“Energy Transition: Missed Opportunities and Emerging Challenges for Landscape Planning and Designing”

Posted by on July 24, 2014 in Homepage, Publications, Research

Last week, Renée and Sven published a new paper in the open access journal Sustainability. In the paper, we discuss three energy transitions in Europe – the town of Güssing in Austria, the village of Jühnde in Germany, and the island of Samsø in Denmark – from a landscape architecture perspective. Because energy transition poses new challenges and opportunities to the discipline, we address the following questions: (1) what can landscape architects learn from the three examples and (2) to what extent did landscape architecture (or other spatial disciplines) contribute to energy transition in the aforementioned cases. Comparing the cases against the literature demonstrated that landscape architects were not as involved as they, theoretically, could have been. However, particularly when the aim is sustainable development, rather than “merely” renewable energy provision, we argue that the integrative concept of “sustainable energy landscapes” can be the arena where landscape architecture and other disciplines meet to pursue global sustainability goals, while empowering local communities and safeguarding landscape quality.

The full paper can be downloaded via ResearchGate, see the tab ‘Publications’ on this website, or directly from the Sustainability website: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/6/7/4386.