Energy supply, thermodynamics and territorial processes as a new paradigm of sustainability in planning science and practice

Abstract

The world’s population is growing constantly and, more importantly, the need for raw materials and food products is growing quickly, as a result of the western development model. The energy-consuming (energivorous) and consumerist nature of this model is being consolidated globally, ignoring both the issue of resource limitations, and the medium-long term environmental consequences (e.g. climate change, water pollution). This development model, in order to maintain its internal integrity and further develop (often at increasing rates of growth), needs to import energy and materials from the external environment and to produce waste and disorder (entropy) in an inexorable slide toward thermodynamic equilibrium. Sustainable development should focus on contrasting these processes as far as possible, and on developing suitable planning praxes. This paper aims to show how to achieve sustainable land-use through local resource evaluation, overturning the "linear" logic of acquisition-consumption-disposal of wastes, in search of circular processes, capable of reducing entropy growth in a social-ecological system. An analysis of the exergetic availabilities of the landscape mosaic demonstrates great potential for exploiting energy supplies from local and renewable sources, thus lessening the system’s overall impact on the global environment.