DENTRO IL PARADOSSO COSTIERO. Un approccio transdisciplinare per un paesaggio instabile

The Ph.D. thesis starts from the assumption of recognizing in the coastal landscape a distinctive condition with respect to other forms of landscapes, declining it semantically by adopting the adjectival noun "Coastalness", and identifying it in the characters of an unstable landscape. It aims to investigate its semantic and strategic significance, to develop an epistemological and methodological approach useful for elaborating new critical directions propaedeutic to the project. The focus lays on the extreme complexity and dynamism of the littoral, the only place on earth where oceanic, terrestrial, and atmospheric processes interact simultaneously, in a space with shifting and permeable boundaries, subject to continuous variations of moving flows that shift from the global to the local scale, and on which the effects of the climate crisis are significantly more visible and intense than on other territories. Although since the 1960s international policy agendas have developed specific tools for guiding administrative processes and planning strategies, and for prompting public debate and coastal communities' participation, the accelerating alteration of the coastal landscape on a global scale reveals their insufficient impact. At the same time, scientific research, often isolated within its academic and disciplinary boundaries, shows that it still has a marginal influence on policymakers and limited effectiveness in effecting widespread awareness. Studying, designing, and managing through linear tools and static approaches the coast as a landscape, which is subject to wicked problems and whose intrinsic character is instability, is therefore configured as a coastal paradox. In an era of profound and rapid changes dominated by anthropocentrism, it is, therefore, necessary to evolve traditional analytical, programmatic, and design methodologies by developing flexible, experimental, immersive, and evolutionary approaches capable of transcending their disciplinary boundaries to read the dynamics of coastal landscape transformation and accompany its evolution. In recent years, a growing number of art research has begun to flank and support scientific research and policy agendas in the process of investigating and monitoring the state of the marine, terrestrial and atmospheric environment, and their mutual interrelations: through its ability to transcend the boundaries of specialized fields, to combine the multiplicity of their respective methods, the collaboration between art and science is configured as a transdisciplinary approach that opens up new possibilities for the interpretation, communication, and management of contemporary changes. Placing within an international frame of reference the experiences conducted personally inside two chosen experimental spaces, the port city of Genoa and Carloforte, on the island of San Pietro in Sardinia, the doctoral research outlines the potential of art-based research in action to configure itself as a transdisciplinary epistemological and methodological process propaedeutic to the elaboration of innovative design approaches on the coastal landscape.