Close Landscape: fragments of Vale do Ave

Marta Labastida

This thesis concerns the proximity as an alternative to reveal opportunities on the contemporary diffuse territory, proposing the definition of Close Landscape as a process and instrument that links the place and the project. Divided in two volumes, the thesis develops the appropriation of the Close Landscape through a sample of the diffuse territory of Vale do Ave. The aim is to test the operational mediation supported on a learning process that allows for a simultaneous access to the knowledge of the sight and to the opportunities and tools of the project. Close Landscape, expressed from a condition of proximity, introduces the fragment as a device that enunciates existing relationships and processes while functioning as a catalyst of possibilities. Close Landscape, understood as an approaching process, challenges the way of looking at the site while generates a grammar both to express and to transform it. The thesis confronts the operativity of what is found in the place through the relevance of the everyday, the variability and multiplicity, the unfinished and provisional, as valid approaches to the project. It proposes three specific mediation actions between site and project: to glean, to recycle and bricoler that determine particularities and opportunities for the project on the diffuse. It aims to contribute to the constant need to review the process and the tools of the project, as a means to acknowledge it as an open and provisional mechanism that activates the place by exceeding any formal commitments in order to approach a collective appropriation, by surpassing any rules of composition xi order to be operative and also by overcoming its location xi order to provide opportunities for the development of the site.