Theoretical and practical disputes in the landscape of urban rural interfaces: Approachesfrom Tucumán (Argentina)

Abstract

This paper aims at characterizing the landscape expression of socio-territorial inequalities in rural-urban metropolitan interfaces (RUI), developing not only its comprehension, but an eventual cataloging as well. In this way, it is intended to enrich the landscape cataloging as a useful tool for decision-making in territorial planning. Landscape, in its contemporary notion, is defined as a social construction resulting from diverse dynamics over time, which combines material and perceptual conditions that make the strategies of the different players in the production of the territory, visible. From that perspective, it is possible to affirm that the landscapes in the interface would account for a simultaneity of forms of diverse relations between natural society and the built environment. Diversity that would be linked to two types of production dynamics: fixed and mobile, the first associated to the residential and the mobile linked to the extractive, nomadic and intensive activities of natural resources. A case study corresponding to the northeastern portion of the river coast of the Salí river in the metropolitan agglomerate of Tucumán (Argentina) is approached starting by considering the landscape as an analysis tool that allows revealing the territorialities in dispute of the IUR. The choice of this methodological strategy corresponds to the interest to explore, from conceptual categories linked to the landscape, a unit of in-depth analysis representative of the dynamics and processes that characterize the IUR in intermediate cities of Latin America. The results are the juxtaposition of at least five landscape categories that would be manifesting the inequalities in access to common property and the deep spatial fragmentation promoted by speculative strategies, linked to the reproduction of informality and labor precariousness processes.