Nuovi lidi, colonizzazioni e rinaturalizzazioni

Abstract

The coastline forms an unusual cityscape: because it is linear, developing and outlining an unstable fringe of land, caressed and disputed by the sea; because it offers the ambiguous precarity of bathing facilities on one side of the shoreline and the fixed bulk of residential buildings on the other; it doesn’t have many inhabitants but mainly just guests; and it undergoes seasonal renewal with rites and rituals to set the stage for the holiday scene. The bathing cities are often disputed territories: by the sea, in the case of the beaches; by the regimental and imprisoned rivers in the Riviera; by the cliffs, by the ports and the marine, maritime and production activities; by the abandoned countryside, the coastal scrub and pinewoods; by the imperturbable masses of the railways and roads. Natural beaches are mobile, unstable. Shorefront ‘cultivation’ has taught to consolidate them, defend them from erosion, level them out, removing their shape, in practice denaturing them. While for some time you are trying to "renaturalize" bathing places, it is still possible to "colonize" eco-sustainable preserved and even new constitution shores.