A Conceptual Framework to Address Collective Energy Initiatives’ Spatial Impacts at the City Level: An Ongoing Attempt

Energy is vital in sustaining human life and fostering development, yet the energy sector's significant contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change necessitate transformative changes, commonly addressed as an energy transition. As major energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters, cities play a pivotal role in such transition. Urban plans and policy mechanisms offer a means to regulate urban processes and practices, influencing energy demand and emissions patterns; however, transformation processes also involve phenomena that extend beyond the confines of urban planning practices, for instance, collective actions. Collective Energy Initiatives (CEIs) represent an emerging transformative social movement fostering the transition toward decentralized renewable energy production and consumption. The implementation of renewable energy technologies introduces spatial challenges, such as land competition and conflicting land uses, suggesting that CEIs practices may have spatial repercussions in urban areas. Yet, there is a lack of scholarly interest in the spatial impacts of CEIs. This contribution presents early findings from an ongoing literature review aimed at identifying methodological approaches to study the spatial impacts of CEIs. Drawing upon existing publications on CEIs, a conceptual framework is formulated to stimulate new trajectories in understanding the complex interplay between energy transitions, collective actions, and their spatial implications. The resulting integrative framework highlights the multifaceted nature of CEI impacts and emphasizes the importance of a nuanced understanding of both internal dynamics and external contexts to effectively address spatial concerns at the city level.