Europe’s rural areas are undergoing a socio-spatial reconfiguration due to the importance of their resources for both conservation policies and the mining industry. The research project aims to interrogate the potential of participatory critical mapping in understanding territorial conflicts arising in this process of commodification of nature. Critical cartography is understood as a tool that can bring out embodied knowledge in local communities, challenging the dominant conception of what counts as scientific knowledge and who produces it. The growing demand for raw materials, particularly in the context of the conversion to renewable energies, is leading to an intensification of extractive industries in Europe. The condition of economic and social marginality of most of these territories makes them vulnerable to exploitation and may lead to them being considered as “sacrificable” in the pursuit of ecological transition. Despite the apparent contradiction with extractivism, the previous policies promoting sustainable and ecological tourism and the creation of protected areas can share logics and practices, in order to profit from territorial resources within a new paradigm of development of rural areas. The study focuses on Portugal, a key country in the race for critical materials due to its large estimated reserves of lithium. The new mines under exploration have led to the emergence of harsh conflicts over the use of the territory’s resources between the communities, human and non-human, that inhabit them, the mining industry and institutional actors that both promote the development of tourism and extractivism. In such a context, where new events of temporal disruption give rise to conflicting visions of the territory’s future, critical participatory cartography is explored in its potential to mobilise knowledge, experiences and relationships that local communities have established with the territory, in order to challenge dominant narratives.

Irene Raverta
Universidade de Lisboa
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