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.
Table of Contents:
1. Thinking with islands 2. Narratives and materialities of sustainability on Ameland 3. Troubles with wind and landscape consciousness on Tinos 4. A common world: legacies of community and commons in Shetland 5. In the shadow of the volcanoes: action and inaction in the Aeolian islands 6. Acting with islands
About the Author :
Marilena Mela is Assistant Professor in Heritage Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she earned her PhD as part of the European Marie Curie-funded project Heriland. She also holds MSCs in Architecture and Architectural Theory from the National Technical University of Athens. Her research focuses on the intersection of heritage, sustainability, landscape, and climate, exploring situated links between inherited pasts and imagined futures in the face of socioenvironmental crises. She teaches courses on heritage, history, design, landscape, and urbanism. She also collaborates with the award-winning collective Boulouki whose work centres on traditional building practices and local knowledge within Greek landscapes.
Review :
Using strategically chosen cases from four islands, within four archipelagoes, within four European seas, this book brilliantly shows that such islands aren't reducible to an isolated location on the periphery of the mainland. They are rather places core to the recovery of the heritage of European cultural and environmental sustainability.
Kenneth Olwig, Landscape Architecture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
