DEMO:POLIS - The Right to Public Space. Catalogue

Date: 2016
Author: Miriam García García
Published work: Regulation Plan for the Coast of Galicia (Galicia, Spain)
Publisher: Barbara Hoidn (ed.). Park Books, Zürich / The University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture 2016

The last decade has seen the Galician coast undergo rapid, uncontrolled development that has threatened to not only damage the aesthetic unity of the coast, but its integrity as an ecological-anthropological system as well. The Galician Coast Management Plan (POL) aims to counteract this development by establishing principles and general guidelines for the integral management of the coast. Applying the criteria of durability and sustainability to urban models of land use, the Plan focuses on the conservation, protection and enhancement of the importance of coastal areas. It also considers the dynamic processes implicit in the socioecological evolution of the area.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Plan is its use of analysis and description of the landscape as a method for developing a new way to read and map the site. The model proposes a structure that builds on various complementary and co-existing elements of the territory, honing in on the peculiarities of each environment in order to enable the dynamic management of the territory. The “natural features” of the coast are therefore interpreted as a potential green infrastructure requiring its own planning framework. Man-made features in the territory, on the other hand, are collected into the concept of a “brown infrastructure,” a definition flexible enough to encompass all activities – on various scales and durations – that constitute the material and immaterial cultural heritage of the area.

The plan encourages the integration of both infrastructures as a landscape infrastructure socioecological system to recover the legibility and functionality of the coast.

Most significantly, the Plan reinterprets landscape as a tool for a multiscalar approach, in which information becomes a formative component and therefore a key element for reflection and motivation in regional planning. This enables decision making through a participatory and dynamic perspective.