Architecture as landscape. Strategies for preserving the identity of landscape in urban context. Case study : project: Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Canary Islands

As global urbanization continues with a fast pace, territories are more often viewed as seamless artificial landscapes, with no physical boundaries. The distinction between urban and rural, between city and countryside becomes blurred and irrelevant in the discussions about the contemporary city. So the discourse of urbanism is widened. Besides the usual interest for the urban form it is taking into consideration landscapes, ecosystems, connections, networks, territories, infrastructures. This multidisciplinary approach would be the interest of the thesis project. Puerto de la Cruz is a city that has been shaped by agriculture through time, but feeling the effects of globalization, there are loads of farmlands inside and in the outskirts of the city, that have been abandoned due to push for the competitive export- oriented farming and the turn to tourism as a main economic drive. The abandonment leads to undesirable changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services. The loss of small scale mosaics of land use also effects the biodiversity dependant on the extensively managed agricultural land. As people are abandoning the farmland and turning to tourism, the urban sprawl is slowly taking over the leftover landscape. Puerto de la Cruz is slowly losing this identity of an agricultural place with a terraced landscape. The aim of the thesis project would be to explore the ways to intervene in such particular landscape of Puerto de la Cruz, formed by different agricultural activities layered in time and now abandoned. This specific landscape is forming the identity of the city, so the subject of how to reuse this type of land is quite delicate. How to twist the direction of development of a city like Puerto de la Cruz from a typical touristic area affected by globalization, taken over by the urban sprawl and losing its particularly rich identity, into a self sufficient community, that is aware of the qualities that the land offers.