Why the “electrify everything” movement needs urbanism

Urbanism, which is the practice of shaping how towns and cities function and evolve, is crucial to the movement to electrify everything.

Here are some reasons:

1. Urbanism powerfully shapes the critical systems best suited for electrification. Opportunities to electrify transportation and builds largely depend on local ordinances and economic incentives.
2. Urbanism creates the possibility of scale by unlocking electrification that delivers tangible benefits. Aligning investor motivations with affordability, reliability, and other needs of residents and ratepayers requires those interests to be fully represented in energy legislation and utility regulation. Emphasizing the lens of communities creates a clearer agenda, improves negotiating power, and creates opportunities to consider new alternatives.
3. Urbanism enables more affordable electrification and new service models. Denser, better-connected places improve the economics of public infrastructure and shared systems, making services easier to deploy and sustain.
4. Urbanism uniquely enables integrated energy ecosystems. It provides tools and methods to manage the built environment and mobility more fluidly, which is essential for uniting building and transportation energy systems.
5. Urbanism sets the stage for transformational electrification. The advent of battery‑electric motors has sparked anexplosion of experiments showing how powerful small motors can revolutionize how we move people and goods. Unlocking many of these possibilities depends on urbanism—through rules governing land use, public rights‑of‑way, and building design and use.
6. Urbanism provides the scale needed to switch from gas to electric systems. A cost‑effective transition to all‑electric homes and buildings is easiest when done at scale—across neighborhoods, districts, or entire towns.
7. Urbanism shapes how large‑scale electrification systems adapt to environmental shocks and stressors. The viability of major new investments depends on positioning them within broader community resilience strategies.

Electrifying everything is a technology upgrade, but it’s also a project of town-building. The fastest, most durable path runs through urbanism—how we plan land use, streets, buildings, and services. Treating neighborhoods as the unit of change lets us deliver tangible benefits, including lower bills, better air, and reliable service. It also integrates buildings and mobility, and designs for resilience from the start.

The work ahead is practical and local:, it is to align utility and city planning, update codes and incentives, finance district‑scale conversions, invest in the underlying systems for transit and the most efficient forms of e‑mobility, and to center community voices in every decision. Do that, and “electrify everything” becomes more than a slogan—it becomes a lived improvement in how people move, live, and thrive.