Energy transition: how to improve urban landscapes

In early July, the 2025 report from the High Coun­cil for Cli­mate¹ was scath­ing: “At a time when cli­mate action is being depri­or­it­ised and the impacts of cli­mate change are get­ting worse, the High Coun­cil for Cli­mate calls for a reviv­al of cli­mate action in France.” Energy pro­duc­tion accounts for more than a quarter of France’s total car­bon foot­print and phas­ing out fossil fuels is essen­tial. The Land­scape and Energy Chair at the École Nationale Supérieure de Pays­age is devel­op­ing dif­fer­ent work­ing meth­ods to pro­mote the integ­ra­tion of renew­ables across the country.

Ber­trand Folléa. I don’t like this idea of “accept­ab­il­ity”. Our goal is to get people and developers on board with an energy trans­ition that’s actu­ally desir­able. Instead of just focus­ing on land use plan­ning, we sug­gest tak­ing a more pro­gress­ive approach to the land­scape. We can­’t just think of the land­scape as decorative.

Some people propag­ate the myth that the land­scape is unchan­ging and must be pro­tec­ted from renew­able ener­gies. This is unreal­ist­ic: our land­scape is con­stantly chan­ging, and not always for the bet­ter. Agro-indus­tri­al devel­op­ment and urb­an sprawl have dis­rup­ted our liv­ing envir­on­ments. This is due to cheap, power­ful fossil fuels, which have caused prob­lems and envir­on­ment­al dam­age. This devel­op­ment is not sus­tain­able in terms of biod­iversity, cli­mate, health or social cohe­sion. It there­fore makes no sense to want to “pro­tect the pic­ture postcard”.

The land­scape approach is based on five principles:

1. take into account the sens­it­ive nature of a pop­u­la­tion’s rela­tion­ship with its loc­al environment;
2. con­sider all liv­ing things, mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between humans from non-humans;
3. take a cross-dis­cip­lin­ary approach, because every­one con­trib­utes to the landscape;
4. adopt a col­lab­or­at­ive approach, because each per­son is an expert on their own landscape;
5. be cre­at­ive and oper­a­tion­al, mov­ing away from dog­mat­ic or ideo­lo­gic­al positions.

These con­di­tions are neces­sary for renew­able ener­gies to make sense in rela­tion to liv­ing envir­on­ments. We are revers­ing the logic: instead of put­ting the land­scape at the ser­vice of energy, we are put­ting energy at the ser­vice of the land­scape. It is a prac­tic­al and oper­a­tion­al approach.

The areas around cit­ies have been dam­aged because of our use of fossil fuels. They are now filled with busi­ness parks and car parks, drain­ing city centres of their shops. The energy trans­ition is not just about installing sol­ar pan­els on roofs and car parks. The trans­form­a­tion pro­cess must aim to improve the qual­ity of the land­scape and urb­an envir­on­ment. Photo­vol­ta­ic shade struc­tures on car parks provide an oppor­tun­ity to par­tially demin­er­al­ise them, restore veget­ated sur­faces that allow water to infilt­rate, plant a few more pleas­ant and cool­er shade trees, and give biod­iversity a chance to redevel­op. This is how the trans­ition will become more desirable.

Anoth­er example is photo­vol­ta­ic pan­els on roofs. It is pos­sible to adopt a set of com­mon rules to cre­ate a con­tem­por­ary and con­trolled roof­s­cape. In Ros­ans, in the Hautes-Alpes region, the Cent­rales Vil­lageoises (loc­al, cit­izen-led com­pan­ies that run pro­jects to pro­mote the energy trans­ition, based on a loc­al approach) has drawn up land­scape and archi­tec­tur­al recom­mend­a­tions that guide photo­vol­ta­ic devel­op­ment. This leads to a more attract­ive roofscape.

These approaches have not yet been widely adop­ted. We lack a cul­ture of land­scape design and remain stuck in the iner­tia of land use plan­ning logic, which reduces the energy trans­ition to simply adding new equip­ment to exist­ing infrastructure.

The Vosges depart­ment is a pion­eer in this field, with land­scape plans hav­ing been drawn up as early as the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the Bruche Val­ley, Saint-Amar­in Val­ley and Hautes Vosges regions have been work­ing con­tinu­ously to trans­form the liv­ing envir­on­ment through land­scape. More recently, the cent­ral Vosges region has incor­por­ated this concept into a land­scape plan for energy and eco­lo­gic­al trans­ition cov­er­ing more than 150 muni­cip­al­it­ies. ADEME pro­duced its first meth­od­o­lo­gic­al guide² on the sub­ject last April.

We are no longer used to see­ing energy pro­duc­tion in the land­scape. Cas­sin­i’s 18th-cen­tury maps show mills every­where. But at the end of the Second World War, we massively increased the use of cheap energy, i.e. fossil fuels. This led to the abstrac­tion of energy pro­duc­tion, extrac­ted out­side our bor­ders or con­cen­trated in a few nuc­le­ar power plants. When energy returned to our liv­ing envir­on­ment in the early 2000s in the form of wind tur­bines, there was no real divide between those for and against. But we failed to estab­lish a clear frame­work for discussion.

In oth­er words, pub­lic policy has failed and everything has been done to ensure that this turns into a con­flict. No inter-muni­cip­al plan­ning – which is most con­du­cive to con­crete plan­ning – has been imple­men­ted. Instead, wind farm pro­jects on a plot-by-plot basis have flour­ished, even though the install­a­tions affect an entire region. The con­flict is now a polit­ic­al one: some are fuel­ling extreme polar­isa­tion. Yet we are major energy con­sumers, and the energy mix is the only real­ist­ic option.

Estab­lished in 2015 at the École Nationale Supérieure de Pays­age de Ver­sailles by Ségolène Roy­al, the then Min­is­ter for the Envir­on­ment, the Chair pro­motes inter­con­nec­tion between the worlds of energy and land­scape. We star­ted from the idea that bring­ing these two worlds togeth­er would be more effect­ive for both the energy trans­ition and land­scape qual­ity. The Chair has four areas of focus: train­ing, research, cre­ation and dis­sem­in­a­tion of know­ledge. It has been exper­i­ment­ing with these issues with RTE, ADEME, loc­al author­it­ies and developers for 10 years.

Interview by Anaïs Marechal