Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Walloon terrils as liminal “coal worlds,” showing how coal’s afterlives shape ecologies, power relations, and new forms of exclusion, revealing energy transitions as contested, but deeply embedded in power relations.

Presentation long abstract

Coal extraction in Wallonia ended decades ago, leaving behind more than 500 terrils – artificial hills made of coal mining residue. Although the mines closed half a century ago, these post-industrial landscapes continue to shape the region’s social, ecological, cultural, and political dynamics. Today, the coal-enriched soils of terrils host biodiversity while drawing a wide range of actors—associations, public authorities, private developers, nearby residents, and users. These groups mobilise diverse and sometimes competing meanings related to environmental protection, mining heritage, territorial symbolism, leisure, and energy transition. Terrils, as genuine ruins of capitalism, have become spaces of spontaneous emergence (Tsing, 2015).

Since the 1970s, terrils are subject to new forms of appropriation. They have been re-exploited for residual resources (Bianchi, 2021), reframed as green spaces (Checker, 2020), and valued for their symbolic capital (Adam & Comby, 2020). They are targeted for solar or wind energy infrastructures. These interventions follow neoliberal spatial logics (Pinson, 2020) and a sustainability discourse (Adam, 2025), transforming peripheral places into sites of opportunity (Mattoug, 2021). They threaten uses, displace humans and non-humans, generating forms of green gentrification (Clerval, 2013) and extractive revival (del Mármol & Vaccaro, 2020).

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, 80 user testimonies, 300 press articles, and a multispecies approach, this paper conceptualises terrils as liminal “coal worlds” (Lahiri-Dutt, 2016). It argues that coal’s afterlives generate dispossession (Yusoff, 2018) and socio-ecological inequalities, revealing energy transitions and green politics as contested processes embedded in relations of domination, shaped by subjectivities (Bisoka et al., 2019).