Paper short abstract:

This presentation draws from the results of an ongoing doctoral thesis on an urban beach, analyzing local fishers’ environmental perceptions and concept of nature in order to understand the ways they develop discourses to legitimate their activity and roles in the urban coastscape.

Paper long abstract:

Today, many european cities are still struggling to reinvent their development model in response to the effects of deindustrialization. It is in this context that nature, landscape and heritage are gaining more and more importance within leisure and tourism based urban models. This is the case of Cadiz, a small city in southern Spain where La Caleta, a beach located at city's downtown, has become one of the main touristic icons of the city. Due to its particular location, history and morphology, this small beach boasts a vast diversity of ichthyofauna, being also an important local heritage site which, alongside, functions customarily as one of the city's most emblematic, active and dynamic open public spaces.

Drawing from the fieldwork results of an ongoing phD thesis, this presentation analyzes local fishers' environmental perceptions of the beach and their notion of nature in order to understand the ways they develop discourses to legitimate their activities and roles in the urban coastscape. By doing so, I show how this perceptions are percolated by urban conflicts derived from the adaptation process taken by the city to transit from an industrial to a tourism based development model.