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Paper short abstract

Murcia’s sun is both hazard and asset. Tracking toldos, climate shelters, and PV parks, I show how the renewable transition remakes land and value: comfort and exposure meet leases, access disputes, and “green” justice claims, yielding polarized local futures.

Paper long abstract

In the Region of Murcia, Spain, the sun is a condition to be mitigated and a resource to be captured. This paper develops an elemental ethnography of the sun to examine how the renewable energy transition reshapes land, value, and everyday life through two interlinked infrastructures: urban shade and cooling dispositifs, and large-scale photovoltaic parks. In the city and towns, heat is governed and lived through mitigation practices—toldos and arcades, timed routes, improvised shade, and the designation of “climate shelters” that recast libraries and public buildings as refuges during heatwaves. In rural and peri-urban Murcia, photovoltaic expansion reconfigures landscapes and access, intensifying disputes over what land is for, who can inhabit and traverse it, and how “green” development distributes benefits and burdens. Recent research on Murcia documents land-use change associated with photovoltaic parks, including new configurations linked to self-consumption and solar installations connected to irrigation and desalination infrastructures.

Drawing on initial fieldwork around Murcia, I follow the sun across these domains as a value-making medium: from the sensory choreography of avoiding exposure to the contractual and moral economies through which radiance is translated into leases, compensation, maintenance labor, and contested landscape futures. I argue that the solar transition cannot be understood only through targets or technological promise; it must be approached as a struggle over land and valuation, where comfort and risk, heritage and livelihood, and visions of “clean energy” become entangled in localized negotiations—producing polarized destinies in which some gain viability while others face enclosure, devaluation, and intensified exposure.