Cultural Landscapes of Energy: Constructing Histories of Power, Prosperity, and Decline in Europe

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Corinne Geering Torsten Meyer

Cultural Landscapes of Energy

Constructing Histories of Power, Prosperity, and Decline in Europe

Corinne Geering, Torsten Meyer

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
27 January 2026

Humanities; European history; Cultural studies; The environment; Alternative & renewable energy sources & technology; Civil engineering, surveying & building

Series: Critical Heritages of Europe

This volume explores the contested heritage of landscapes impacted by energy production. It offers a comparative perspective across Europe on different energy resources and reveals the hidden histories behind current efforts to revalorise the industrial heritage of energy production.

Including case studies from across the European continent, this volume adds a crucial historical perspective to current debates on energy transition and the future of Europe’s landscapes, which have been deeply impacted by energy production. Coal mining, oil drilling, peat extraction, and the construction of large-scale infrastructure, such as dams, have shaped ‘cultural landscapes of energy’ in present-day Europe. The exploitation of natural resources served economic development and established new industrial work cultures, but it also destroyed settlements through excavation and flooding. This volume brings together conflicting histories around work, habitation, and leisure in contemporary landscapes across Europe. Drawing on archival records, interviews, and fieldwork, the chapters in this volume combine perspectives on the productive and destructive sides of energy. They address the tensions emerging from heritage-making processes, which focus on the end of energy production despite ongoing and future commissioning projects.

This volume contributes new insights to the fields of energy and environmental history, heritage studies, memory studies, landscape architecture, and sustainability science. It provides rich materials on energy landscapes across Europe for researchers as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in energy transition, (post-)industrial heritage, and cultural tourism.

Edited by: Corinne Geering, Torsten Meyer
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032753362
ISBN 10: 1032753366
Series: Critical Heritages of Europe
Pages: 274
Publication Date: 27 January 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Corinne Geering holds a tenure-track position at the Department of Economic, Social, and Environmental History and the Linz Institute for Transformative Change (LIFT_C) at Johannes Kepler University Linz. Specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history from a transnational and global perspective, her wider research interests include the use of the past in regional and urban development. Torsten Meyer is Senior Scientist at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum/Leibniz-Research Museum for Geo-resources. His main research interests include environmental history, the history of technology (eighteenth to twentieth century), and the use of industrial heritage in regional planning.

Reviews for Cultural Landscapes of Energy: Constructing Histories of Power, Prosperity, and Decline in Europe

“Energy production has had a major impact on landscape transformation everywhere on the globe. This important collection of articles draws our attention to the environmental damage done, but also to the impact of energy production on work and leisure patterns. The case studies presented here are brimming with insights into changes to socio-economic structures, migration patterns and tourism as well as heritage initiatives. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and transformation of energy landscapes.” - Stefan Berger, Professor of Social History, Ruhr University Bochum “This carefully edited volume provides a rich and engaging account of lives entangled with energy infrastructures, in numerous European regions across the former East-West divide. The book convincingly shows how hydropower plants and dams, coal mine fields and oil rigs produced wider landscapes of hope and home, loss and resignation, and, in their afterlives, of ambivalent heritage and unsettled tourist attractions.” - Anna Storm, Professor of Technology and Social Change, Linköping University