Dynamic relationship between landscape and new energy system categories

Abstract Landscape is an ethics-oriented human action. Even energy systems have an active role in structuring landscape. They must establish with landscape a positive and proactive role and be able to guide it towards a conscious and structured goal. To do this, energy systems should be first identified through a functional and perceptual classification, whose steps include: structuring of the information system; identification of principles and of objective and requirement classes for interpretative classification; benchmarks for the perceptive classification of the energy systems in use; classification method; results. This process attempts to define which cases can be positive for landscape and are recognized by stakeholders as such. This, however, without using ordinary analysis and management systems. These techniques often seem to originate from the assumption that landscape is just an unchanging good to be preserved and that any human action involving it, especially with regards to energy systems, should produce the least possible impact. The starting point intends to be different, as different are also the concept of landscape and the idea of energy systems. The identified interpretive categories, related to the use of the energy system, mean to be proactive and meta-planning, as well as to provide guidelines for defining a project’s contours and possible, positive role within landscape and lived space.