| Summary: | The heath landscape is an open coastal cultural heritage of Western Europe along the Atlantic coast. For over 4000 years, it has been both a distinctive agricultural type and an essential part of European development. Numerous traces of settlements testify that humans have used the landscape actively. The heather as a biotope resulted from centuries of deprivation of nutrients and was exploited to its limits. Nowadays, the Norwegian heath landscape is scarce, and it is going to disappear without a designer and locals' intervention. How should we maintain such a landscape of tomorrow? How do we approach the natural processes of overgrowing heather? The project is situated at Bliksvær - an archipelago of approx. sixty islands located 15 km west of Bodø in Norway - operating as protected natural reservoir and a nationally valuable cultural heather landscape. Investigated coastal valley and the heather field on the main island are recognizable landscape entities on the Western coast of Norway. Therefore, Bliksvær, with its rare biotope, and aesthetics can be an example for other coastal heaths where high-quality food production may be the new purpose for management inlined with tourism. The thesis aims to question the current conservation practices and implies that it is impossible to preserve the heather landscape in its totality at Bliksvær. Traditional farming does not fulfill farmers’ needs and aspirations, while modern producers pretend to be nostalgic historical actors living in paradoxes. The proposal strives for a genuine representation of a farmer to whom the heather landscape represents the landscape of labor. It welcomes both locals and new neo-rural operators to continue the management, directly impacting nature, the rural economy, and the lives of various animals. Shifting focus from cultural landscape to cultural experience may allow farmers to stay on-site by embracing and reimaging the Nordic wilderness. Gastronomic movement contributes to managing and protecting the environment. The program ...
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