Abstract
This thesis, Power and Power: From Centralised Grids to Commoned Energy Landscapes, investigates energy not merely as a technical object or commodity, but as a spatialised form of power. By tracing the historical development of the UK’s centralised electricity system and its embedded infrastructural logics, the research reveals how energy production has profoundly shaped social structures, labour movements, and territorial landscapes. In the face of the climate crisis and resource depletion, terms such as “decentralisation” and “renewable energy” have gained traction. Yet without structural and spatial reorganisation, these transitions risk being subsumed into existing frameworks of capital accumulation.
The study argues that meaningful decentralisation must occur at the intersection of society, technology, and space. As a spatial practice that connects people, ecologies, and infrastructures, landscape architecture holds transformative potential in challenging prevailing models of energy governance. Through historical analysis, global case studies, and speculative design proposals, the thesis constructs a strategic framework in which the landscape becomes a platform for decentralised energy, rendering invisible systems tangible, participatory, and embedded within everyday life.
Ultimately, the thesis contends that energy infrastructures should not remain hidden or detached from public consciousness. Instead, they can become shared civic spaces—sites of agency, memory, and collective care. Landscape, in this vision, is no longer the backdrop to energy production, but its cultural and political foreground. In this shift, we move from viewing the power station as a landscape to imagining the landscape itself as a generator of power—social, spatial, and electrical.
