Contested Landscapes of Renewable Energies : Spatial Justice for Democratic Landscape

As a contribution to the discussion about landscape democracy, I propose to observe some contested landscapes of renewable energy and the local protest against them to understand whether they can provide some information on what a democratic energy landscape should be. An analysis of the reasons behind the protest reveals that the landscape is not the object of the protest, but its tool: the landscape is used by protesters to understand, reveal and communicate a spatial injustice (Soja, 2010). It seems that the ‘direct participation for all in all phases of decision making regarding landscape alteration, supervision of landscape evolution and prevention of reckless landscape destruction’ (Prieur, 2006, p. 28) are requested not per se, but as a way to obtain spatial justice.