Constelaciones rurales serranas : lógicas de ocupación del territorio y modelos de orden. Lecturas interpretativas de la construcción histórica del Norte de Traslasierra, Córdoba, Argentina

Abstract

A set of intentioned readings over Cordoba's ancient landscape, reveal the occupation logics developed over centuries of territorial construction. These logics result from the combination of cultural ways of domination and exploitation of the space, the technical resources available and the natural landscape conditions imposed. Models of order emerge from such processes, constituting the synthesis of human work accumulated in time and expressing ways of space organization and a specific way of rurality. The keys for future planning reside in these models. The study area is North of Traslasierra, Córdoba, Argentina, a large territory of more than eleven thousand square kilometers, with an estimate of one hundred small villages and settlements, and a population that is just over thirty thousand people. lt's an area of ancient colonial settlements and important economic weight between the seventeenth and nineleenth centuries when it entered a gradual socioeconomic decline. As a result, today it is a regional space in crisis with a significant delay in terms of territorial policies. Its "traserrana" position and the natural settlement of its valleys and mountains have also been an impediment for its development and have helped to set up a territorial invisibility box. The general hypothesis of this research is the presumption that the North ofTraslasierra is an undervaluated region -in terms of its cultural attributes - and unknown as representative of the local history. The area counts with numerous highly explanatory evidences of the regional identity and of Cordoba's native culture, offering some keys for the comprehension of the rural highland territories . Other secondary hypotheses hover around the presumption that both the scale of the Latin-American territory and the omnipresence of nature, "minimize" the traces of human work, discussing the notion of "will to project". However, it emerges the suspicion that in non-agrarian rurality (on the European way) it is also possible to discover spatial models of order appropriate to the scale and the vastness , in a way of organization that can be named "rural constellations". Therefore, the study of the production activities on the area (mules, goods, blankets and minerals) and their spatial expression, could allow the comprehension of the conformation of a way of rurality and also offer clues to rethink the future of the region. lt is also maintained that the scale of the area, the vast distances and the low density of material traces, demand the construction of a regional story to study and visualize this postponed highland space. It is intended to create new readings over this landscape of Córdoba in order to define a body of knowledge about it. In that process, the aim is to value its cultural and landscape resources, as a way to recover the regional history and to construct a narrative of the territory. Finally, new inputs of territorial order with a focus set to the material reality of the local spaces are expected to be generated in order to guide the definition of future projects and intentions at the region. The methodology is divided into two procedures: first, selective and intentioned readings of the territorial processes, applying scales which express the actions of spatial definition and using drawing as the main instrument of reading and recording, in order to get a closer proximity to a tangible reality, secondly, a description and interpretation in the sense that to understand is to interpret, and to interpret is to evidence.