Making the archipelago: Heritage, Energy, Planning and Action in the North Sea and the Mediterranean

This study travels to four archipelagoes—the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian islands in Italy—to examine links between collective pasts and imagined futures as expressed in energy and sustainability projects. It is the result of a four-year PhD research, funded by the European project HERILAND that explored the relationships between heritage and spatial planning in Europe. In this thesis, I discuss the roles of heritage in sustainability action across geographical difference. Heritage is a relevant lens through which to critically and creatively examine histories of cohabitation, confrontation, power, and rights in the relationships between humans and environments. This becomes particularly relevant at this time of environmental and social crises, when the reliance of sustainable development strategies on technocratic, top-down, and large-scale solutions fails to counterbalance continuing global agendas of extraction and growth, and address issues of environmental and social justice in ‘peripheral’ places like the islands studied. Instead, I stress the need to ‘think small’, and ‘look back’ arguing that seeds for meaningful change exist in such places and the relationships between people and environments afforded by their unique historical and geographical realities. To approach this, I construct a kaleidoscopic conceptual framework informed by critical heritage studies, planning theory, cultural geography, environmental humanities, and other scientific areas. Their intersection makes it possible to examine landscapes both as nodes in global networks and as distinct lifeworlds of human communities and non-human actors. More concretely, I engage with the local frictions produced both by climate change and climate mitigation—the fragile consensus around a solar park in the Wadden Sea, conflicts around wind turbine towers in the Aegean, experiments with the tides in Shetland, and volcanic episodes in the Aeolian—but also with the learning potential of their long environmental and cultural heritage. Communal grazing areas, community-maintained agricultural terraces, peat cutting, and rural Mediterranean architecture are relevant instances of this heritage. To bring such instances together, I create a comparative methodology: I narrate four thick local stories that describe alternative models of human-environment relationships in their past, present, and future. Then, I juxtapose these stories, eventually making it possible to renegotiate established authorized discourses of heritage and sustainability and the associated courses of action in policy and spatial planning. The dissertation contributes to heritage and environmental studies by building on the concept of landscape. It broadens the knowledge on islands of the Mediterranean and the North Sea and discusses the universal relevance of their local histories. Readers are invited to participate in the life and troubles of four archipelagoes; and in doing so to think along on emergent—archipelagic—claims around our shared landscapes.