Understanding, Reframing and Redesigning the Territory of Tourism and Everyday Life in a Danish Coastal Town

The paper presents the overall approach and initial findings developed through the first 1½ years of work by a research group at the Aarhus School of Architecture (AAA) working on developing transformative site-specific architectural strategies for a renewed tourism-dominated landscape in the municipality of Ringkøbing-Skjern (RKSK) at the western coast of Denmark. The research presented is a part of a larger 3year research project done in an interdisciplinary group with researchers from Aarhus University (AU) in collaboration with the local municipality. The ability of architecture and physical prototypes to spark local collaborations and strategic development are at the heart of the project. Overall, the aimed at research contribution is to investigate the potential of architecture to become at the same time a catalyst for tourism as well as for the enhancement of everyday life-experiences, when using a strategic design-based approach. The project departs theoretically from the idea that tourism is a part of and entangled with everyday life. Secondarily the objective of the project is to discuss how mapping and 1:1 tests of spatial urban prototypes can be an appropriate way for research to both understand, learn from and impact small tourism-dominated towns. The paper will focus on describing the ‘understanding’ and ‘reframing’ aspects of the work.