LEXICON FOR COASTAL RESILIENCE
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If the anthropocene condition is the result of the binomial between man and nature, between natural and artificial as an essential component of its hybrid character. If climate change is its most emblematic crisis. If the world we inhabit is a complex adaptive system in which changes, transformations, even disturbances constitute the basis of its evolutionary process. If we recognize the coast as a socio-ecological system with the capacity for morphological, regenerative and adaptive variation.
If this is so, it is not possible that our way of relating to the coast is limited to mere protection, regulation of uses or the construction of works and infrastructures that make the adaptability of the coast impossible at the same time that they amplify the dangers resulting from the climate change.
A metamorphosis, cultural, political, physical and technical is necessary, deployable from the field of planning and design capable of transforming the requirement of simple controllable and manipulable infrastructures, into renewed synthetic landscapes, hybrids of nature and culture from the hand of the design, ecology and technology. This is the only possible way to favor change processes that enable self-regulation, evolution and, therefore, the resilience of the coast to the effects of climate change. This metamorphosis illuminates a renewed conceptual framework for coastal planning and design and a new visual alphabet of strategies and techniques for coastal resilience.
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The doctoral thesis of Miriam García, who obtained the distinction «Cum Laude», aims to modestly join the efforts to build the discipline while embracing Vroom’s work, circumscribed in this case to a new way of understanding and therefore working with the coastal landscape. For this reason, it is necessary to reformulate the theoretical framework on which the littoral planning is based today. As a result of this reformulation, special concepts arise which are directly linked to a vocabulary that is unknown in some cases and even inexistent in some others. This vocabulary collects the socio-ecological processes that will make possible the synthetic metamorphosis of the coast through the design of resilient landscapes. Prior to the physical metamorphosis of the coasts as a mechanism of resilient adaptation to the effects of climate change, it becomes essential to develope a conceptual metamorphosis supported by its own semantics, generated through design. Because both technical and scientific languages remain always alive. Their evolution has addressed their own adaptation to different contexts and societies along the centuries, shaping the substrate of its culture.
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The investigation has allowed us to show not only the components but also the needed materials to design synthetic metamorphosis along the coastline. From then on, it is possible to recognize the fine details, the distinctive enhancements inside the different proposals that conform the new coastal lexicon. But of course, we are only in front of a sample, a portion of this new vocabulary that is yet to be fully developed. It may seem easy to understand, but in actual fact, it is not if we consider the infinite dynamic connections between communities and places.
However, all of them can be grouped into four large families that can work in a complementary way or fluctuate in space and time, depending on the contexts.
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