INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE
A SECOND COAST
From mapping tactics to hybrid design speculations
Maria Goula Cornell University Ithaca / United States
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Elizabeth Kolbert [New Yorker, April 1, 2019] in her article “Under water: can engineers save Louisiana’s disappearing coast?” writes: “Plaquemines is where the river meets the sea. On maps, it appears as a thick, muscular arm stretching into the Gulf of Mexico, with the Mississippi running, like a ropy blue vein, down the center. […] Seen from the air, the parish has a very different look. If it’s an arm, it’s a horribly emaciated one. For most of its length-more than sixty miles-it’s practically all vein. What little solid there is clings to the river in two skinny strips.” Kolbert claims that we have inherited a way to map wet, unstable landscapes such as estuaries, deltas, wetlands and salt marshes in forms that convey their potential virtue of becoming solid, permanently inhabitable land. Reading her while writing about the second coast’s efficacy as a conceptual device for alternative coastal readings and, potentially, for an alternative response to seascape leisure development in Albania, brings into my mind how necessary intentional, rich representations of the coast are, at
this particular moment of climate change. Intentional dynamic mappings are equally critical for coasts facing severe environmental and cultural degradation from tourist exploitation as for these coasts still waiting to be developed and crucial because unfortunately our default disciplinary response is limited to ideas that understand the coast as a line to establish and maintain by all means. Neither we have tools to avoid the coast’s political and spatial segregation: we either preserve its environmentally fragile parts while we have no alternative models to inhabit the rest, the apparently ordinary shorelines. This timing also aligns with a general agreement that our coasts will either disappear, or lose their most valuable wet habitats or, in the best-case scenario, will definitely need larger budgets for protection or replenishment of the beaches, the unique, although commodified value for coastal hospitality. Can we afford then as a society and also as a design discipline responsible for the environment as a whole, not to represent and
