Democratizing global tourism or designing diversity to reach harmony

Abstract

The largest lake in the Balkans, the largest bird "airport" in Europe, multinational, protected under the Ramsar Convention, a candidate for the UNESCO transboundary biosphere enlisting, the Skadar Lake is yet, economically speaking, an "in between" region of Montenegro. The Skadar Lake is the size of the Venice lagoon, with which it shares a parallel potential: while the renaissance Venice was geographically impossible to conquer by its enemies, making it a safe trading destination, Skadar Lake is the forgotten ecological oasis with the potential to flourish new ecological development strategies. This thesis argues that performance, payback and social motivations as design strategies prompt a new type of thinking that simultaneously critiques and challenges the ecological neutrality with which the current architectural and urban design discourse perceives the life in rural areas. It examines tourism as a vehicle to develop the region; it ignites design strategies to experiment with culture and ecological processes in order to excite relationships between the locals and the tourists, the people and the environment. Describing the heritage processes in the National Park through Felix Guattari's three levels of ecology (the human, the social, and the environmental), and establishing new consumer tastes (geared towards social and multispecies interaction, gastronomy and other aspects of local material culture), the thesis attempts to answer the following questions: Can future development of the Skadar Lake region stimulate a mode diverse economy? How can a more experiential tourism, driven by altered consumerism, stimulate the valorization of the region's landscapes and further expand them? Lastly, when almost everything has been done already, how to redefine Skadar Lake's identity in order to secure it a place on the competitive global tourism map? The thesis objective is thus to design a platform - a hybrid of the Skadar Lake's identity and the experience thereof