A Territorialist Perceptive Approach to Composing Landscape Atlases, Salluit and Inukjuak
Landscape atlases – photographic collections linking the territory and its occupation – can engage local populations in a participatory process and contribute to the planning of their habitat. Following a perceptive approach borrowed from the territorialist school, two exploratory methods of photograph collection challenged agents with contextual and expert knowledges for the assembly of atlases. They illustrate essential information for an adapted local planning: the “record” of an ever-transforming landscape – the “tangible manifestation of the territory”. Photographs from an online competition and from excursions by the author allow the identification of recurring landscape characters, which inform on the urbanity of Nunavik communities. These characters, observed synchronically, concern formal and relational aspects which define the profound ways of dwelling in the local territorial context. Completed with diachronic observations and a morphotypological approach, this knowledge could incorporate current practices of urban design into an “Inuit urbanism”, informed by the rules of formation obtaining in the current phase of occupation of the territory. These methods, along with community mapping activities, could constitute the role of citizen committees in the production of their habitat and the formulation of shared, self-determined, co-constructed strategic scenarios.