A second coast: from mapping tactics to hybrid design speculations

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE

A SECOND COAST From mapping tactics to hybrid design speculations

Maria Goula

Cornell University Ithaca / United States 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

Figure 1. MAP_Fundació Barcelona_ 2011 Torroella de Montgrí, Baix Empordà V. Garcia, E. Gorrea, N. Laroui, C. Martínez-Almoyna.

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interpret our shores? One of the meanings of being “terrestrial again” according to Bruno Latour’s “Facing Gaia,” (Latour 2017) most recent claim to the first grasp and, secondly act within the new political (ecological) frame of this climate regime, could definitely be, the need of visualizing the earth, through specific, new representations, as the only real option to operate in an era of great uncertainty. In such an endeavor we could collectively speculate on what the coast is now and what it used to be by unfolding its dynamic conditions, engage with a common history of silencing parts of the water cycle that were not considered productive, such as wetlands, and salt marshes and speculate on what it can become in the near future. If for Louisiana, understanding the natural processes of a water cycle in one of the most complex watersheds of the planet, is the path to survival, for the Mediterranean coasts is a new opportunity, and specifically for the Albanian Riviera is the last chance to brand its waterscapes through innovation strategies that can only start from unveiling the conditions that contribute to certain qualities that we cannot afford to lose, such as creatively restructuring the coastal landscapes with the already connected but ignored, hydrological systems. For the last twenty years, in my research within the Master’s of Landscape Architecture, in the School of Architecture of Barcelona and now at Cornell University, the second coast has been a persistent cartographic strategy. In every territory that we studied, it helped to understand and redefine the values we have constructed on this basically in-determined, always changing interface between water and land. Through extensive, layered, though eclectic, mappings and transects, my collaborators and I, have demonstrated that most of the times this desired piece of land, happens to be more watery than our mode of inhabiting it would like. Not only because of the waves’ rhythmic forces of moving sediment and thus, creating sand beaches, eroding rocks, flooding dunes and marshes; but also because, especially in the Mediterranean, the historic drainage of the “unproductive” wetlands and their conversion to

agricultural fields have completely and equity, and we can finally provides a nuanced understanding erased the wet landscapes descry approaches that are less of what a landscape can offer themselves and, in correspondence, aggressive toward the landscapes beyond the beach. our memories of them. The second they occupy and promote, their At the same time, it becomes a lens Figure 2. Languedoc Roussilon. Credit E. Gkoumas, D. Gómez de Zamora, E. Santamaria, M. Tsafaricoast then, as a representational to unveil silenced performances of natural and social dynamics act is strategically reconsidering included. the different moments of the water the in-determinancy of the coastal Yet, it seems that we lack cycle: while it is not referring to it landscapes as a value. conceptual disciplinary devices constantly, by paying attention In my lecture within the frame of and design tools to lead this to micro-topography, it reveals TAW I aimed to reflect on the slow transformation, beyond the potential for unfolding and interdependence of landscape evolution of the architectural type defending the processes that allow and the leisure industry: it took of the hotel and its materiality. richer habitats and values that an a few decades for the tourist The second coast also aims to understanding of a short term industry to become conscious of situate coastal leisure research productivity of it have erased. the fact that landscapes can offer in an intellectual realm which has Finally, the second coast is an more than mere physical support been clearly neglected by Design operative concept that redefines since there is no industry without schools and the industry itself. The our design attitude toward overa resource to depend upon. The second coast is not only a tool exploited territories introducing hospitality industry is slowly trying for representing the coast in a a new understanding and also a to think in terms of resiliency of its systemic way, it is also a design new ethos for the coast: that of vital resources and has introduced strategy that connects the coast the emergence of the values of terms as responsible tourism to with its hinterland through water, wetness as a variable condition to address environmental justice historical paths and narratives and unveil, enhance and preserve.