Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) are an emerging mechanism for coordinating place‑based energy transitions, yet little is known about how these plans are produced, interpreted, and translated across the diverse actors involved in their development. This research examines the socio‑technical processes through which LAEPs take shape, focusing on how documents, practices, and organisational relationships influence their evolution.

The study adopts a qualitative approach informed by actor‑network theory, combining documentary analysis, semi‑structured interviews and case studies. Documentary analysis is used as a form of translation tracing, following how planning artefacts move between organisations and how meaning is negotiated. Thematic analysis provides a flexible framework for identifying patterns across both documentary and interview data. Case studies are used to investigate the longitudinal effect of LAEP in specific technological cases.

Preliminary findings indicate that LAEPs have had relatively low influence, with the majority of local authorities in Wales accepting them, but agreeing that it is to be used by regional or national levels of authority. Early themes highlight tensions between strategic ambition and operational constraints, the stabilising role of technical modelling outputs, and the ways in which organisational priorities shape what becomes “actionable” within the plan.

By illuminating the contingent and negotiated nature of LAEP development, the research contributes to wider debates on socio‑technical transitions and the governance of local energy systems. The final thesis will offer methodological insights into translation‑focused document analysis and practical implications for improving the robustness and legitimacy of LAEP processes.

Reducing land take, set out in the EU's target of no net land take by 2050, and steering cities toward more compact, low-carbon forms are central objectives of the European green transition. These goals rest on a long-standing planning assumption: that as demographic and economic pressures stabilise, the need for urban expansion eases, opening scope for densification, consolidation, and reuse. This paper revisits that assumption through an analysis of urban expansion across European Functional Urban Areas over the past two decades.

The evidence suggests the relationship between urban expansion and its conventional drivers has weakened, with land take continuing across a wide range of demographic and economic contexts rather than tracking them closely. This raises the possibility that contemporary expansion is shaped less by current demand than by inherited development trajectories and structural momentum - dynamics that sit awkwardly with land-take reduction and compact-city agendas.

We argue this points to a blind spot in green-transition planning: instruments calibrated to demographic signals and visible growth pressure may systematically overlook expansion that persists on its own momentum, across both growing and declining cities. Reframing land-take governance as a question of trajectory and lock-in, rather than demand management, offers planning a more robust basis for aligning urban form with environmental objectives. The paper reflects on what this shift implies for how planning knowledge about urban growth is constructed, and for the spatial dimension of climate planning.

In the UK, a large proportion of future emissions are embedded in existing cities, given that more than 80% of buildings that will be occupied by 2050 have been built. This suggests that a critical part of the low-carbon transition shall address existing urban systems and actually existing unsustainability.

Yet research shows low-carbon transition has been slow, fragmented and controversial – often framed as an ‘implementation gap’. We argue that it reflects a deeper disjunct: the planning and development systems that produced carbon-intensive urban environments remain organised around land release and new development rather than repairing and adapting existing built environments. Furthermore, despite strong policy ambitions and broader agreement on characteristics of sustainable cities, there remains considerable uncertainty about how sustainable futures can be achieved in practice.

In response, we propose urban retrofit as a way to capture the problem space around the disjunct. It helps us to understand the climate politics of the ‘existing city’ in two ways. First, it shifts attention from future sustainable visions to actually existing unsustainability embedded in inherited urban systems. Second, it shifts attention from new development and climate projects to the urban processes through which carbon-intensive environments are continually (re)produced through the planning and development systems. Urban retrofit foregrounds a politics around urban repair, reframing low-carbon transition as a challenge of reworking the existing city both materially and institutionally.

The paper concludes by outlining five approaches to urban retrofit, demonstrating a heterogenous and contested field through which different actors pursue different low-carbon futures.