Designing the Desert: Making and Unmaking Landscape in the Arid Southeast of Spain

Positioned at the crossroads of environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities, this thesis explores ongoing processes of landscape design (formation and change) in the desert landscape of Almería in southeast Spain. This region, known as the most arid of Europe, shows the paradoxical coexistence of intensive greenhouse agriculture and pervasive depopulation. By focusing on both the making and unmaking of landscape, I propose a perspective that is attentive to the entanglement of progress and decay, creation and destruction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and cultural analysis, the thesis demonstrates that un/making landscape is not just a spatial but also a temporal process. As an intentional project that intervenes in the experience and projection of time, it not only occurs at moments of drastic change, but through those various material forms and practices that infiltrate the everyday. I argue, first, that the (re)production of normative desert imaginaries infuses human intervention in the landscape as both lived experience and discursive framing. I then analyse depopulation in the region through the concept of unmaking, which points to the gradual dismantling of material and social structures, but is also deliberative and creative. Finally, I highlight that ruination, decay and stagnation are not opposed but fundamental to the modernisation and renewal of the landscape. In this way, the thesis presents a reflection on the ways in which people engage with their environment, on the rhythms and excesses of modern progress, and on the making and unmaking of the desert landscape itself.