Energy becomes politically consequential when it ceases to appear as an abstract quantity and is understood as a relation among bodies, technologies, territories, institutions and forms of knowledge. Fred Cottrell’s Energy and Society established this proposition with unusual clarity: the amount and form of available energy condition what a society can do, yet energy never acts outside the social matrix of converters, values and organisational choices through which it is captured and spent. His notion of surplus energy is therefore not merely thermodynamic but evaluative, because what counts as surplus depends upon the social operations through which energetic gains and losses are recognised. Cara New Daggett radicalises this historical insight by showing that “energy” itself is not an innocent natural category waiting to be discovered. The modern energetic imagination emerges through nineteenth-century thermodynamics, fossil fuels, industrial labour, racialised empire and a political theology of productive work. Energy becomes a way of measuring bodies, disciplining labour and projecting a world in which matter appears valuable insofar as it can be converted into work. The epistemology of energy is thus inseparable from an apparatus of valuation. Henri Lefebvre relocates this problem in space. His production of space does not describe an inert container occupied by economic processes; it identifies space itself as a product and productive force, traversed by flows of energy, raw materials, labour, capital and information. Urban space becomes a nodal condensation of these movements, a place where infrastructures make distant territories operationally present. What looks like a bounded city is consequently sustained by relations extending far beyond its apparent edge. This is the point at which energetic history becomes urban epistemology: to know the city is to know the relations, converters, conduits, scales and asymmetries through which its continuity is materially accomplished. Farías gives this proposition a methodological form through actor-network theory. The city can no longer be treated as a singular, stable object whose internal characteristics await description; it is multiple and decentred, circulating through heterogeneous networks of humans, technologies, documents, institutions and non-humans.
Relationality here is not a metaphor for interconnectedness but an ontological claim about how urban objects exist. Donati’s critical realist relational sociology sharpens the distinction by refusing both methodological individualism and holism: relations are not secondary links between already complete entities but generative realities that mediate agency and structure and participate in the morphogenesis of social formations. Read alongside Farías, this permits a stronger account of infrastructure. Pipes, grids, roads, legal categories, datasets and energy systems do not merely connect urban entities; through their patterned relations they help constitute what an urban entity can become. Mariana Valverde adds the governmental dimension by demonstrating that cities are governed through heterogeneous ways of seeing. Zoning, land-use categories, nuisance law and embodied judgements do not assemble into a single modern epistemology. “Seeing like a city” is epistemologically hybrid: abstract, calculative techniques coexist with situated, relational and historically older forms of judgement. Urban knowledge therefore operates through an unstable traffic between measurement and experience, plan and nuisance, overview and proximity. Graham and Marvin’s infrastructural turn makes the material consequence explicit. Networked systems of energy, water, transport and communications are neither neutral backgrounds nor technical supports; they are spatially selective architectures of connection and disconnection whose reconfiguration produces differentiated capacities to inhabit the city. Wiig, Karvonen, McFarlane and Rutherford describe the legacy of Splintering Urbanism as precisely a change in apprehension: infrastructure became a way of reading the urban condition. The important epistemic shift lies here. Infrastructure is simultaneously object and instrument of knowledge. It is something to be examined, but it also reveals the city by tracing who and what can move, connect, receive, consume, communicate or remain excluded. Connolly extends this beyond methodological cityism by following urban metabolisms and circulations across conventional territorial boundaries. The city becomes a “site multiple”, constituted through everyday practices and more-than-urban connections rather than secured by the municipal perimeter. Energetic legibility names this capacity to read urban life through the material relations that make it possible while refusing to reduce those relations to a single scale, territory or metric. It treats energy, infrastructure and knowledge as mutually composing operations: energy animates infrastructures; infrastructures spatialise political economies; epistemic practices render some of those relations visible while leaving others latent, naturalised or deliberately obscure. A field organised through energetic legibility must therefore resist the archive as a passive storehouse and the city as a self-evident empirical object. The operative question becomes how relations acquire visibility, durability and public consequence. Socioplastics can work at precisely this intersection because its corpus behaves less like a closed theoretical system than like an infrastructural environment in which documents, images, operators, citations, platforms, urban observations and conceptual distinctions are repeatedly connected and redistributed. Cottrell’s converters offer one useful analogy: a field does not simply possess information; it requires devices capable of transforming dispersed material into usable intellectual energy. A citation converts reading into lineage, a marker converts a conceptual distinction into a retrievable unit, an index converts accumulation into navigability, a DOI converts a text into a persistent public address, and a spatial observation converts an encounter with the city into transmissible evidence. These conversions are never neutral. Daggett’s genealogy warns that every regime of conversion carries assumptions about productivity, value and whose labour becomes visible. The relevant task is therefore not maximal circulation but explicit governance of transformation: which traces are intensified, which contexts survive compression, which relations are made searchable, and which scales disappear when a complex urban situation becomes a keyword, diagram, dataset or indexed node. Lefebvre’s insistence on flows makes the archive spatial rather than merely textual. A corpus distributed across repositories, blogs, images, videos and bibliographic anchors is produced through routes, terminals and points of concentration much as urban space is produced through circuits of capital, energy and information. Its architecture lies in the organisation of passage. Graham and Marvin make clear why passage must be analysed politically: networks create premium connections as well as bypasses, tunnels, discontinuities and exclusions. The same applies to knowledge infrastructures. Search engines, repository protocols, metadata conventions and citation systems determine differential accessibility; public visibility is infrastructurally allocated rather than naturally earned. Wiig and colleagues’ account of infrastructure as a mode of apprehension can therefore be inverted productively: an archive becomes epistemically powerful when its infrastructure itself can be inspected, when the routes by which claims become legible are part of what the field exposes. Valverde’s hybrid urban vision prevents this from collapsing into technocratic transparency. Not everything worth knowing becomes stronger through abstraction. Situated judgement, ambiguity, tacit recognition and embodied proximity remain epistemically active, particularly in urban and artistic research where the object changes with position, duration and mode of encounter. Farías and Donati make the corresponding ontological point: the unit of knowledge is not the isolated item but the relation that allows heterogeneous items to generate a formation without dissolving their differences. A photograph, planning document, performance trace, bibliographic citation and climatic observation can belong to the same epistemic situation without being translated into a common substance. Connolly’s site multiple provides a spatial model for such coexistence. A site can be simultaneously local and translocal, materially specific and relationally extended; its coherence comes from following connections rather than imposing a boundary in advance. This allows Socioplastics to treat the urban archive as an active topology whose units gain meaning through recurrence, adjacency, translation and infrastructural placement. Energetic legibility consequently becomes a discipline of attention to conversion costs. Every act of making knowledge public spends context while gaining circulation; every abstraction amplifies certain relations while suppressing others; every infrastructural shortcut redistributes epistemic labour. The goal is not to eliminate these transformations but to render them accountable and generative. A field becomes robust when it can move evidence across media and scales without pretending that nothing changes in transit, and when it treats persistence, discoverability and public address as theoretical questions rather than administrative afterthoughts. Energy then ceases to be only a thematic subject among others. It becomes a model for understanding how intellectual systems are activated, how infrastructures distribute capacity, and how cities and archives remain operative through continuous conversion. Urban epistemology, in turn, becomes less a theory of what the city is than a practice for following what makes the city knowable, governable and transformable. Socioplastics gains from this an infrastructural epistemology of circulation: knowledge is not accumulated substance but patterned capacity moving through material and symbolic converters, always situated, politically uneven and susceptible to reconfiguration. Within Socioplastics, this condition condenses as InsightViscosity.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, epistemology, media archives and public infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Bibliography
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