Reframing urban: rural marginality through renewable energy communities

Abstract

Understanding the recent transformations of human settlements requires acknowledging that energy and space have historically operated as inseparable forces in shaping infrastructures, resource distribution, and territorial hierarchies. Planned industrial areas, however, consolidated a rationality grounded in productive centralisation, infrastructural concentration, and rigid separation between areas of production, consumption, and dwelling, thereby deepening the dichotomy between urban centres and marginal territories. This process generated fragmented landscapes and planning systems increasingly incapable of addressing the socio-spatial inequalities they themselves produced.

The persistence of functionalist and sector-based planning models further reinforced this discontinuity by treating territory as a sum of autonomous zones rather than as an integrated metabolism of material, ecological, energetic, and social flows. In contrast, it could be deepen some relational readings between urban, peri-urban, and rural systems, even referring to the theories developed since the 70s by some Italian radical avant-gardes that imagined the reposition of marginal landscapes as reservoirs of ecological, cultural, and productive values. Within the same perspective, Friedman reaffirmed local energy self-sufficiency as a strategic condition for thereorganisation of contemporary urban systems.

By articulating post-industrial inequality, critiques of territorial exploitation, energy decentralisation, and related landscapes, the paper intends to deepen how Renewable Energy Communities exceed the technical dimension of the energy transition and should instead be understood as territorial devices of reconnection. Embedded within the logic of urban metabolism and low-carbon circular economy, they offer the possibility of rebalancing the relations between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas, transforming marginal landscapes and inner areas into new centralities of cohesion and resilience.