Affective synergies: Landscape as the origin of an ecological- cultural intermediation process

Abstract

Events like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring or the 15-M Movement in Spain, all of which were clearly carried out due to the social demands of populations seeking to recover the power of choice over the most quotidian issues (work, housing, education, leisure, etc.), speak of the resurgence of a collective need to reappropriate cities and territories through greater understanding and involvement in processes that affect their quality of daily life.

The main objective of this reflection is to provide a new point of view based on this current need to find and define new mechanisms and instruments for dialogue and relationships, and integration and intermediation. Starting from architecture and territorial design and through the creation and reactivation of new and old synergies and existing affective relationships in a territory, these strategies will enable on a local level the redefinition and restoration of a sense of domesticity and appropriation for the populations that inhabit these territories.

In particular, based on the reinterpretation of the concept of landscape brought about by the European Commission, it is proposed that the origin of these strategies be sought not in urban areas but rather outside of cities, on their edges, in certain “natural-rural” areas that still possess the appropriate scale, which is linked to the preservation and development of everyday life and the ability and symbolic-affective potential needed to become the source of a number of new relationships and dialectical and creative processes.