DESERT TOURISM – Abstracts of Presenters

Vincent Battesti
Anthropologist; Professor Museum National d Histoire
Naturelle and Professor at the School of Landscape Architecture Versaille
Oases as Socio-ecological Landscapes

The Saharan oasis under the challenge of its landscape

The history and the structure themselves of oases recall us this obvious fact: the nature of gardens and palm groves is artificial; to be more precise, anthropic.  Surrounded by the desert, oases are usually the combination of agricultural spaces and dwellings.  Their existence itself is not necessary, but the quite common shape and structure of these ecosystems in Sahara are answers, to the severe desert pedoclimatic conditions, selected and implemented by generations of gardeners.

The result as it appears today can be seen and analyzed as an oasian landscape.  These landscapes are shaped by history, local environment, and daily practices.  Their primary purpose seems to be agricultural, but other kinds of practices contribute to their definition: gardens, even of a palm grove, are always more than a production of biomass: they produce social fabric, through everyday works, talks, evocations, or thoughts made around them.  Oasian gardens are “spaces” qualified and so turned to “places”, practiced, said, thought, with agricultural, aesthetic, social purposes…

Therewith, do we circumnavigate the oasis landscape issue?  Certainly, oasian landscapes are “built nature”, but we maybe have to find out now by whom they were built…  By “local practices”, I do not restrain my analysis to the indigenous practices but I broaden it to the nowadays-effective actors of these spaces. If I illustrate my lecture with the case of Jerid in Tunisia, I have to convene in my analysis actors of tourism and actors of development.  All, with local people, converge to define what is an oasis, what “it is for”, how to read these spaces, and this polyphony is not without effect on the share of the resources: water, land, labor and even ideas of the relation to environment.  If we focus on tourism, its impact is consequent on many daily local aspects, at first the use of the scarce water (to be used by hotels or to embellish the scenery), the labor (diverted from agriculture), but even on the definition of the oasis: a place to work or a place to stroll?  The usual local definition of the garden manages a place for leisure and work unlike European tourists who underestimate the anthropic quality of a palm grove.  An ethnoecology of the oasis landscape deals with the cross-actions of practices and narratives of various actors of this specific desert space.

Nesma Brahimi
UNESCO
Route des Ksour: From Concept to Implementation of a Local Development Project in Algeria

Algeria is Africa’s second-largest country, with an area of 2,382,741 km2, of which the Sahara occupies four fifths. In 2003, Algeria confirmed the trend of the past few years towards a consolidation of its macro-economic and macro-financial indices.
These results are due notably to the performance of the Special Economic Relaunch Programme and the National Agricultural and Rural Development Plan in a climate of rising hydrocarbon prices. Additionally, action to support small and medium-sized enterprises and youth employment helped to bring about a considerable reduction in unemployment, which currently stands at 23%. Tourism remains a minor factor despite a significant rise in the number of foreign tourists, from 140,000 in 1999 to 305,000 in 2003.

To this analysis should be added the consequences stemming from the Structural Adjustment Plan which Algeria experienced in the recent past. Indeed, the first National Conference for Combating Poverty and Exclusion, held in November 2000, highlighted the particularly painful impact on the country of the increase in poverty, which was both large and unexpected. The Poverty Map drawn up to cover all of Algeria’s 1,541 communes highlighted the fact that the mountain and plateau zone and also the South were marked by extreme poverty.

Following analysis of Algeria’s socio-economic context, the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for Algeria, produced by United Nations agencies in conjunction with the government, has outlined the reduction of poverty as one of four central themes for the 2002/2006 period.

Furthermore, the second UNDP Common Country Policy with Algeria, for 2002/2006, outlined the following areas of action as fundamental goals: the fight against the marginalisation and exclusion of the most deprived populations; the increase peoples’ living standards; and the implementation  of programmes allowing the re-integration of people through the creation of sustainable income-generating activities. 
Following the adoption of the Millennium Declaration, on 13 September 2000, by 189 Member States, the United Nations agencies were invited to contribute as a matter of priority to combating poverty. In keeping with this, the General Conference, at its 31st session in November 2001, invited the Director-General to implement a Plan of Action relating to the cross-cutting theme of the fight against poverty and extreme poverty.
This process was continued in the context of the follow-up to the World Summit on Eco-tourism (Quebec, Canada, 19-22 May 2002), of the Rio+10 Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg (South Africa, 26 August–4 September 2002), of the WTO Global Code of Ethics for Tourism and of the Plan of Action of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity.

The plan of action of the intersectoral project “The Sahara of Cultures and Peoples”, with the Ksour Road as its pilot project, was drawn up following the development of a subregional network and several field expeditions which were presented at the Ghardaïa International Workshop (Algeria, 19-21 April 2003). The experience of the Ksour Road project was, of course, intended to be shared with all the countries of the Sahara region.
Having actively participated in the Ghardaïa workshop, UNDP was directly involved with UNESCO in defining the main orientations of the overall project strategy. UNDP is strongly involved in the combat against poverty in Algeria, and brings valuable experience from initiatives such as the Timimoun-based “Community development in the south” project.

The pilot project “The Road of the Ksour” forms part of the “strategy for the sustainable development of tourism in the Sahara in the context of combating poverty” which UNESCO adopted in 2002. Its claim is to promote sustainable tourism in the Saoura-Gourara-Touat-Mzab region as a complementary economic option that can effectively counter the precarious situation of the local populations and protect the local cultural and natural heritage.

The project consists of action to provide multidisciplinary training, to restore Ksour buildings, to preserve the oasis ecosystem and to protect the tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Local actors, especially young people, the unemployed and women, are at the heart of the project and play a full part in formulating, implementing and evaluating it.

Three strategic principles give structure to the overall project approach, with a view to sustainable development and combating poverty.
Ownership, involvement and responsibility by local actors
Local actors, especially young people, the unemployed and women, take part in the definition, preparation, management and direction of the project. These local actors participate in the various associations involved in the project. Subsequently these associations delegate an umbrella association to take responsibility for the operational organization of the project. In this way the project empowers local people through the training of staff to manage it, local acceptance of responsibility for the problem and oversight of the actions undertaken. The overall conduct of the project should promote active democracy and “local governance”. The other key area for the involvement of local people is training and education in activities related to tourism, building and the environment.

Equality and the empowerment of women is an important goal of the project. From this viewpoint, the project seeks to set up mechanisms to enable women to take part in all phases of the process. It must go beyond the mere production of craft products (generally sold by men) and aim to highlight and enhance their specific skills.

The development of active teaching based on the “learn and do” principle in the different areas of the project (environment, heritage, tourism)
The second principle is to promote awareness and lifelong learning among local actors. At every stage from identification to implementation (conceptualisation, rehabilitation, manufacturing, promoting, marketing and evaluation), products are created using tried and tested techniques that are adapted local development requirements. Two basic principles and motivational factors are involved: “learn and do” and active teaching, which consists of doing while learning. This also avoids the risk of grafting ready-made answers on to local realities, allows independence from economic dogma, and enables the participants’ independence and adaptability to be developed.

Similarly, the first cross-cutting training activities allow a maximum number of people to be involved in the project, creating the beginnings of a culture of tourism. This will allow certain participants to rapidly become trainers and educators themselves, having gained an initial practical experience.

Strengthening cooperation by setting up machinery for multidisciplinary exchanges at national, subregional and international level:

Although the pilot project concentrates on specific Ksour, the project is based on the premise that knowledge and skills will be exchanged between the different sites, and the initiatives undertaken will create a momentum. A key factor in this exchange will be the development of a network linking towns and rural areas, chiefly through contacts among associations. With effective sub-regional participation, neighbouring countries can also benefit from the positive outcomes and lessons learned from the Ksour initiatives. This networking will also be facilitated by the establishment of cross-border cultural tourism circuits linking World Heritage sites.

The overall strategy has three interdependent aspects:
Ø      The heritage: the value of local skills and knowledge 
Promoting mud-brick building, to promote authenticity and contemporariness.
Recognizing and passing on the skills of the Maalmine, the traditional master builders.
Setting up and supporting local building cooperatives and associationsØ      The environment: an ecosystem in need of preservation
More active conservation of resources and use of renewable energy sources.
Training and promotion of scientific research.
Training and awareness in environmental protection.
Support for a participatory approach in resolving environmental problems.
Ø      Tourism: a complementary occupation / a tool for development
Promoting local awareness and training in the management and implementation of tourism.
Interlinking the sites through exchange and training programmes in tourism.
Appropriate choice of sites.
Ensuring that the introduction of tourism is done in a controlled and reasonable way.
Establishing national and cross-border cultural tourism routes.

Aziza Chaouni
HUGSD
Mythopoiesis in the Moroccan Desert Landscape

Ever since the Sub-Saharan region of Morocco, the Grand Sud, was opened to tourism in the late 1930’s one type of accommodation has been predominant in the tourist landscape: the Kasbah-hotel. This typology is often criticized as a homogenous body of middling simulacra of Southern Moroccan architecture, a tasteless fabricated authenticity disrupting the pristine landscape. This paper will argue that, on the contrary, the aspiration of this typology is less the mimicry of the referent, the actual Kasbah, than the attempt to hybridize and invest an iconic architectural form with new meanings and program. The negotiated architecture of the Kasbah hotel offers not only an inventive revival and reinterpretation of the ethereal Kasbah, but also an accommodating platform for the expression of shifts in national identity, political agendas, and aesthetic aspirations. The Kasbah hotel is thus a privileged locus for the study of the intersection of modernity, vernacular forms, and tourism’s underlying politics. The examination of the genealogy, persistence, evolution, and hybridization mechanisms of this model is even more crucial today when the Kasbah-hotels have paradoxically came to represent a large part of the Grand Sud remaining “built heritage” and thus occupy the position of a ‘traditional, authentic’ referent.

Aziza Chaouni, BSc. March., is a structural engineer and an architect. With partner Jeannette Kuo, she is the co-founder of KCD, a multi-disciplinary design collaborative, which works on projects in the US, Europe  and North Africa.
Last, year Aziza researched desert tourism in the Sahara under the Appleton Travelling fellowship awarded by the GSD.
Aziza is the Aga Khan Visiting Fellow as well as a Visiting Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design. She is co-teaching this semester a studio on the city of Fez with Professor Sarkis, and a research seminar with Professor Lefebvre. She is the co-chair of the Desert Tourism Conference with Professors Sarkis and Lefebvre. Her research on Saharan tourism from last year will be presented in an exhibition acoompanying the Conference.

Chris Johnson
Ecologist, Director of ‘Wild Jordan,’ the division responsible for eco-tourism development at the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN)
Desert tourism as a vehicle for nature conservation: the Jordanian experience

The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), a long established Jordanian NGO, has been developing tourism ventures in its desert parks for over twelve years as a means of generating revenue, community benefits and awareness to support its conservation goals. Its first venture was in the spectacular Dana Nature Reserve, at the edge of the Jordan Rift valley, where an array of eco-tourism facilities and activities were developed that now attract over 35,000 visitors a year and provide enough revenue to cover most of the Reserve's running costs. Dana is widely considered as a regional model of sustainable biodiversity conservation and the RSCN has been applying 'Dana principles' to all its protected areas. This paper examines the effectiveness of these ventures in meeting conservation goals and presents the major lessons learned and hopes for the future.

Chris Johnson, BSc. MSc., is an ecologist and conservationist, specializing in the institutional strengthening of environmental NGO's and the development of eco-tourism and other nature-related businesses. He started working in Jordan in 1994 to help establish the Dana Nature Reserve as a model of integrated conservation and development.  He is now the Director of "Wild Jordan', the division responsible for eco-tourism and socio-economic development at the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature.

Gini Lee
University of South Australia
Three Scenarios For a Critical Architecture of Desert Mobility

Three scenarios for a critical architecture of desert mobility

An invitation to consider the existence of critical architectures has prompted me to present another way of looking at the ‘hybrid’ architectures that I encounter in the Australian outback. In particular, the statement that ‘the term critical architecture implies a mode of architecture that opposes dominant economic and cultural strands, and hints at an alternative form of practice that does not reproduce prevailing values’ is extremely pertinent. In this context I examine certain small architectures and built landscapes in places remote from urban sensibilities; where people build and occupy marginal environments that reveal certain site-specific ecological, economic and social conditions at play in the desert.

Notions of mobility , whether temporary, portable, or transportable, frame this writing, particularly with regard to works that embrace the intersections of art, architecture and landscape. In this review of the relationships between some temporary and mobile architectures located in (extra)ordinary cultural landscapes I discover a critical architecture that uncovers the artful in the everyday pragmatics of remote inhabitations. This account of the architectures that emerge in the iconic landscapes of central Australia infers the tradition of the folly in the picturesque landscape. But even as these ‘follies’ frame photo opportunities for tourists, they also indicate a cultural approach to settlement, and they are more obviously examples of necessity as the maker of invention. They are architectures of mobility that respond to an ecological imperative based upon scant resources and insecure foundations characterized by chance results.

An introduction to certain remote places

 Moving around towns in the middle of South Australia such as Coober Pedy or Mintabie, geographically in the heart of Australia (otherwise known as the outback), one is confronted by places formed by spatial and material coincidence; where compositions of artefact and reworked topography, and middens of discarded material, emerge from the desert and from architectures and landscapes in the mind.  In these compounds, temporary settlers live and work within the day-to-day practices of existence in remote and largely unsustainable environments. People still come to try their luck, strike it rich and hope to move on to greater comfort elsewhere. These ‘mobile grounds’ occur in many outback towns over Australia, where get rich quick opportunity seems to abound, but the reality is often something else. Of course, many stay on for ever; looking for that elusive find, blowing whatever is earned on a few big nights out; or the place imprints in their souls, so that leaving never happens.

The places are known for their concealed architecture; the dugouts, where activity occurs underground and much that is visible above ground is a forest of air and exhaust chimneys. Yet there are other architectures here that also demonstrate the reality of occupying and building under conditions where the physical consequence of remoteness from the urban fringe and the reality of climatic extremes, meet the cultural conditions of mining, pastoral and tourist activities based upon global markets and a frontier mentality of hard work and hard play. These architectures and their material qualities are not documented in the tourist literature; perhaps it is because they are too handmade or hybrid and their aesthetic too raw or mundane. But ‘dirty realism’ has ever required the eye of a ‘curator’ to emerge, and my photographic practice is aimed at revealing these overlooked architectures, as architectures.
The narratives implicit in these ‘hybrid’ architectures have not been recognized by mainstream planners, builders and architects.  When they venture to build in remote places, they import their exemplars from elsewhere: yet the nature of mining claims generates an evolutionary and organic development of sites and dwellings. Despite this, the adjacent service towns are ultimately laid out within whichever planning framework has been fashionable during the stage of town development. Most are now populated by spectacularly poorly conceived prefabricated suburban housing and services.

My recording of the intrinsic architectures that I perceive in the ‘vernacular’ below and beyond these ‘planned’ developments was made over a number of journeys, where photographs of the material qualities of rural and remote places in South Australia resulted in postcards that sought to celebrate the cultural fabric of these places through their architecture. I was concerned to record the material coincidences arising from the nature of occupation, the availability of economic and material resources for settling, the qualities of site and services, and the building and marking practices that resulted. These recordings also uncover attitudes that express architectural improvisation and evolution and alternative approaches to dwelling and interaction with landscape in harsh environments.
Propositions on postproduction: revealing the architecture behind the seemingly ephemeral and transitory

In framing this work, I am influenced by Nicolas Bourriaud’s essays on (the art of) postproduction. He suggests that postproduction practices are essentially about the recycling of existing material into new material and asserts that post-produced works contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original. These practices work with objects that are already in circulation through material manipulation. Bourriaud questions current practices when he asks; how can we make do with what we have, rather than make new when there is a wealth of material already available for manipulation and (re)presenting through interrogation of existing forms that will enable producing different results. In postproduction theory, the work functions as a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives. Regarding built works, (re)programming the existing is evident in the making and remaking of the ‘hybrid’ architectures and/in landscapes in remote places.

There are architectural types that emerge in remote desert places that exhibit a unique visual aesthetic reflective of prevailing conditions and defining narratives. They are described through a spatial and material reading that also infers a range of actions such as transformation, evolution, improvisation, appropriation and mediation. These actions parallel those that are introduced in postproduction theory, where art and installation practices utilize the activities of insertion, occupation, manipulation of the ‘original’ and appropriation.

In the following three scenarios I suggest ways of reading the postproduction practices of the builders and makers of these desert architectures through the theoretical lens of (conceptual) mobile ground.

Mobile ground 1: on architecture merging to landscape

Coober Pedy: hill (and garden) topography 1

A chronology of occupation and development, boom and bust, and use and obsolescence, are evident in the spatial arrangement of mining compounds constructed in association with hill topographies. The caravan is the first act of occupation. In time and with the success of the mine, a range of sheds and shelter structures are built beside the caravan and then into and then over the mine workings. Gradually, the space of the mine and the hill become fused, the relative plasticity of corrugated iron clad framing allowing forms that mimic or even structure the working of soil and topography.

Socially, the house and the mine are interdependent. A miner’s domestic arrangement is merged with working life where the living room is often also the entrance into the underground workings or deep into the hill. These multipurpose dwellings allow for an economy of scale and construction, for expanding and decreasing populations, and for security. Surveillance and protection of valuable mining claims and gem storage is paramount to the safe workings of these places. Dynamite is readily available, demarcation disputes and robbery occurs, so a single entry reduces the availability of access: these places are also fortifications.

Here, the hill provides a framework for the spatial installation.  Corrugated iron is easily transportable and relatively abundant as a protecting skin. Often appropriated or borrowed, corrugated iron sheeting folds into architectural forms and moulds to extant topography. Many remote areas are ‘out of council’, which means that few building regulations exist, constructions can appear overnight, and just as quickly be abandoned as need arises. And the rusting, discarded machinery lying about reflects an encompassing garden of dreams and aspirations, where the placement of this stuff defines the outer perimeter of the compound, and marks territory alongside the active mine/house. These desert gardens serve as a spare parts shop, available to all. This kind of mobile ground appropriates existing topographies, spaces, and abandoned/unused and new materials. A new aesthetic and a new program for dwelling and working arise from reworking sites of activity.

The first move that persists is the principle of ‘mobile ground’. It is particularly visible in the urban fabric of these remote places. The first construction or the original vehicle that provided for shelter, or for a workplace, or a lockup against marauders and animals never appears to lose its influence as a foundation for the future installments of development.

Mobile ground 2: on material (re)contextualization

Coober Pedy: the articulated shed

The next stage may emerge from many quarters; material may be ordered from town (town, in this context is the nearest major city, some 800 kilometers away) and transported up on road trains, or scrounged from a neighbor, or the components may be collected from an adjacent pile of redundant building materials. Nothing is discarded if it may be reused later: in these places, waste and rubbish piles are material ‘commons’ available for picking over and not an affront to the city beautiful.

It is possible to read the history of building, rebuilding and reuse written on the weathered and patched walls of successive sheds, in successive locations, by successive builders. Buildings are connected through the archive of their materiality. Through a close inspection of corrugated iron profiles and colours, or of window frames, you can infer previous installations; on adjacent sites, or in other parts of town, or even in other towns. In Oodnadatta, there is a man who paints all his buildings a particular shade of bright pink. Wherever this pink is seen along the track, it is thought that Adam has been there, either in reality or certainly in the imagination.

Material layering becomes spatial layering, when the first shelter, the physically mobile shelter, is parked within a temporary but less mobile enclosure. Mobility on wheels gradually moves towards fixity as people stay on. When shelter is built over a mobile shelter, the wheels are usually removed. These material layers reveal evolving attitudes to climate and protection of the settler, no longer a nomad; yet it seems that the potential to remobilize is always on hand.

Amusing juxtapositions of ‘hybrid’ architectures are really evidence of a serious culture of making-do; and then forging of narratives that deal with evolving and altered stages of occupation. This reprogramming of existing fabric and artifact into new or reworked and re-conceptualized dwellings is a material mobility, where the pragmatic reuse of material is fixed around a settler’s first move, contributing to an unlikely but clearly articulated architectural intention.

Mobile ground 3: on the ephemeral inside/outside and adapting the mass produced 

Parachilna: mobile ATCO accommodation (with shade)

The ubiquitous ATCO shed has replaced the caravan as the mass-produced shelter of choice in many remote places. Little more than a glorified container, the ATCO is modular, can be perforated to allow ways to get in or out, fits on a semitrailer, and can be connected to services (if they exist) in a jiffy. It can be readily moved from place to place, up and down the road; can contain anybody and anything, and sit lightly upon the ground; although they can be hard to shift without heavy machinery. There is little inherent charm in the bare-faced ATCO, and it pretends no site specificity. Its modularity allows for ATCO compounds and settlements to be set up wherever and whenever. As the use of the ATCO increases, an experiential sameness is creeping into tourist facilities in the outback.

Despite the ATCO’s fine qualities and ready availability, it is impossibly unrewarding to inhabit – you are either inside it or outside it, and there is no obvious room for mediation in the mass produced object. However, ATCO interventions are evident in many remote places, devised to improve the living environments for those unfortunate enough to be living in them full time; and for international backpackers, who may find the landscape and the weather unrelenting. It is, in reality, possible to hang anything off or cut any hole into an ATCO – it is the ultimate mobile ground concept within a strict modular framework. Its ubiquitous flexibility has produced a number of sheltering forms that allow for extensions to both the view and to the immediate external spaces of the ATCO compound. In these adaptations, the contained space of the ATCO shelter is opened up or extended to create a link between inside and outside. For example, a single window punched through the container focuses views on to the landscape beyond, and a shade cloth enclosure or verandah mediates exposure to sun, wind and dust.

Through the medium of this mass produced product a pragmatic mobility coincides with spatial experimentation aimed at mediation between inside and outside. The container, in every way an expressionless and unrelentingly uncomfortable box, an identifiable product of a universal solution to the need for a transportable shelter, is liberated from its limiting properties. Actions taken to allow for movement across the wall are mostly about making connections with the landscape, with relieving a claustrophobic interiority, and with bringing the outside, inside. The alternative actions provide a spatial mobility across the wall, to enclose exterior space and expand interior space while providing for climatic relief from sun, heat and flies. The containment provided by translucent shade structures evokes other ephemeral shade conditions, those that convey the temporal passage of sunlight and shadow.

Desert mobility: in three if not more ways
If, as suggested above, grounded space has become conceptually ephemeral, then the methods of spatial occupation that I have observed in these architectures are concerned with physical and ephemeral mobility. ‘Hybrid’ architectures involving temporary and mobile insertions into existing building and landscape fabric express programs where transportability and evolutionary response to changing conditions are essential, yet unrecognized, architectural practices in places affected by cultural and physical remoteness.

People living in remote areas have always operated within communication and living systems based upon improvisation of scarce materials, transforming existing practices to suit transience, and mediating between local and external ecological conditions. The visible result of these operations resides in the use and reuse of materials and building forms that work to mediate and reprogram relationships between architecture and landscape.

‘Hybrid’ desert architectures operate within social and cultural, as well as physical, ways of experiencing mobility. The shelters in remote South Australia, as compositions of container, caravan and ATCO architectures have been realized without an architect as author and are certainly post-produced. These seemingly dissimilar projects are connected through shared degrees of mobility, where response to landscape context is concerned with a regard to spatial and material mobility, and to the passing of time. Impermanence is evident in ways in which the ground is touched lightly, and in evolutionary adaptations to material and immaterial conditions; even the architectures that emerge from the topography appear as a temporary wrapping, such as might occur with a tarpaulin thrown over a gaping hole. Yet, over time each project tends to ‘ground’ towards permanency. Even in their ruin state, these ‘hybrid’ architectures mutate from the caravan to the shed to the house/shelter, and they transform into structures where mobility and fixity coincide. Yet, there is the sense that they could take off at any time, through demolition and rebuilding or through a re-engagement of wheels or even through the act opening out.

Do I believe that a mobile and less permanent architecture is more inherently suited to a critical position, or not? These desert architectures demonstrate alternative forms of practice that work outside the cultural and economic agendas of our dominant urban environment. Due to their remoteness, they are barely known. Whether a critical, theoretical perspective is relevant to these practices is probably not the point, as professional architectural practice will probably remain a distant concept in outback Australia. Yet the practices and narratives that emerge in these constructions may inform architectural practice, across all places where distinctions between architecture, art and landscape collapse.