12. Atlas of Conclusion - Fields of Operation

 

Projective Sandscapes gave us the opportunity to reflect upon multiple agendas and chiefly on the concept of legacy, produced by specific forms of territorial management. The knowledge extracted from this research demonstrated us that political inheritance is a crucial determinant condition, in relation to the resulting social formations, to be taken into account in our proposal. In Nukus and the Aral Sea basin, Soviet over-imposed a particular system of cotton production and designed an urban model to exploit a territory and its resources without engaging with the real capacity of its environmental condition. 
The consequence of this management continue to reverberate to this day, more than two decades after the fall of the USSR.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, their management policies left behind a territory emptied from its resources, with no alternatives and with the legacy of unwise and retrograde water practices, a forced labour system which obligates population from all ages to harvest cotton seasonally and a common property policy for land which therefore control production and goods market.
Reflecting upon this legacy and how it conditioned our proposal, it led us to re-think our desertification atlas of Europe. It made us question which past territorial forms of management have ruled in each of the particular sites across Europe, producing as a result contemporary conditions such as the desertification occurring across the Monegros Desert in Spain due to overexploitation of water resources and oil extraction and water distribution conflicts accrued, for example, in Greece with the shrinkage of the Koroneia Lake caused by a massive plan of intensive agriculture or that of Lake Tuz in Turkey provoked by the construction of dams and well drilling. Despite the fact that the overarching argument of the atlas, related to over-exploitation policies, brings together all these particular sites such as the Highlands, the Bledow Desert and Olehsky Sands under the umbrella of desertification conditions, the idea of the territorial legacy underlines the specific and unique particularities of each of the sites, questioning the very possibility of considering them at the scale of a common European policy, as though the 
Florence Convention aims at doing. 
Whilst the Atlas of Guilty Territories aims at unveiling remote and transboundary consequences within the frame of Eurasia desertification process, the new cartography attempts at disclose on-going effects over landscape from dominant collective policy-maker such as the European Union and Russia. The over-exploitation and desertification becomes significantly a matter of discussion especially across borders and remote landscapes involved which particular productivity chains. These grounds would be warranted fields of operation where new strategies take place. What we learned is that significant social conflicts are tightly stranded together with political and territorial approaches, and specifically in this case to desertification processes. At any given time environmental emergencies provoked by the scarcity of resources and therefore competitive practices are inciting large scale migrations across perilous routes towards Europe. Uzbek cities which were formerly relying on fishing production from the Aral Sea and later on the expansion of the cotton monoculture cultivation, are rapidly shrinking because populations are moving to city centres and abroad for better life and job opportunities. Desertification processes are swiftly threatening all the agriculture production and water resources availability. 
This brings to ask ourselves which is the role of the European Union within this frame of instability and which is the meaning of territorial border when it comes to deal with territorial influences negotiated by over-imposed systems of production, especially where their legacy provokes particular consequences both of territorial managements and  social change.