AA Landscape Urbanism  |  2016  |  Social Formations

Tracing the Linkage between Producers and Consumers

Location: Ladakh, India
Instructors: Eduardo Rico, Clara Oloriz, Douglas Spencer
Collaborators: Sun Tao

Awarded Distinction Honour

This project traces the social formation of pashmina wool and the finished shawls, through time and space, and then scrutinizes the productive microlandscape and the effects of the pashmina economy on the producers’ livelihoods and their immediate environment.

The economy of the region is based around the livestock of the Changpa, and the most important resource is the plants the animals graze on. The study of the economics of  the pastoralist community over the past 70 years exhibits an increase in proportion of goats per herd because of which they have to make more shifts of settlements to avoid overgrazing. Consequently, per capita availability of pasture has drastically decreased, creating major concerns for the producers of pashmina, namely decrease in food supply and pastures, increased frequency of camp shifting and urban migration.

This critical examination brings out complex interdependencies between the inhabitants and the landscape, and the impact of the global trade on them, given the nature of their nomadic pastoralism, their deep connection with the land, and its cold, arid and remote geography.

In addition to searching for the local roots and ramification of the global chain of the pashmina production, this project was an exercise to produce and collate a set of GIS data for a territory that is politically charged, mostly undocumented and with little or no digital datasets to rely upon.

Explore the full project here.