“Lithium Urban[i]ties: Powering the just, green energy transition ”

The mandate to stop burning fossil fuels and find alternative energy sources in order to act on climate change is driving technological innovation worldwide. But what does lithium has to do with it all? And what's at stake for us, architects and urbanists?

The rising demand for the so-called green technologies to power the energy transition relies on access to a few critical minerals and metals, and lithium is one of them. To keep up with ever-increasing consumption demands, governments across the world are declaring lithium a matter of national security and aiming to control every step in the supply chain. This means more extraction, more manufacturing, more distribution, more consumption, and more recycling, one country at a time. And with this comes the fast production and reproduction of an assortment of industrial and infrastructural types to serve the insatiable consumption habits of millions of city dwellers: the mining site, the industrial park, the gigafactory, the solar megafarm, the smart highway, the transcontinental sea routes, and more. Rapidly urbanizing the boundless territory far from the main metropolitan areas with a calculated banality, the so-called energy transition is reproducing problematic, unjust patterns of development and generating habitat loss and fragmentation, land and water dispossession, waste, and pollution.

This studio takes on climate action by investigating the lithium urban[i]ties powering the just, green energy transition. A collective operative atlas, an interinstitutional seminar, and fieldwork across the Reno (NV)-Salton Sea (CA) territory inform the students' design research projects.