‘Towards the synthetic metamorphosis of the coast. Designing resilient landscapes’

Currently, we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, an era in which the natural world is never free from a certain degree of human influence, and where therefore all ecological systems have been, in one way or another, affected by human action. They are therefore anthropized environments that have had to adapt the cycles regulating their functioning to the transformations that humans have been making in them. This also means that humans have become part of ecological systems as a regulatory agent, and protection or inaction on these systems is no longer sufficient to achieve their proper functioning. It is necessary for humans to act on these systems with operations that allow their reactivation so that they can regain their recovery capacity or resilience.

In that global context, the thesis questions the treatment of coastlines, their planning, management, and design. It argues that their necessary adaptation to climate change must come hand in hand with a radical change in the conceptual framework in which their transformation has been globally developed through plans and projects in recent centuries. This metamorphosis of the coast is claimed in the thesis through the development of a set of propositions that confront current models with new ones, as a response to the changing conditions we expect within the uncertain framework of climate change.

Two heavily anthropized places that have become aware of their own vulnerability are the Mississippi Delta and the coasts of New York and New Jersey. While it is true that they did so after suffering the consequences of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, respectively. As a result of both disasters, two international design idea competitions were held (Changing Course Competition and Rebuild by Design) with the aim of providing a resilient solution.

The winning proposals from these competitions become the case studies for Miriam García García's doctoral thesis, and from her analysis emerges a new set of tools, like a new vocabulary, to tackle the challenge of resilient design against the effects of climate change on coastal systems. These devices, called components, work together, like a network, to achieve the reactivation of the socio-ecological functions of the system.

The doctoral thesis that earned Miriam García the "Cum Laude" mention aims to modestly contribute to the construction of the discipline by picking up the advanced baton from Vrom, in this case, confined to a new way of understanding and, therefore, working with the coastal landscape. The main objective of the thesis is not criticism, but rather its usefulness lies in developing a set of conceptual and design proposals from which to reformulate the relationship between human habitat development and coastal dynamics, as well as the inherent dangers of climate change. This is carried out through a set of case studies representative of what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls the metamorphosis of risk (Beck, 2015). For him, it is not about contemplating the negative consequences brought by the new global economic and ecological conditions, but rather, on the contrary, taking advantage of the unforeseen but potentially positive and emancipatory consequences of disasters. This also means that we are experiencing a moment of the birth of new orders, structures, and relationships, which Beck encourages us to analyze as if they were the germ of future structures and typologies.