Student Project | Landscape From Clearing

Lima is the only capital city in South America with open access to the sea, but the coastline of the district of San Miguel does not quite qualify as a beach. The wave conditions are among the highest on the entire “Costa Verde” in terms of height and intensity, making the place unusable for bathing. In addition, it is also a coastline that does not value landscape structures such as breakwaters.

For more than 15 years, this place has been polluted by more than 90 hectares of rubble and demolition debris to gain space for the sea, which has accentuated the recreational sensory dissociation with the sea and the subsequent disarticulation with its city and hillside. Authorities made plans for separate portions of land in the same coastal strip. That is why it is decided to raise a comprehensive thesis that can relate the historical sensory recreation between the citizens of Lima and its coastline and the forgotten rich ecosystem.

These dynamics have led to a decrease in seabirds, molluscs and fish due to the new sedimentation and have also highlighted the false protection against erosion. However, on an architectural level, the opportunity to take advantage of this topography, the site’s resources such as the boulders and the connectivity of the upper part of the cliff allow thinking of a new resilient future as a landscape. The possibility of improving such devastated environments in the city enriches design to create habitable places for living beings: humans, animals and plants.

From there, the thesis sets out a question: how to enable this landscape for bathing by creating a system of marine and clearing domestication for its subsequent articulation with the city and revaluation of the coast to achieve a balanced idea that works with the anthropized land as a tool for time restoration. The main objective is to lead to a different vision of landscape from the one proposed by the State, where landscape architecture is not taken into account, so the proposal is based on understanding the beach as a space for the inclusion of different social strata through leisure, sport and contact with nature, but also from the point of view of a landscape protected from erosion and a marine ecosystem. To reconstruct this new landscape, natural and anthropic resources will be used through a system of boulder gabions as elements capable of generating containment, filtration and which will form a new language in the landscape that will help to create a close link between the citizen and the sea. This will be measured, counting the amount of removed topographies, hectares of land, rocks and resources as materials that will help to re-establish recreation with the citizens and the marine ecosystem.

In relation to an event that involved excessive anthropic activity, landscape architecture shows that it is possible to reach a balance in which the sea is a means of recreation and identity for the city as well as a habitat for marine species.