Networks are crucial components of complex societies and underlie successful climate-energy strategies. Nevertheless they remain relatively understudied and insufficiently understood in their dynamics as well as in their relation to resource consumption and economic prosperity.
In this doctoral project, several historical cases of physical network will be explored from an industrial ecology standpoint and in relation to energy consumption. The project will address complexity in sociotechnical network structures and uses based on a complex systems modelling approach associating statistical physics (graph theory), geography and economic history. The project will mainly focus on the transportation and energy networks and their entanglement.

A first target will be railway networks that progressively grew during the 19th century in relation to coal extraction, trade and use. Railway networks are intertwined with early-industrial sociotechnical development and paved the way to the development of road networks in the 20th century in particular on the basis of complex oil networks. The study will address the dual role of railways and road networks in the transportation of both passengers and freight of energy and materials. The growth rates, interconnections and key metrics of these networks will be jointly analyzed and compared to an equivalent analysis of electricity grids which are currently under study by members of the PhD proposal team.