Recarbonization
Land
Capital
and the Spatial Fix of Energy Transitions




Billy Fleming, PhD
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (Temple University)

Douglas Robb, PhD
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (University of Calgary)

Questions? Please reach out at: Billy.Fleming@Temple.edu Call for Abstracts | Due Friday, June 19

In 2024, nearly 600 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity were installed around the world. By the end of 2025, nearly 4,500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity was in operation globally—with an average annual growth of 15.1% since 2020.1 More is planned (and needed) to meet the various national and international goals tied to the Paris Agreement and the various national, corporate, and other commitments it inspired.

The exigency of clean energy deployment is driving a new wave of development that is transforming the planet. Whether in the mines, slag piles, and refining facilities of critical mineral extraction, the reindustrialization of developed economies around the production of clean energy technology, or the sites in which new panels, platforms, blades, and batteries are installed and discarded, this energy transition is a world-making project that is and will continue to reshape the planet. In describing the land-intensivity of this era in the United States, Buck asks us to “imagine the entire land area of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas dedicated to wind farms, and an area the size of West Virginia set aside for solar…with transmission capacity five times greater than today and half of all forest land impacted by efforts to sequester carbon.”2 This translates to a transformation of land use on the order of hundreds of millions of acres for solar, wind, nature-based solutions, and their associated infrastructures–figures that underscore the territorial implications of the energy transition, even before accounting for mineral extraction, processing, and waste.3 Renewable energy and carbon management are now planetary phenomena, shaping national and international policy, corporate strategy, and the myriad ways in which we all live and relate to each other and the more than human world.

As daunting as the material intensity of this energy transition may be, this kind of framing fails to capture a more insidious truth: simply building new renewable energy supply will not necessarily lead to decarbonization. This is true for a variety of reasons, including the lack of regulatory investment in managing the decline of the fossil fuel industry in most nations. But in this project, we are particularly interested in the sites, systems, and spatial configurations that are driving a growth in emissions and reindustrialization alongside an unprecedented growth in renewable energy supply. We refer to these sites and territories as landscapes of recarbonization.

This emergent network includes data centers developed to service AI technology companies, aluminum and cement manufacturing facilities built or retrofitted to certify their products as “green”, and by the fossil fuel industry as it seeks new means of legitimizing its operations and expansion amidst calls for rapid decarbonization. In most cases, these new industrial facilities are being developed in proximity to new clean energy supplies, siphoning renewable capacity away from the grid. Robb and colleagues refer to these activities as “the production of new landscapes where renewable energy projects can be portrayed as absorbing some of the impacts of continued fossil fuel production, while also enabling private companies to reposition their activities as carbon neutral.”4 This industrial-renewable nexus is producing a world of high emissions, high energy costs, and, strangely, growing supply of renewables–creating a new generation of stranded assets that are undermining the goals of the Paris Agreement.

This emergent socioecological fix is a feature of net-zero decarbonization strategies, where recarbonization operates as a spatial fix for contemporary capitalism, displacing the contradictions of decarbonization across territories, infrastructures, and ecological relations rather than resolving them. Or, as Robb and colleagues describe it, “transforming potential barriers to accumulation within the fossil fuel industry into new sources of profit that are designed to offset, absorb, and otherwise legitimate the expansion and continued operation of its various facilities and infrastructures.”5 In a sense, this is what the abundance agenda looks like in practice—rapid growth in the supply of everything, exploding consumption and development, and little to no ability to manage who, what, and where benefits. As Fleming notes, “the decision to focus exclusively on supply—making and deploying as much clean energy generation and storage as possible—will obviously grow the total amount of power that can be produced…Yet it does not guarantee a meaningful shift in the proportion of power consumed or generated by renewables.”6 The result is a new form of landscape, sprawling and diffuse, in which carbon absorption and emissions offsets are a singular, catalyzing force. The cumulative effect of this realization of net-zero is a world of growing emissions, expanding political economic power in the fossil fuel, heavy manufacturing, and technology industries, and land-use transformation at a scale, scope, and pace that is unmatched in human history.

It is within this context that this symposium and publication project emerged. Recarbonization: Land, Capital, and the Spatial Fix of Energy Transitions aims to document, assess, and critically investigate the myriad ways in which the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and other heavy industries are erecting new barriers to the energy transition and climate action. Carbon neutrality is often discussed in planetary or atmospheric terms, but it is an inherently place-based concept, comprised of hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, utility-scale battery storage facilities, deep-well injection sites, and ecosystems reframed as nature-based solutions.

To better understand this nascent, pernicious process as it undermines the energy transition, we are seeking contributions from geographers, political ecologists, sociologists, political scientists, landscape architects, architects, urban planners, photographers, and interdisciplinary artists, scholars, and practitioners that help us document, assess, and otherwise understand the ways in which the growing capacities of renewable energy are being consumed by an emergent set of recarbonizing clusters. These clusters include, but are not limited to: (1) the fossil fuel-renewables cluster, in which projects like the Site C Dam along the Peace River are being used to legitimate the expansion of an LNG Terminal through claims of low-carbon natural gas; (2) the big data-renewables cluster, in which projects like the Mineral Gap Data Center in Virginia are powered by a utility-scale solar power plant that would otherwise have contributed new capacity to the regional grid; and (3) the heavy industry-renewables cluster, in which projects like suite of Fortera cement manufacturing facilities in operation or under construction in California that use renewables to heat their kilns, capture and storage carbon emissions on site, or both.


Submissions that are accepted will form the basis for a symposium and small exhibition slated to run in the fall of 2027 at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. The work presented at this event will be part of a new volume that we expect to publish in late 2028. We hope to include many forms of scholarship, including but not limited to:

Scholarly writing that takes the form of more conventional chapters in a volume. We expect these contributions to range from 4-6,000 words in length, with 4-6 images. We particularly welcome field-based research contributions, ongoing or incomplete, that document:

  • Projects that fit within the framework of recarbonization outlined above (e.g. data centers, fossil fuel facilities, and heavy industry manufacturers using new renewable energy capacity to legitimize their projects).
  • Projects that employ nature-based solutions or large landscape conservation methods that are framed as carbon offsets for ongoing emissions of any kind (e.g. a unit of government investing in NBS projects for the express purpose of offsetting other emissions in their jurisdiction).
  • Projects that employ technological Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies to legitimate the expansion or continuation of fossil fuel facilities (e.g. the Quest CCS project in Alberta’s Tar Sands).
  • Simulation and other model-driven analyses of the relationships between growth in renewable energy capacity and growth in carbon emissions. These may be global, national, or local in scale.
  • Theoretical and conceptual frameworks that articulate a political ecology of carbon management as it relates to recarbonization. These contributions may probe the relationship between sites and non-sites of re- or decarbonization, the ways in which carbon management obscures or justifies particular industrial and economic arrangements, and/or the kinds of alternative modes of carbon management that might be possible outside the framework of net-zero. 

Visual essays that are more experimental in form. We expect these contributions to range from 1-2,500 words in length, with 12-20 images that are organized around:

  • Meander surveys, dispatches, and other field-based explorations of the linear and/or networked sites of recarbonization (e.g. a meander survey, field notes, photographs, and drawings from a study of Louisiana’s emergent CO2 pipeline network).
  • Multimedia explorations of the territorial and planetary impacts of site-based recarbonization projects. These contributions may include archival materials that document the long-held plans for industrial expansion in a region; or cartography, photography, collage, or other image-based forms of design research that examine the physical dimensions of recarbonization and its spatial fix.
  • Material ecology studies that document the ways in which the more-than-human world is impacted by recarbonization (e.g. using novel instruments and non-laboratory techniques to examine the impacts of data center clustering in the American Southwest on water/soil quality and wildlife).
  • Works that resists extractive documentation practices or experiments with speculative, refusal-based, or counter-cartographic methods.

Objects, models, graphic novellas, photographs, paintings, illustrations, and any other expressive form of making that helps us understand, interpret, or otherwise critically examine the process of recarbonization.

  • For initial submission, these kinds of contributions can be described, photographed/digitized in draft form, or otherwise conveyed clearly enough for us to determine whether or not to accept it (and/or encourage continued development).


Please submit the following materials to billy.fleming@temple.edu by end of day June 19th to ensure full consideration. Questions are also welcome at this address.

  • Abstract (up to 600 words)
  • Author bio(s)
  • For scholarly writing submissions: 1-2 representative images; please also note if your field-based research is complete or ongoing.
  • For visual essay submissions: 4-8 representative images; please also note if your field-based research is complete or ongoing.
  • For objects, models, and other expressive forms of making: 1-2 representative images; you may also include a detailed description or series of process drawings about something you intend to make.


Artwork: Noa Mori Machover

Notes:

  1. IRENA (2025), Renewable capacity statistics 2025, International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi.
  2. Holly Jean Buck, “Building Better Worlds: How We Can Move the Goalposts from Net-Zero to Postcarbon,” in Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, edited by Billy Fleming, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026, pp. xx-yy.
  3. Billy Fleming, “Planetary Design and a Just, Postcarbon Future,” in Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, edited by Billy Fleming, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026
  4. Robb, D., Le Billon, P., & Bakker, K. (2024). “Landscapes of Recarbonization: Carbon Neutrality, Settler Colonialism, and Cumulative Environmental Effects in the Peace River Region, Canada.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 114(9), 1930–1947. 
  5. Ibid.
  6. Billy Fleming, “Planetary Design and a Just, Postcarbon Future.”