Renewable energy and the reshaping of extended territories in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Renewable energy (RE) production is expanding with large scale implications on the land it is extracted from, including socio-ecological systems, local regulatory practices, and sustainable urban development. With capital-intensive upfront investment, RE extraction infrastructures and practices operationalize agricultural products in the case of biofuel or electricity generation from energy crop, or the land itself in the case of solar and wind farms. In both cases, the RE generation engenders a contested relationship with established agricultural practices and subsistence farming in particular. It reshapes these landscapes into zones of high-intensity, and often large-scale industrial infrastructures – operational landscapes.In a process of externalising urban (sustainability) agendas, a dependency of concentrated urban areas on their hinterlands is further consolidated. RE projects, however, also form an increasingly sought-after opportunity for investment, creating a complex entanglement of urban interests in the RE transition. This entanglement captures the correlations that develop between urban centralities as sites of consumption and extended urban configurations underlining their role as a “strategically essential terrain of capitalist urbanisation” (Brenner 2016). This contribution looks at the geography of SEA and Singapore as a dominant regional urban centrality. It aims to further the discussion of operationalization and the question of sustainability in the extraction of renewable energy sources. The presented inter-urban linkages of renewable energy generation stress the need for a trans-local and planetary view on spatial practices of hinterland transformation. Lastly, the contribution hopes to animate the exploration of new forms of analyses, visualizations and understandings for a particular, planetary urban configuration.