Uno spessore fragile : approcci socio-ecologici per il progetto del litorale italiano

Since the second half of the 20th century, the Italian coasts have undergone a radical transformation. On the one hand, there has been a massive displacement of populations, particularly from inland territories to the coast. On the other hand, the change in society's ways of living has contributed to the settlement of a recreational thickness, consolidating what we call a tourist civilization. In recent years there has been a general tightening of some meshes on the coast, which by nature have varying thickness. Over time, a seaside tourist imaginary begins to settle, contributing to massive colonization of some coastal areas, sometimes by opening access, sometimes by privatizing them. We have gone within a few years from keeping our distance from a sphere of recognized instability to the presumption that we can inhabit it with the help of rigid and stable structures. Today, climate change has exacerbated the regime of instability inherent in these places, showing the inadequacy of some tourist settlements and facilities in terms of responding to environmental drives and incompatibility with the dynamism of the dune movement. According to IPCC predictions, sea level rise will heavily reshape national coastal areas, highlighting the need to explore possible future geographies through the project. A recognition of state-owned land and a new season of public property acquisition is needed, both for the implementation of defense policies and sustainable tourism projects and to imagine the depth of the coast of the future, recognizing its role as public infrastructure. The contribution envisions the coast as a democratically accessible community asset recognized as state property. While there is a need to ensure that a fair percentage of the beach remains outside the logic of the market, there is also an emerging need to reorder the way the maritime state property is managed. The regime of tourist-recreational concessions, and the allocation criteria related to them, need a renewed view that aims at coastal regeneration, taking into account the parameters of transparency, sustainability, and accessibility. In this sense, current beach concessions should ensure virtuous socio-ecological designs that, by encouraging sustainable forms of tourism, favor the construction of eco-friendly removable structures, investment in dune care practices, including monitoring of erosion phenomena and environmental awareness, but above all, guarantee accessibility and a set of minimum services, recognizing the coast as a public good. Building on these assumptions, the paper proposes a recognition of significant actions to reimagine the coastal thickness, a series of dune restoration and protection projects, or some policies that have begun to recognize the coastline's role as a public good and its relationship with its backshore.