Playing with the Line, Channelling Multiplicity: Wind Power Planning in the Narbonnaise (Aude, France)

Abstract

This paper describes an innovative planning process, the Wind Power Charter of the Regional Natural Park of the Narbonnaise (southern France). By ‘innovative’, we mean that planners' decisions relate to the site/situation which they aim to transform rather than to preexisting norms or abstract territorial representations, as is so often the case in wind power planning processes. This planning process has a direct consequence: it succeeds in taking into account the existing local landscape and in engaging it in a transformative process. Drawing upon Deleuze's and Guattari's concepts of ‘map’/‘tracing’, and on Deleuze's concept of ‘sign’, we follow the way in which landscape is circulated in this process and analyse the relational properties of the graphic representations which underlie it. The analysis relies on a follow-up of the design and consultation work throughout this process. It shows how an iconographic practice can contribute to the composition of an emerging reality (new landscape) without indexing it to preexisting and normative representations of the territory: hence the title of the paper, “Playing with the line, channelling multiplicity”, which connects the materiality of graphic forms with the nonrepresentational—with the multiplicity of the emerging energy landscapes.