Landscape and wind energy: Evaluation models

Considering the landscape as a “tool” to produce the territorial and urban planning has always fascinated and involved experts with very different backgrounds. In this regard, also the Italian lawmaker has issued rules and regulations, in different periods, which have imposed the need to establish urban landscape plans. The landscape has been interpreted, often for the only goal of protection, through reading keys based upon the “opinion” of experts (government officials, superintendents, planning boards, etc.), resulting from simplistic and often apodictic value judgments. Such an approach cannot be methodologically included in the evaluation processes; it has not produced any progress in the field of territorial and urban planning, rather it has led to a wasteful conflict between “conservationists” and “transformists”. This paper does not aim at debating the evolution of the landscape concept in urban studies or the legal nature of the rules that have introduced the obligation of landscape planning, since there exists a rich literature on the matter. Instead, it seeks to deal with a much more practical and substantial topic: how to evaluate the landscape transformations caused by the construction of wind farms, since these are emblematic projects for their physical size. In this respect, the landscape evaluation is based on different stages, which define the general evaluation model. The first stage is the analysis of the state of fact in which the places and protection levels are geographically described, with the goal of characterizing the intervention area following two main reading keys of the context: on one side the landscape qualities, on the other the landscape, anthropic and environmental risks. The second stage concerns the description of the project in its engineering and architectural aspects, as well as its application in the intervention area. In the third stage, the evaluation is carried out through the definition of the evaluation model in relation to the levels of modification and alteration of the landscape quality after the project inclusion. In the fourth stage the judgment of landscape compatibility is expressed through the identification of the conditions of coherence/conflict between project and environmental context, as well as any measures of mitigation and/or compensation. Finally, the paper aims especially to address the third stage, the evaluation, which presents proper techniques of qualitative and quantitative assessment of the landscape transformations by comparing the ex ante stage (without the wind farm) with the ex post stage (with the wind farm).