Temporal Landscapes For The Public Good: Negotiating Solar Collectors Among Ancient Remains

This article concerns the contested siting of a solar collector field in Torsng, Sweden, a designated area of national heritage. The contest is described as a 'planning drama' and a locally articulated controversy between two national policies and priorities: national heritage versus sustainable development. Two professional groups are at the centre of this drama: antiquarians at the County Administrative Board, and a group of employees at the municipally owned utility company. The article focuses in particular on the clash of two knowledge systems; how these are expressed, clarified and elaborated on when being confronted with one another in this specific situation. Temporal, horizontal and vertical scales are used to analyse the material. Contrary to what has previously been assumed to be the case for modern Western societies, the contested landscapes are shown to depend for their realization or destruction, not only on temporal and horizontal dimensions, but also on a vertical dimension including artefacts above and below the surface. The struggle to find a solution that everyone could agree on was not merely a matter of making two conflicting ways of perceiving this land come to terms. It was, in fact, an attempt to force two incommensurable landscapes into the same piece of land.