IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

The geopolitical use of natural resources in connection with the Ukraine war has shown the fragility of the energy supply system, becoming the new European emergency. As Ivan Illich underlines in his seminal contributions though, the discourse on energy has always been caught between scarcity and abundance, making “energy” a word charged with hidden implications. The energy landscapes describe highly contradictory territories where collective needs all too often clash with toxic environmental impacts. Health and work issues intersect living needs and, therefore, raise uncomfortable questions about contemporary lifestyles and their consequences in terms of spatial justice. Although indispensable to the functioning of urban settlements, energy infrastructures are mainly located in marginal areas of the city, creating a distance – physical, civic and cultural – from such operational landscapes to people; a detachment also increased by processes of financialisation that tend to dematerialise the territorial presence of energy companies. Under the pressure of necessary changing conditions, can heritage processes support the humanisation of energy landscapes, generating new commons, cultural identities and lifestyles out of them? Exploring such ‘technoscapes’ from the cultural heritage viewpoint, the paper aims to reduce the mentioned distance by discovering values and histories attached to them. It thus explores two energy infrastructures located on opposite poles of Rome (Italy): the Farfa 1 hydroelectric power station, at North, which realisation produced a cultural landscape protected by law; and the ex-nuclear power plant of Borgo Sabotino, at South, currently going from a disassembly project to the reuse and renaturalisation the extant.