This project thesis develops a method for diagnosing the “inhabited landscape” in Terre Valserhône (formerly the Bellegarde area, Ain, France), a territory reshaped by Greater Geneva’s cross-border metropolitan integration. Recent reconfigurations (the Upper Rhône dam, the CEVA/Léman Express rail link, and municipal merger) have widened the gap between institutional planning narratives and residents’ lived experience. The thesis asks how a research-creation device can make such inhabited landscapes discussable in public action.

The inquiry follows a device-based approach: a six-month territorial permanence, documented through a field log, leads to a prototype itinerant survey by horse-drawn carriage, conceived as a mediation support and a means to explore everyday relations to landscape. Encounters, observations and collected narratives are translated into an inquiry booklet and a cartographic chain (sensitive/narrative map, strip map, multi-scale maps) articulating landscape elements and testimonies of the lived territory.

The analysis adopts a relational definition of landscape, in dialogue with vernacular landscape (J. B. Jackson), Italian territorialism (Magnaghi) and critical anthropology of fieldwork. It shows how appropriable narrative and cartographic forms can support resident mobilisation and reopen public debate on local landscape issues.