Abstract/Summary

The text is a chapter in the book Renewable Energies and European Landscapes: Lessons from Southern European Cases. The book provides timely, multidisciplinary cross-national comparison of the institutional and social processes through which renewable energy landscapes have emerged in Southern Europe (Spain, France, Italy and Portugal). On the basis of case studies in these countries, it analyzes the way in which and the extent to which the development of renewable energies has affected landscape forms and whether or not it has contributed to a reformulation of landscape practices and values in these countries. Landscape is conceived broadly, as a material, social, political and historical process embedded into the local realm, going beyond aesthetic. The chapter presents a case study in the southern Italian region of Puglia (Apulia), the rural area of Alta Murgia, which is partly included within the perimeter of the first National Rural Park in Italy (Alta Murgia National Park). The study focuses on the process of PV power development in this agricultural area since the first Italian feed-in tariff system came into force (2005–2007). The purpose of the study is to explore the impacts of the political forces embodied in the planning process of these renewable energy projects. This goal is achieved by considering not only the impacts on the socioeconomic development of the whole area over the last decade but also those on the landscape features and values that sustain and enable local socioeconomic development. National and regional renewable energy policies, on the one hand, and the National Park Plan and Regulations, on the other hand, have engendered dramatically different consequences for the agricultural lands located inside and outside the perimeter of the protected area. The argument developed in the chapter is that these two radically different approaches to the process of energy project planning ultimately reinforce the physical and symbolic gap existing between so-called particularly worthy landscapes and ordinary everyday landscapes (of energy). It is argued that the process of PV plant planning and development in the areas surrounding the Park has been essentially dominated and led by a sort of “site counter-logic.” This ultimately resulted in a “counter-site logic.” In the conclusion, the chapter emphasizes the potential for the planning process of green energy projects to act as a laboratory for experimenting with a new integrated approach to energy provisioning, as both a conceptual frame and a biophysical phenomenon.