5.5 Conclusion - A summary of findings
One thing is clear; we are edging towards an irreversible change in the biosphere that will put into question the very fabric upon which we depend. Urban Seascaping explored what it meant to depart from business-as-usual urban development practices and paradigms at the coast by integrating marine life forms without romanticising or reverting to the past. While being wary of greenwashing, this research explores the role of the spatial design disciplines to re-conceive, re-orientate and re-design our relationship with the more-than-human agencies in the future.
In this final subsection, I present a summary of the key findings and learnings from the past three years, with two main contributions, Urban Seascaping as an ethical and critical proposition as well as an analytical and curatorial tool that engages with various complexities, entanglements and relations in the Anthropocene. Thus, Urban Seascaping with seaweed contributes towards addressing the climate crisis to contribute towards the ongoing paradigm shift that is urgently needed in coastal cities to re-envision what it truly means to live not just by sea but with the sea.
Figure 177. The research (Part III) has explored various coastal adaptation strategies, concluding that there are benefits to the hybrid approach of combining both hard and soft approaches. The illustration is not to inform final design-specific solutions but an illustration of general principles of the Hybrid Approach developed for this research. Redrawn and redesigned diagram by Soo Ryu and Agnes Varmund (based on Sutton-Grier et al. (2015)).