DECODING COASTAL PARADOX. The transdisciplinary approach as a research method for an ever-changing landscape

Over the last hundred years, a complex plurality of natural and anthropogenic tensions has characterized the coastline, making it somehow a “landscape par excellence” (Bellmunt, 2007). What makes the coastal landscape emblematic is its extreme instability, due to the dynamic interaction between processes constantly changing in space and time, whose origin and impacts vary from the global to the local scale, in a cyclic continuum of cause-effect. In the Anthropocene, this instability has grown exponentially: oceanic, atmospheric and terrestrial transformations due to climate change are evolving with increasing speed, causing extremely intense and significantly visible effects on the coastal zone (Alterman and Pellach, 2020), further pressed by socio-economic and geopolitical processes. It seems clear that such a complex and dynamic landscape cannot be studied, designed and managed through linear tools and static solutions, and that the strategies developed so far in the framework of Integrated Coastal Zone Management, although multidisciplinary, are not effective if disciplinary boundaries remain impermeable. The coast needs a flexible, highly experimental, transdisciplinary approach, capable of addressing what may appear to be a paradox: decoding an ever-changing landscape, which is apparently unmeasurable as its physical extension. Within an international reference framework, the proposed contribution brings together the analysis of projects and experiences operating at the intersection between art, environmental and social science, architecture, cultural activism and citizen science, with the experiences of action-research developed by the author in the port city of Genoa and on San Pietro Island in Sardinia (Italy), in order to outline the potential of the transdisciplinary approach as a strategic methodological tool in the development of new critical paradigms and design solutions to address the multifaceted challenges of coastal sustainability.