Landscape by the catalogue, tensions and misalignments in the building, house by house, of the Mediterranean dream

Abstract

This paper is part of an ongoing investigation on the urbanization processes derived from tourism that, focused on the Costa Blanca, Spain, aims to rethink some planning tools in contemporary landscape urbanism. In this case, I depart from the importance of the landscape catalogue in the implementation of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and the difficulties found in practice to put into effect its democratic approach. I take the landscape catalogue as a fertile space for rethinking how landscape is created collectively nowadays and I present reflections on research in the early days of catalogue making and on fieldwork done participating in the tensions and misalignments in the building, house by house, of the Mediterranean dream in the Costa Blanca, Spain. This way, I put side by side the making of catalogues and the use of catalogues by inhabitants in building warehouses, plant nurseries or prefabricated elements, to see how, in both, the elements of the catalogue undergo a similar abstraction, being cut out from the field. Exploring the use of catalogues I intend to question the making of catalogues and to be able to rethink pre-given definitions of how a landscape is characterized through the study of how a landscape is changed in practice.