Sustainability, resiliency and authenticity of rural landscapes. The forced relocation of inhabitants at a port in Terraba Sierpe wetlands, Costa Rica, and the ‘un-ruled’ practices in the abandoned landscape of Penyagolosa mountain, Spain.

The poster presented hereby is intended to establish a lively debate on the eventual interpretation of the dynamics in two specific rural landscapes and how their analysis depends on the ability to appropriately select and assimilate the transformations of the place. The two cases expose potential problems that arise when interpreting and managing these rural landscapes. Interpretations can be ‘colonial’ or ‘indigenous’. These approaches, therefore, aim to question why space is sometimes constructed under ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ interpretations of imaginaries, behaviours, expressions, and adaptations which result in characteristic experimentations and transformations of the rural landscape. In this realm, the approach to the rural landscape in Costa Rica is contextualized by its sustainable development, the conservation of biocultural heritage and the resilience to climate change. This analysis seeks to consider ‘social sustainability’ and the need to reconsider what are the parameters that define the buffer zone of the World Heritage Sites at Terraba Sierpe wetland. Traditionally, the surrounding populations established patterns of coexistence in that wetland system, using natural channels as means of communication between the settlements and making artificial dykes to conduct the wastewater. Currently, these ancestral practices and the climate change reluctance premises have been ignored when carrying out the site management plan, the real needs and rights of its inhabitants have been ignored, forcing them to move to another site and leave behind their habitat, life forms and port city activities. The second approach is located in the Mediterranean, in a rural landscape of Spain. Here, sometimes ‘sustainable’ is synonymous with ‘pragmatic’ when referring to heritage management. Depending on the levels of significance of a place, the authenticity of the local streetscapes is what becomes vital to sustaining a rural town. The study analyses divergences in the conceptualization and stratification of heritage, and how the search for authenticity depends on the ability to ‘sustain’ and assimilate asymmetries in-between the ruled conservation and the un-ruled spontaneity. This case broaches a fundamental issue on how attributes in cultural landscapes need to be understood, enhanced, experienced and managed in innovative ways that may allow to open up new possibilities for recognising alternative and dynamic heritage’ values in the ‘un-ruled’ and abandoned cultural landscapes. The two approaches pose different questions on the inevitability, and creative potential of changes and loss in cultural landscapes. Hence, this poster is intended to raise the following critical questions: 1. Social sustainability speaks of dynamism, change, hybridity and even abandon and de-population threats. Are we ready to accept and properly manage the loss as part of an authentic and sustainable process? 2. Is it our look for authenticity and integrity in rural heritage ‘colonial’ or ‘indigenous’? Do we really look for the social integration and local actions responding to their current socio-cultural entanglements? 3. How further various waves of newcomers bring another overlay, much of which often is sourced from their original cultures and this too can cause conflict and a clash of values? How can we apply critical considerations to the inner and outer perceptions, appropriations and transmigrations