacking Meanings.- 5. Towards a ?Meaning?-ful Analysis of the Temporalities of Mobility Practices: Implications for Sustainability.- 6. Being at Home Today: Inhabitance Practices and the Transformation and Blurring of French Domestic Living Spaces.- Part 3 - Situating Agency.- 7. The Car as a Safety-net: Narrative Accounts of the Role of Energy Intensive Transport in Conditions of Housing and Employment Uncertainty.- 8. The Tenuous and Complex Relationship Between Flexible Working Practices and Travel Demand Reduction.- 9. Leisure Travel and the Time of Later Life.- Part 4 - Tracing Trajectories.- 10. Changing Eating Practices in France and Great Britain: Evidence from Time Use Data and Implications for Direct Energy Demand.- 11. Paths, Projects and Careers of Domestic Practice: Exploring Dynamics of Demand over Biographical Time.- 12. Demanding Business Travel: The Evolution of the Timespaces of Business Practice.- Part 5 - Shifting Rhythms.- 13. Demand Side Flexibility and Responsiveness: Moving Demand in Time Through Technology.- 14. Reducing Demand for Energy in Hospitals: Opportunities for and Limits to Temporal Coordination.- Part 6 ? Researching Demand.- 15. Identifying Research Strategies and Methodological Priorities for the Study of Demanding Energy