Energy landscapes describe landscapes shaped by the production, processing, transmission, storage, distribution, and disposal of energy. Although the term entered broader discourse through the visual impact of wind farms, its analytical scope is far wider. Any landscape materially transformed by energy systems—past or present—can be understood as an energy landscape. Alongside renewable infrastructures such as wind turbines, solar fields, dams, and power lines, energy landscapes crucially include oil and gas: extraction fields, offshore platforms, pipelines, refineries, storage terminals, petrochemical zones, and transport corridors. Fossil-fuel landscapes have been among the most extensive and durable spatial formations of the modern era, reorganising territories at regional and planetary scales. They have generated characteristic geographies—zones of extraction, sacrifice landscapes, ports, highways, and company towns—whose ecological and social consequences remain embedded in the land.
Studying energy landscapes contributes to understanding how societies visualise and aestheticise force and power. Energy itself remains imperceptible; only its infrastructures, emissions, residues, and altered landforms can be seen. Making these transformations legible is essential, particularly in contemporary energy transitions, where questions of acceptance, responsibility, and design are inseparable from how energy landscapes are perceived and shaped.
Historic gardens are in most cases preserved through visual continuity, yet climate change exposes the ecological instability beneath their timelessness. The article argues that heritage landscapes are to reveal, not conceal, this rupture—shifting toward a cultivated sense of change.
Despite local initiatives to preserve industrial heritage and Ravenna’s iconic skyline, the Hamon towers, featured in Red Desert were demolished to make way for a government-supported photovoltaic power plant. Is demolition justified and have the Hamon towers, and what they stand for in the film, contributed to their demolition as part of a corporate profile-changing gesture?
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