Abstract:
With the increase of the well-known cries about climate change, food insecurity, landscape degradation, rural poverty, loss of ecosystems and species, a rapidly growing world population and the recently predicted mass-migration of climate refugees, more and more of the remaining rich landscapes are expected to give way to anthropogenic purposes. The importance of taking solutions to scale grows ever more indisputable. The field of landscape architecture owns this scale and ought to be much more daring and proactive in that. This thesis project therefore suggests an alternative lifestyle design that can be implemented on large scales to replace the expansion of ‘common’ societies and thereby actually impact the planetary fate. Its essence is that this livelihood adds value to the landscape instead of only extracting from it, and to do so by reclaiming the earth’s ‘voids’ - the deserts - where little can be taken and much is to be gained - meanwhile sparing rich ecosystems elsewhere. The Sahelian biome or ecoregion - backed by the political cooperation of the Great Green Wall project - was chosen as a research target. An Atlas of the Sahel was ensembled and interwoven with facets of landscape biography and desert-greening design principles were extracted from a comprehensive list of best-practice cases of Sustainable Land Management (which is widely considered the key to land restoration and desert-greening). The last research phase investigates through literature on resilience and in-depth interviews what progress implies for the local communities of the Sahel - to align global progress with local desires. The result is an explorative vision of desert-greening societies - in the form of water-harvesting towns, craters and landscape patterns. These Void societies are active and resilient livelihoods that expand their desert-greening trace - thereby replenishing groundwater aquifers (which protects existing communities as well), fixing carbon, launchin ecosystem services, promoting a new viable economy, and meanwhile reducing conflicts. They do so by countering the environmental and social hurdles (drought, flooding, terrorism, a.o.) and seizing the regional opportunities (sunlight, space, mineral resources, a.o.) - restoring and enriching the landscape by a combination of indigenous knowledge and latest technologies. Caution is necessary in further research as the global effects of large scale desert reclamations are still underinvestigated.
