Small places, big claims : Community mobilization around landscapes in Greece, Scotland, and the Netherlands

Can there exist common ground for collective claims among communities that dwell in distant physical grounds? Landscapes of the Anthropocene are not independent to each other: the depleting resources of the planet and the globalized neoliberal model of spatial production create the need for strategic collaborations towards meaningful change. While urban research has often prioritized cities as nexuses of innovation, recent literature draws attention to the terraforming of rural areas and to the agency of non-urban communities. Such sources argue that new models can be produced at small, remote places, that have often been economically marginalized and overlooked in knowledge production. Indeed, small communities often mobilize successfully around common threats, such as the scarcity of resources, environmental deterioration, or profit-based extractivist projects. In doing so, they sometimes carve alternative trajectories to the dominant model of global progress and development. Landscapes are key driving forces in these processes: as co-constructed and ever-evolving heritage assemblages, they exert agency over communities. I study the affective qualities of landscapes by looking at contestations around spatial change in the Greek, Scottish, and Dutch islands. All cases are related to infrastructures of energy production, as a cross-cutting theme that brings together urgency and continuity, the global and the local, the past and the future. My analysis centers on the agency of the landscape-as-heritage in imagining new energy systems; in building consensus across governance scales; or in practicing radical democracy by resisting unsustainable projects. By finding patterns in the ways claims are structured around landscapes in geographically distant places, we can imagine a wider paradigm shift in human- earth interaction. Through the parallelization of cases, I discuss the potentialities of meaningful new models of landscape governance, built around sharedness and common claims