Countermapping large-scale photovoltaic plants in a Sicily’s inner area

Abstract (English)

In contemporary capitalism, ‘green’ electricity is largely generated by incorporating marginal ecolo-gies and geographies into circuits of intense capital accumulation. In less than four decades, wind kinetic force or solar radiation -including the rural lands through which they can be exploited indus-trially- have become central to an industrial complex that in 2022 invested $1.3 trillion in transition technologies (IRENA 2023).

In interpreting these developments, critical scholarship highlights the dispossession practices that facilitate capital valorisation and examines their impacts on local communities. Alternative litera-tures converge on concepts such as “green sacrifice zones” (Zografos and Robbins 2020), “green grabbing” (Leach, Fairhead, and Fraser 2012), “green extractivism” (Bruna 2022) and “green coloni-alism” (Hamouchene 2022). Moreover, a range of injustices along class, gender, racial, and species fractures are scrutinized within green energy systems (Sovacool et al. 2019), framing such marginal-ities as the ultimate ramification of resources and value appropriation networks (Andreucci et al. 2017).
Aligned with these critical perspectives, this paper illustrates a collaborative and critical mapping of large photovoltaic plants in the Valley of the Simeto river, Sicily, between 2023 and 2025. A long-standing crisis of the agricultural sector, exacerbated by increasingly severe droughts, is now driv-ing the Simeto Valley towards a deep transformation. Pushed by diminishing farm productivity, more and more farmers are ceding their lands to a multiplicity of companies investing in large-scale photovoltaic plants through sale agreements or rental contracts for twenty to thirty years. As a re-sult, several thousands of hectares of agricultural land are changing hands and shifting from a citrus or wheat monoculture into a silicon monoculture.

In spite of the spatial and chronological magnitude of such a structural change for the agricultural landscape in the area and beyond, a thick opacity surrounds vital information about land deals and infrastructure design. Local communities struggle to understand how much land is going to be used, where plants will be located, who or what entity is going to own the plans and, most im-portantly, what kind of impact can the plants and related infrastructures be predicted to have on the human and non-human inhabitants of the Valley.

With this background, the paper explains the non-linear and sometimes contradictory action-research processes that have led to the co-construction of a collaborative and critical map, as both an instrument of collective knowledge and social activation for change. The paper will explain how the main features of the map, such as plant location, owners and extent are overlayed with data on the cultural and historical heritage of the area and on the ecosystems existing through it, ulti-mately composing an alternative narrative of a marginal territory that risks instead being under-stood as a mere energy reservoir.