One-way street? Spatiality of communities in low carbon transitions in Scotland

Abstract

Community low carbon transitions – studies of the ways in which community is used to pursue environmental aims and objectives – are closely linked to arrangements of energy production and use. Community is used as a way to pursue particular energy agendas. Yet, as is often pointed out, the trajectory of transitions imagined, the ambitiousness of the envisioned transformation, and especially the implied community invoked within this, all remain gloriously inconsistent. Within community transitions attention increasingly focuses on the tensions emerging or smoothed over as competing agendas are brought together through capacious words and concepts: for example between so-called top-down government deployed community, and so-called bottom-up emergent community action. This paper offers one way to explain and explore these tensions, where they come from and, thus, help in understanding ways in which they may be overcome. Using the case study of an attempt to target one ‘street community’s’ environmental footprint in Scotland, the paper argues for taking an explicitly geographical and spatial lens to analyse these processes. The paper uses three forms of space—perceived space, conceived space, and lived space—to outline how three distinct but overlapping communities were spatialised. The contention of the paper is that tensions in community transitions often result from different spatial imaginaries, informing one’s approach to, and ‘common sense’ understanding of, community. In reflecting on the spatial implications different forms of community produce (and are in turn produced by), the article argues for greater appreciation of the imbrication of space, community, and energy as mutually co-constitutive.