Timothy Moss, together with eight co-authors, received the Best Published Paper Award 2026 of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) for the paper “Energy infrastructures in divided cities” and was published in 2025 in the journal ‘Progress in Planning’. It was chosen from nominations by 18 journals of urban, regional and planning studies. T
The paper investigates energy infrastructures as instruments of separation, control and collaboration in three divided cities: Berlin, Jerusalem and Nicosia. The authors achieve three things: Firstly, they identify the multiple ways in which geopolitical division and unification have manifested themselves in the cities’ electricity (and gas) supply systems. Secondly they analyse the strategic responses of service providers, politicians and users to their divided and united energy systems over time. And thirdly, they use the three cases to generate insight into energy infrastructures as conduits of separation, control and collaboration in politically contested cities.
The paper is praised for its combination of “theoretical ambition, conceptual sophistication, and methodological depth within a highly original comparative framework” by AESOP. It resulted from the project “Powering divided cities: urban energy systems between separation and cooperation (DiviCiti)” led by Timothy Moss and funded by DFG.
Paper
Timothy Moss, Itay Fischhendler, Lior Herman, Shirley Lukin, Ourania Papasozomenou, Elai Rettig, Gillad Rosen, Marik Shtern, Sertac Sonan , Energy infrastructures in divided cities, Progress in Planning, Volume 191, 2025, 100910, ISSN 0305-9006, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2024.100910
