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– The Saharan oasis put to the test of its Landscape: The Jerid.
Chapter in Virginie Picon-Lefebvre with Aziza Chaouni, Desert Tourism: tracing the fragile edges of development, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, Series: Aga Khan Program of the Graduate School of Design, 2012, p. 104-117 (ill.)
ISBN 13: 978-1-934510-18-6 /ISBN 10: 1-934510-18-1
PDF File: https://hal.science/hal-00569247
On the Publishing house website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog....
– Short abstract:
Certainly, oasian landscapes are “built nature”, but we maybe have to find out now by whom they were built… 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.
– Resume of the book Desert Tourism: tracing the fragile edges of development (Virginie Lefebvre, with Aziza Chaouni eds.):
Deserts are becoming increasingly popular tourist destinations. However, the growth of this tourism niche raises particular challenges, jeopardizing their fragile ecosystems and straining scarce resources. Paradoxically, the increasing popularity of desert tourism is undermining the very essence of the allure of these places. In developing countries, the consequences are even more drastic, as local populations live in dire conditions with few resources and insufficient infrastructure, rarely benefiting from tourism’s economic effects.
This book seeks to analyze the relationship between tourism and the sustainable development of those territories, addressing issues raised by architecture, landscape design, and planning. Following a historical perspective, Susan Miller, Claude Prelorenzo, Neil Levine, and Aziza Chaouni show how the imaginaire of the desert was invented by movie directors, writers, and architects. Virginie Lefebvre, Alessandra Ponte, and Kazys Varnelis explore traces of previous conflicts that transformed deserts, from war to peace, into touristic destinations and places for experimentation. Finally, an analysis of contemporary conditions helps to measure the challenges still to be faced: Vincent Battesti tackles the ethnocultural landscapes of the oasis, Chris Johnson the preservation of deserts and impacts on local communities, and Gini Lee the use of deserts as creative places for artists.
– To download the chapter (pdf format):
– Proceedings of the conference “Desert Tourism: delineating the fragile edge of development”, at Harvard Graduate School of Design, April, 2007.
See page dedicated to the lecture given for this conference.