This workshop is now *fully booked*
Over the last two decades carbon reduction policies, rapidly fluctuating oil prices and stagnating real incomes have drawn increasing attention to questions of affordability in the transport and the domestic energy sector. However, there are differences in research and policy emphasis between EU countries. The UK has pioneered transport & social exclusion research and accessibility planning, but with a focus more on lack of car ownership than on the economic stress and oil vulnerability of motorised households. The notion of fuel poverty is well established in the British context, but is narrowly focused on domestic energy consumption. In France, by contrast, the notion of ‘energy precarity’ is increasingly applied to both home and transport energy use. In both Germany and France, rising transport costs have been seen as an opportunity to steer spatial planning and residential location choices towards the ‘compact city’, to a greater extent than in Britain.
As a whole, the body of knowledge on transport and energy-related economic stress in the EU is substantial and involves various disciplines and areas of policy making. This two-day workshop aims to capitalise on this, fostering cross-fertilisation across national and disciplinary boundaries, challenging “silo” approaches of policy making in which issues of transport, housing residential development and fuel poverty are seen as separate. It also makes the case for a more rigorous conceptualisation of transport poverty – as much more than just the poor relative of fuel poverty.
The event is part of the EPSRC-funded research project (t)ERES (Energy-related economic stress in the UK, at the interface between transport, housing and fuel poverty, 2014-2016) of the Universities of Leeds and Aberdeen, and attached to the DEMAND (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand) Research Centre (2013-2018).
For more information see the (t)ERES project blog