When the Streetlights Come On: What Urban Planning Can Teach Us About Energy Equity
When I was a kid, my entire world was measured by how far I could ride my bike.
At the edge of the neighborhood lay a court island park, our kingdom for climbing trees and hiding in the bushes, waiting to jump out and startle passing cars. Then there was a Busch's grocery store, where a "hard-earned" allowance was instantly traded for one-dollar Faygo sodas. On the bike rides home from school, the neighborhood creek always called to us, prompting a detour to skip stones and leap across the slick rocks lining the shore. Back then, there were no pocket clocks for us (I only knew one kid who had an iPod). I just knew it was time to head home when the streetlights began to flicker to life. Their glow marked the quiet end to driveway basketball games, frantic rounds of neighborhood tag, and those golden evenings spent simply wandering around.
Back then, I never gave a second thought to where that electricity came from, or who had planned the infrastructure required to harness it. I didn't wonder about the crews who laid the pavement for our streets, or the city planners who drew up the plats for the homes in my small suburb. To most people, energy and city infrastructure, in general, are nothing more than the invisible backdrops to their chaotic lives—electricity hums behind the drywall and concrete sits quietly beneath their car's tires. In the energy industry, we treat these pieces of infrastructure as completely separate, rather than as parts of a shared ecosystem. Yet, while the energy industry and urban planning often operate in entirely different worlds, they are driven by the exact same mission: to shape the physical environment that enables modern life.
I am incredibly new to the energy industry—two months down with hopefully many more to come. Yet, I also enter the industry with a unique perspective and background that not many hold in the space. I am an urban planner at heart and my passions lie in fostering better spaces, streets, neighborhoods, and, most importantly, communities that people can enjoy living in. Energy plays a huge part in that and can play an even larger one. When you strip away the technical jargon, both fields are fairly similar. They both interface directly with homeowners, demand extensive and empathetic community engagement to be successful, and hold the immense power to radically elevate a community's quality of life. One plans the places we inhabit; the other powers them.
The energy sector is currently facing a massive transition, with decarbonization, the rise of renewables, rapid electrification, grid modernization, and more. But it shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel; there is a wealth of place-based knowledge, community trust-building, and human-centered design that the energy industry can and should learn from the world of urban planning. Urban planners have long known that macro-level community success is built from the bottom up. Jane Jacobs—frequently described as a messianic figure in my urban planning and community development graduate classes—put it best: "The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all."
In our industry, those "sidewalk contacts" are the front-porch conversations conducted by outreach, the cold calls inviting homeowners to participate in program evaluation, or the local partnerships with community-based organizations that can build trust between residents and the utility. They represent a fundamental truth that the energy sector is beginning to grasp: planning for the energy transition ultimately means planning communities with community. We often treat energy efficiency as an isolated issue that happens one building at a time—an insulated window or roof here, a smart thermostat there. But efficient buildings are only one piece of an efficient community puzzle. If a neighborhood's design isolates its residents or lacks the infrastructure for clean energy, a green building is just a deserted island—with plenty of residents or castaways left behind by the clean energy transition.
To go forward, we have to look through the lens of equity, a space where urban planning has decades of hard-won lessons to share. For decades, urban planners have wrestled with questions of equity, trust, and community participation. Much of that work has involved trying to repair communities that were deliberately divided, displaced, and disinvested through policies such as urban renewal and redlining in years past. Both urban planning and the energy sector share this unique challenge: we are not simply working with a blank canvas, but trying to shape an image out of generations of old, heavy paint—carefully peeling back the harmful layers of the past while meticulously sketching out the infrastructure of tomorrow.
True equity cannot be engineered from a distant office; it requires planning with communities instead of for them. Just as a city neighborhood relies on the collective trust of its residents, a clean energy transition relies on the trust built by engaging communities (not just individuals) as co-designers of their own future.
The good news is that many people across the energy industry already understand this. In my admittedly short two months at Encolor, I've had the chance to see some of that work up close. What struck me wasn't the technology. It was the conversations. The outreach. The willingness to sit down with residents, community leaders, and local organizations before charging ahead with solutions. Community engagement wasn't treated as an obligatory public meeting squeezed in at the end of a project (which some city planners certainly treat it as such). It was part of the project itself. These community partnerships point to a truth that's easy to miss when you're buried in spreadsheets, engineering diagrams, and policy documents: the energy transition isn't really about technology. Not entirely, anyway. It's about people. It's about neighborhoods. It's about the complicated, messy, deeply human places where life actually happens. Just as great streets are built on thousands of small interactions between neighbors, a successful energy transition will be built on trust. Not the kind announced in press releases, but the kind earned one conversation at a time.
Thanks for reading,
Dillon
If you're curious about anything I've talked about here, such as if you want to learn more about who Jane Jacobs was, I've linked some sources for you here. Please check them out if you have the time: