Assembling the Archipelago: Heritage in Energy Transitions and Climate Action

This book explores the potential of heritage to enact sustainable human-environment relationships across geographical differences. It does so by travelling to four archipelagoes: the Wadden Islands in the Netherlands, the Cyclades in Greece, Shetland in Scotland, and the Aeolian Islands in Italy.

In the face of planetary socioenvironmental crises, the reliance on sustainable development strategies, including the energy transition, on technocratic, top-down solutions fail to counterbalance global agendas of extraction and growth and address environmental injustices in ＂peripheral＂ places. This book stresses the need to ＂think small,＂ arguing that seeds for meaningful change exist in such places and the geographically and historically situated relationships between people and environments. Islands, interconnected yet autonomous places with unique histories, are good places to start. In four archipelagoes, frictions produced both by climate change and climate mitigation ―the fragile consensus around a solar park in the Wadden Sea, conflicts around wind turbine towers in the Aegean, experiments with the tides in Shetland, and volcanic episodes in the Aeolian―come in dialogue with the learning potential of their environmental and cultural heritage. The counterposing of these stories renegotiates established discourses of heritage and sustainability and the associated courses of action in policy and planning.

This contribution will resonate with academics, students, policymakers, and activists in heritage studies, environmental humanities, landscape studies, science and technology studies, and sustainability. Readers are invited to participate in the life and troubles of four island landscapes, and to think along on emergent, archipelagic claims towards sustainable and just futures.

Marilena Mela is an architect and Assistant Professor in Heritage Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she earned her PhD as part of the European Marie Curie-funded project Heriland. Her research focuses on the nexus of heritage, sustainability, landscape, and climate―more broadly exploring links between inherited pasts and imagined futures. She teaches courses on heritage, history, design, landscape, and the city. She also collaborates with the collective Boulouki, whose work centres on traditional building practices and local knowledge within Greek landscapes.