Geographies of (hydro)power Water exploitation and urbanisation praxis across the Veneto region

Abstract

Since the mid-20 th century, fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth system have emerged through a multiplicity of socio-ecological crises triggered by ever-growing large-scale use of natural resources and the ever-greater scales of social and material exchange, and accelerated by climate change. Although over the time we have come to realise how the long-distance interactions between urban and non-urban territories, supporting vertically cities and their functioning, have increasingly altered ecosystems and established intensively operational landscapes, energy extractive production methods and their reciprocal counter-landscapes are rarely critically investigated as constitutive parts of the urbanisation process. Transcending binaries of urban/rural environments, this contribution describes larger research attempts to understand and question the social, political, and ecological dynamics deployed by the energy spatial project along the Piave River, the most engineered hydro basin in Europe. Whilst the exploration offered by the methodology of landscape urbanism pushes the focus beyond the urban realm, it makes use of urban political ecology's conceptual framework as a lens through which examining how urban metabolic processes entail urbanisation across scales. Engagements between urbanism research praxis and landscape political ecology additionally provide a productive method to frame and conceptualise extensive forms of urbanisation through the focus on critical landscapes. The research argues that by bringing upfront the anatomy of the riverine infra-natures is a way to question inherited and ongoing dynamics entailed across landscapes, as well providing as encompassing understanding of their intricate apparatuses' roles in forging the territorial palimpsest.