To do a landscape: variations of the Costa Blanca

Abstract

This research on the forces and forms of urbanization in the Costa Blanca, in the Mediterranean West coast, aims to rethink the collective creation of landscapes by putting side by side top-down landscape planning instruments with everyday activities of things and people that change landscapes in practice. Placed in the hyphen between the disciplines of anthropology and architecture, it is based on fieldwork done by the method of participant observation and, also, participant design. Landscapes transformed by mobile populations are a perfect site to study the difficulties in implementing the democratic approach of the European Landscape Convention. The convention defines landscape as it is perceived by its inhabitants while they constantly take part in its transformation from the inside. Though, the tools available for planners and landscape designers are heirs of a political and aesthetic understanding of landscape that fixes it either as a territory to govern or a view to admire. The research departs from the moment in which these tools are taught to architects in the school. It describes a series of courses about the topic of tourism in which students and teacher made together several experiments with the profession. An experiential methodology that continues along all the chapters wich are all practice based research. After setting the stage of the Costa Blanca in a non-representational way, through an exploration on the potential of narrative to recreate places, it develops a series of variations on the tools of the architect to work with planning. The research does not define a priori what should count as ‘tourism’, ‘spoiled’, ‘valuable’, ‘agricultural’ or ‘natural’ landscapes. Interested in the moments of enjoyment, it does pay special attention to the temporalities of landscape. Fictions, maps, summer houses, events, catalogues and agendas are all in the toolbox of the architect but here they are played in the minor key, to make variations to the major key that has a tendency to prevail. Each chapter pulls a different string from mesh of landscape ecologies of practice, and follows where it leads. The tools are thus presented anew through what was learnt in the fieldwork with lifestyle migrants that seek their place in the sun and local inhabitants that have had an active role in the urban transformations of the area. Building on scholarship in landscape architecture, anthropology, science studies, tourism, planning and speculative philosophy, it follows how actors learn to be affected in the material performance of different relations between people and landscapes. The chapters are built in counterpoint to one another, using narrative and different formatting to stress the accounts of practice and more traditional ethnography. The process of writing and presenting them becomes part of the research. Also, as ways of practice that emerge from landscape transformation related to tourism are described, the question of what making the landscapes of enjoyment does to the political and professional ways of knowing about landscape becomes a central thread of the thesis. In this, it explores how enjoyment cannot be produced, enjoyment can only happen in the collective co-production of landscape, in an undercommons where it becomes 'a task to do' - an agenda for keeping us indebted and thus engaged to each other in a shared landscape.