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Paper short abstract

Hydrogen and lithium socio-technical imaginaries co-produce regional space in Northwest Bohemia, Czech Republic. We use the concept of Re-infrastructuring to show how industrial/coal legacies shift from burden to asset, exposing place-based transition as contested and uneven.

Paper long abstract

This paper is a case study of negotiating the EU's just energy transition in the regional context. It examines discourses surrounding the proposed hydrogen economy and lithium mining projects in Northwest Bohemia (Czech Republic), a coal- and industry-dependent region currently targeted by EU transition funding/decarbonisation. The paper advances the claim that decarbonisation is characterised by an inevitable intersection between socio-technical futures and socio-spatial transformations: socio-technical imaginaries (of "hydrogen economies" or "critical minerals mining") actively reconfigure spatial imaginaries of regions, while spatial imaginaries (of peripheries, corridors, hubs, or "affected territories") reciprocally shape what these technologies can plausibly mean and how they are justified. To render this mutual dependence empirically visible, we introduce re-infrastructuring as an analytical concept. Re-infrastructuring condenses the relationship between socio-technical and spatial imaginaries and allows us to trace it across both material registers (inherited infrastructures, sites, labour, landscapes) and immaterial/institutional registers (funding instruments, governance arrangements, expertise, know-how, and discursive repertoires). Our central argument is that regional transition politics is organised around attempts to re-infrastructuralise institutional–socio-material inheritance to reassemble what regions already "have" so that inherited burdens become narrated and governed as assets and future value; disconnection becomes connectivity; and historical grievances are translated into continuity and strategic regional positioning (e.g., from an extractive "energy reservoir" to an "energy heartland" and "laboratory"). The paper thereby reframes place-based transition not as a neutral policy principle, but as a contested process of regional revaluation with distributive consequences.