ENERGY AND SHELTER AS FOUNDATIONAL ECONOMY PILLARS IN A TIME OF CRISIS: A spatial analysis of vulnerability and new perspectives on Southern Europe

This dissertation examines energy and housing vulnerability in Southern Europe as an inherently socio-spatial phenomenon, situating it within the broader crisis of foundational economy provisioning that has intensified since the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Adopting a mixed-method, problem-driven research design, the thesis bridges New Economic Sociology, critical economic geography, and the foundational economy approach to investigate how uneven territorial allocation of resources shapes differential exposure to energy and housing vulnerability, and whether local alternative practices of provisioning can counter this exposure. The first empirical study maps energy vulnerability across 110 Italian provinces in 2011, after the 2008 crisis. Through Principal Component Analysis and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis on a thirteen-indicator index, it identifies three energyscapes – as different landscapes of energy vulnerability according to the deprivation profile: an urban fragility cluster in major conurbations, an energy-network cluster in central-southern provinces, and a climatic-exposure cluster in the north, revealing a potential multiplier effect in conurbative contexts, where socio-economic, demographic and housing precarity coexist. The second study shifts to Portugal in 2021, after Covid-19, at the finer scale of freguesias. A composite Energy and Housing Vulnerability Index, built through PCA on six infrastructural and demographic indicators of vulnerability, is analysed via Geographically Weighted Regression against private rental tenure, rent support and social integration income, respectively read as Polanyian proxies of market exchange and redistribution. The analysis shows decommodification measures can be seen as spatially contingent and often compensatory rather than transformative, producing social citizenship without material capacity wherever welfare is not coupled with place-sensitive investment. The third study turns from diagnosis to alternatives, examining ten Italian Solidarity Renewable Energy Communities (S-RECs) through twenty-five semi-structured interviews and document analysis. A three-dimensional framework — networks, market integration, and socio-ecological provision — compares three organisational models: public-led, pluralist, and Community Energy Builders. Findings show the transformative potential of S-RECs depends strongly on pre-existing local social capital and grassroots mobilisation, with rural public-led and pluralist models pursuing more radical, preventing-reversing decommodification, while urban and NGO-led models remain closer to redistributive, market-compatible logics. Together, the three studies articulate a coherent trajectory moving from macro-level spatial diagnosis to micro -level socially embedded alternatives, showing that energy and housing vulnerability, welfare decommodification, and community-led energy transition share the same underlying logic of territorially uneven embeddedness. The dissertation concludes by proposing a renewed spatial contract for foundational infrastructures, and by identifying the analysis of exploitation within essential provisioning systems as a priority for future research. It contributes a replicable socio-spatial methodology for vulnerability analysis, integrates economic sociology and economic geography into a shared toolkit for foundational economy analysis, and connects structural diagnosis with the empirical study of decommodifying alternatives in Southern Europe