Grünheide becoming giga? Contesting scale and pace in the establishment of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany

• Examines local contestation of the Tesla Gigafactory in Germany as a place-based justice conflict. • Moves beyond the dismissive NIMBY label through an analytical focus on place and procedures. • Understands tensions during the establishment as a mismatch of the projects pace and scale with meanings, practices, and democratic expectations of local actors. • Highlights dilemmas and pressures for rural municipalities hosting large-scale green industry projects. The transition to electric vehicles is reshaping global automobility supply chains, generating far-reaching social and environmental impacts across different places. Gigafactories, which produce batteries and electric vehicles, play a central role in this shift, making their establishment an attractive prospect but also a contentious issue for many regions. This paper looks at the establishment of the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide, Germany, a large-scale green industry project that represents a significant transformation for the locality and has sparked local opposition. While local protests were described as NIMBY (not in my backyard) in the media, research has shown that the label is dismissive and fails to acknowledge underlying motivations behind the resistance. Building on existing literature on local contestation to large-scale projects, this paper applies a place-based and procedure-orientated analytical approach. Drawing on qualitative analysis of interviews and participation in protests and public hearings, this study explores how tensions due to the pace and scale of large-scale green transition projects lead to senses of injustice. The accelerated pace in planning and participation procedures mismatches local expectations and creates feelings of procedural injustice. The scale of the gigafactory project and concerns about how the factory will grow in the future lead to a loss of sense of place, as the municipality is significantly changing from a “green” to “industrial” space. By understanding place-based opposition as a dissonance of the project's pace and scale with existing local rhythms and ideas, the paper showcases the dilemmas localities face within the global restructuring of electric vehicle production.