From GIS to marble crafts: Mundane representations of renewable energy landscapes and their roles towards just transitions

This essay discusses the roles of spatial representations of renewable energy in shaping attitudes and action around the production of space amid the socio-environmental crisis. Central is the dispute around the production of renewable energy spaces. Renewable energy infrastructures such as wind farms and solar parks are important tools for the urgent transition of our societies to cleaner models of energy; at the same time, the territorial expansion of renewables usually happens within the existing neoliberal frameworks of spatial production, often reproducing inequalities and excluding human and non-human actors from their local landscapes. Architecture and architects can critically contribute to this dispute by employing their visualizing skills. Forefront architectural research already visually investigates matters of sustainability, spatial justice, and local rights; however, its engagement with real-life complexities of the energy transition remains limited. Greater affective power lies with the everyday spatial imagery that already forms part of renewable energy planning. Architectural materials, such as masterplans, construction drawings, diagrams, and models usually constitute formal requirements within the planning process. In some cases, the insufficiencies of the planning system account for the emergence of opposition movements, which spontaneously employ sketches, caricatures, landscape photography, and graphics as means of protest. An analysis of visual materials from my research in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Greece, and a focused case study of a wind-power conflict in the Aegean islands, shows how agencies of spatial representations vary greatly depending on sociopolitical contexts and planning cultures. “Mundane” imagery created both within the formal planning process and in opposition to it interacts with existing systems and ultimately affects the shaping of the landscape.