FUEL(ING) THE CITY: A DIY Kit for Energy Stewardship
Victoria Mohr, Alejandro Ponce de Leon, Philipp Simon
FUEL(ING) THE CITY: A DIY Kit for Energy Stewardship is a hands-on workshop designed to construct stories, imagine, and explore how energy systems weave landscapes, cities, ecologies, and people. By building simple models and creating circuits, participants are invited to engage in exploratory dialogue, rethink where energy comes from, how it’s shared, and what their costs or impacts are. We aim to develop a replicable curriculum through a kit that guides conversations and actions by building blocks, leading participants to envision energy circulation— from production to reduction—in communal spaces. Ultimately, the kit encourages residents, community members, experts, and stakeholders to reimagine their local energyscape (Howard et al., 2013) through emergent energy narratives (Castro et al., 2024).
Scholars in the Energy Humanities have argued that achieving energy resilience necessitates rethinking socioecological interaction with energy as a means to reinvent contemporary paradigms surrounding production, extraction, consumption, and circulation (Szeman and Boyer, 2017). Our project challenges prevailing perceptions of the energy crisis as a solely technological or financial issue. Here, we critically examine the role of landscape in the ways socioecological and energy systems interweave—from both conceptual and practical perspectives—aiming to develop methodologies that can foster energyscape thinking and facilitate the co-design of post-extractive energy infrastructures.
The kit we are developing activates communal ‘energy sovereignty storytelling’ —a mode of story-ing localized energy in ways that radically defy Western-centered views on energy and infrastructure (Castro et al., 2024). In contexts marked by transitions—ecosocial, economic, political, infrastructural—, emplaced forms of storytelling may be a way to envision achievable routes towards energy justice as well as pathways towards territorializing energy technologies. Inspired by collectives like Aerocene, PlaceIt, Energy Democracy, and Nidos de Equilibrio, our work proves the use of devices as mediating tools for community-participation processes and how play and creativity may encourage stewardship and climate action. In designing this kit, we are testing ways to activate narratives that could drive the implementation of place-based transformative solutions and potentially transform the landscapes of energy production.
The extraction and production of fossil fuels have significant repercussions on the surrounding community, biodiversity, and environment, with issues such as oil spills, explosions, and volatile pollutants historically affecting environmental and human health. In the San Francisco Bay Area (California), where this project unfolds, the “Contra Costa Refinery Belt” is home to five refineries that stand near dense urban areas—San Francisco, Richmond, Oakland, Berkeley, to name a few. Community-based monitoring programs, such as Purple Air, currently respond to citizens’ demands for air quality and accountability. Could communal engagement also gather aspirations for clean-energy landscapes while reducing dependency on fossil fuels as a form of social protest?
Pilot Workshops
Supported by the 2024 Research Fund: Climate Communities, we developed a prototype version of the kit and conducted a series of pilot workshops between 2024 and 2025, centering storytelling as a tool for energy literacy and collective imagination.
This summary highlights our final workshop, which brought together participants from fields including energy democracy, community participation, ecological humanities, and environmental design. The activity unfolded in three core stages: [1] Memory, [2] Reconstruction, and [3] Collaboration, where participants engaged in a structured sequence: Prompting, Building, Sharing, Reflecting (Rojas & Kamp 2022, Kristiansen & Rasmussen 2014).
What is energy for you?
Participants explore what energy means in their life and memories. A surfer models an ocean wave—“a surge of inspiration and creativity every time I’m in the water”; another person evokes creative city energy through subway tunnels, art museums and bustling streets; a club-goer remembers the electrifying atmosphere of a Latino disco in Los Angeles; a Chilean participant recreates childhood hours spent watching fish in a rural stream.
During the discussion, common threads are found—movement, multisensory immersion, social vibrancy. Examples remain “at the human scale,” not the megaproject scale. Energy is a process, “a verb,” or “the city’s pulse,” rather than a static output.
© Victoria Mohr
Where does your energy come from?
Part 2 asks each person to locate their memory inside broader socio-technical systems. A deck of illustrated system-cards—Source, Production, Delivery, Consumption, Governance, Culture, etc.—serves as thinking scaffolds. Participants place their model on the table, pull cards that “feel right,” and then extend or rearrange bricks to diagram upstream and downstream connections.
Discussion shifts from feelings to flows: Which transport and labour circuits feed an socially-energized nightclub? How do transmission lines, dams and pipelines underpin suburban comfort?
This step reveals tensions of scale and justice. Massive infrastructures appear alien to the embodied memories, yet they condition those very experiences. One participant notes that the surfing beach they love is also one of California’s most toxic, polluted by sewage outfalls and upriver dams that block salmon migrations. The group begins to ask how joyful energy practices and systemic harm can be reconciled in an equitable transition.
How can we co-create an equitable future?
In the final stage, the group merges into a collective design charrette. They choose a challenge card—”Design a neighborhood where energy means connection, not consumption”—and combine their earlier models into a single, imagined cityscape.
Key features emerge:
- Kinetic playgrounds – giant slides and dance floors wired with gear-based generators so “people create energy by having fun”.
- 15-minute density – mixed mid-rise blocks
- Micro-grids & micro-dams – small-scale, community-owned renewables replace distant transmission towers.
- Civic plazas as commons – space for food, music and workshops that regenerate “social energy” in tandem with electrical supply.
Throughout, the group keeps in mind that pleasure, spirit and infrastructure “have to go hand in hand,” otherwise green transitions risk stripping places of the very joy they seek to sustain.
Participants’ takeaways
Energy is relational and multisensory. Starting with personal memories broadens the definition beyond electrons and barrels.
Systems thinking can begin with play. Building, mapping and iterating with tangible media demystify invisible circuits without overwhelming novices.
Justice requires scale-bridging. Participants repeatedly juxtapose intimate joy (surfing, dancing) with infrastructural violence (toxic beaches, refinery belts).
Transition visions thrive on joy, not austerity. The group champions a pleasure-ground paradigm—generating power through movement, music and social density instead of sacrifice.
Participants repeatedly highlighted that simplicity and the tactile nature of the workshop unlock the workshop’s power. Participants agree that the prototype already shifts how they perceive everyday surroundings:
“I’ll notice the environment in a different way in terms of energy for sure”
By refining cards, circuits and facilitator guides, you lower the barrier for anyone—teacher, activist, city planner— to adopt the kit without the need of us as facilitators. While still leaving ample room for locally specific storytelling and justice-focused invention.
© Victoria Mohr
Next steps…
As we continue to develop the kit, our next steps include embedding accessible electronics and integrating educational content. The circuitry is intended to support systems thinking and allow participants to experiment with scaled energy flows. However, during informal pilot workshops, we observed that hands-on circuit building often shifted participants’ attention away from storytelling and toward “solving” the circuit itself. For us, one of the core values of the kit is to center energy stewardship through narrative. We believe the circuitry should be intuitive—enhancing, rather than distracting from, the storytelling experience.
Looking ahead, our goal is to share the kit with local organizations, museums, and schools, enabling them to facilitate workshops independently. Fuel(ing) the City activates new modes of storytelling around energy, reimagining how people understand and relate to infrastructure. By anchoring learning in place and memory, the project supports a just and equitable energy transition through participatory, transformative approaches to energy production and use.
References
Castro, Azucena, et al. “Energy Sovereignty Storytelling: Art Practices, Community-Led Transitions, and Territorial Futures in Latin America.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, vol. 7, no. 1, Dec. 2024, p. 2309046. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2024.2309046.
Cueva, Sol Lillian. “Tell Me an (Un)Fortunate Story: Advancing Storytelling Methods in Energy Futures Research.” Futures, vol. 165, Jan. 2025, p. 103505. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103505.
Fairchild, Denise, and Al Weinrub. Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions. Island Press, 2017.
Feldpausch-Parker, Andrea M., et al., editors. Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy. Routledge, 2021, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429402302.
Howard, D. C., et al. “Energyscapes: Linking the Energy System and Ecosystem Services in Real Landscapes.” Biomass and Bioenergy, vol. 55, Aug. 2013, pp. 17–26. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biombioe.2012.05.025.
Kristiansen, Per, and Robert Rasmussen. Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method. Wiley, 2014.
Pena, David de la, et al., editors. Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity. Island Press, 2017.
Rojas, James, and John Kamp. Dream Play Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places. 2022. bookshop.org, https://bookshop.org/p/books/dream-play-build-hands-on-community-engagement-for-enduring-spaces-and-places-john-kamp/16894704.
Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer. Energy Humanities. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. www.press.jhu.edu, https://doi.org/10.56021/9781421421889.
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