2. It leaves out the associated geographic transformations following the deployment of such environmental technologies—or what is referred to as externalities 3. It does not address the politics of consensus or disagreement on how to organize the world and distribute resources. 4 Although urban infrastructures reach out to geographies beyond the city, the discourse of urbanism often abstracts territorial infrastructures, severing and divesting the city from the environmental costs of urbanization. Many urban analyses leave out how infrastructures—for example, those of fossil fuel in the twentieth century—have shaped geographies. So when geography is reduced to a thin line, the territory is detached from the technological, geographic, and political attributes of infrastructure. Indeed, the mandate for “clean” urbanism, I argue, rests on the city’s capacity to divest itself of the environmental costs of urbanization while reaching out for its resources to political and geographic entities beyond city jurisdictions, what is referred to as an “externality field.” The sites and forms of such hinterlands are an out-of-sight-out-of-mind entity for the public as well as for architects, leaving out how energy (and particularly fossil fuels) shapes geographies. Should the transition to a renewable energy regime not be accompanied by a reflection on the geographies upon which the current regime rests, and by an inquiry into its own proposed geographies—be it wind or solar-it then such projects may usher in little if any political and economic transformation, and merely pay lip service to an ecological discourse in urbanism. The debate over the (next) mode of energy requires thus a geographic examination, to foresee and possibly avoid the potential perpetuation of uneven geographies of power in the sunbelts, fields, and wind corridors of the world. What is the agency of architecture in making visible and speculative the geographic transformations associated with the deployment of infrastructure in resource territories? We live in an epoch shaped by extensive environmental transformations, with risks and unaccounted for consequences at the scale of
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