No. 1 (2025): Southern transitions. Facing climate change and ecological degradation in the Global South
Ricerche

Gyratory planning. The green transition’s productivism and wind power around Foggia

Richard Lee Peragine
Dipartimento di Architettura, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Italy

Published 2025-07-16

Keywords

  • wind power,
  • Green Transition,
  • productivism,
  • planning,
  • Mezzogiorno

How to Cite

Peragine, R. L. (2025). Gyratory planning. The green transition’s productivism and wind power around Foggia . Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti, (1), 226–249. https://doi.org/10.36253/contest-16014

Abstract

This paper sets out to question the productivism that undergirds the green transition and impacts a specific territory and landscape in the Italian South, as a particular geography of the so-called Global South. In doing so, it seeks to question the logic at work within the implementation of wind turbine projects in the province of Foggia. The strategic reports and environmental assessment tools of territorial planning promote and legitimate this productivist orientation. The article in fact will firstly move from national strategies of decarbonisation in Italy to the specific planning apparatus sustaining the green transition in Italy southern region of Puglia. Three specific wind turbine projects in the province of Foggia will then be considered: three wind farms respectively in the municipality of Ortanova, Borgo Tressanti and Borgo Mezzanone. The wager is that under the current productivist auspices of the Green Transition, wind energy production requires a form of gyratory planning that, trading on the legacy of internal colonialism and uneven capitalist development, reproduces the growthist paradigm of green capitalism. In doing so, gyratory planning warrants more infrastructure, while creating green sacrifice zones and seizing on the deprivation of rural organised abandonment. 

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