Alessandro Sciullo

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

eCREW coordinates and supports the roll-out of an innovative scheme of household cooperation in energy management, addressing Community Renewable Energy Webs (CREWs), in which households jointly exploit household-level electricity generation and battery storage capacities and optimise energy efficiency and expenditures. Key purpose of CREWs is to support the transition of passive consumers to active participants in the local energy system through informed decisions and collective actions.

Goal: The COMETS project aims to quantify the European-wide aggregate contribution of CAIs to the energy transition at national and European levels by investigating their evolution and scaling up at an in-depth level in six selected countries. The main expected impacts of the project are two-fold. Firstly, COMETS will advance the scientific knowledge on the motives, desires, objectives and barriers of such collective action initiatives and their historical and future role in the energy transition. Building on the information gathered and tested for its robustness, we will then co-develop and test supportive tools together with CAI members, decision makers and the scientific community. Lastly, these stakeholders will then be able to exploit the main outputs of COMETS, namely a Supporting Platform for CAIs, the enhanced knowledge base, scenarios and roadmaps for spreading CAI models, even after the project is concluded. Funding: Horizon 2020 (from May 2019). Project link: upcoming

This work aims to set the basis to explore the Posthuman condition as the future human condition, going beyond the anthropocentric sight of the life on Earth where humans, animals, nature, objects, buildings up to the Internet itself are considered as a whole system, an interconnected mind interacting on several layers simultaneously, where human beings are only a part of the whole system. For this purpose, this analysis wants to present the first steps of a general methodology, to co-design the sustainability ecosystem at local scale. The adopted approach is based on two main stages and it aims to identify an ontological map starting from a crowdsource mapping of the relevant topics related to sustainability, on one side, and to design a local environmental ecosystem, on the other side. The first step has been achieved, with the contributions of more than 160 citizens, asking them to identify crucial interdependent concepts associated to food, energy, waste, mobility, green public procurement and environment and, consequently, to highlight keywords interconnections, obtaining a conceptual map of more than 400 keywords and 550 links. The second stage has been performed thanks to a 4-hour codesign workshop. Starting from few general topics (e.g. energy, food, waste, ..), 40 agents (public institutions, NGOs and businesses members as well as private citizens) within the local community, i.e. the City of Turin, have been interviewed. Thanks to this collaborative workshop a piece of the whole local ecosystem has been identified with more than 205 relevant actors and 300 relations. This research proof how sustainability cannot be treated separately from the actors involved. It needs to be theoretically explained using an holistic and multidisciplinary approach that encompasses stakeholder theory or agent theory including social and psychological implications, as well as, hyperconnectivity as core element of a posthuman system.