Energy vulnerability in the grain of the city: toward neighborhood typologies of material deprivation

Stefan Bouzarovski , Harriet Thomson

Abstract

Geographers are increasingly engaging with the driving forces and implications of energy poverty—a specific but relatively unknown form of material deprivation that emerges at the nexus of sociodemographic inequalities and built formations. In this article, we argue that an improved understanding of the urban embeddedness of energy poverty can provide novel insights into the systemic underpinnings of injustice. We thus develop a conceptual framework focusing on the links between the sociodemographic and housing vulnerabilities to energy poverty on the one hand and wider patterns of urban social inequality on the other. This approach is applied to the study of several postcommunist cities in eastern and central Europe (ECE), where energy poverty has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Using evidence from extensive custom-built neighborhood surveys, we interrogate the sociodemographic, housing, and infrastructural features of households that experience a lack of adequate domestic energy services. Our results point to the existence of distinct landscapes and typologies of energy vulnerability in the urban fabric. Material deprivation—a phenomenon that has rarely been studied in infrastructural terms—creates new sociospatial inequalities that might supplant patterns and processes of intraurban differentiation.