Towards A New Geography Of Risk: MIRACLE

This volume brings together the results of the project MIRACLE (Multi-risk Integrated Resilience Approach for Coastal Landscapes and Environment),outlining the operational vocabulary needed to address systemic risks in water territories. Through interdisciplinary approaches, the volume explores the interactions between risk, landscape, and design, offering conceptual tools to understand the complexity of contemporary landscapes in transition. The aim is to build a shared vision capable of guiding adaptation and resilience processes, connecting local knowledge, design practices, and institutional dimensions. The volume frames water as a territorial and cultural matrix: a living agent that connects geographies, economies, memories, infrastructures, and relations between humans and non-humans. We do not face hazards one by one; we address their co-presence: flooding, and other coastal hazards, subsidence and landslides, heat waves, loss of biodiversity, social and touristic pressures that intersect and amplify each other. Speaking of multi-risk means moving beyond emergency fixes toward a systemic reading that holds together slow variables and sudden shocks, environmental cycles and ways of inhabiting, material conditions and institutional arrangements. MIRACLE adopts design as a tool for engaging in urban laboratories. Mapping is essential, yet it becomes truly operative only when it connects with lived perceptions, place-based memories, and institutional learning. In “amphibious” territories where land and water interpenetrate, design cannot only protect: it must learn to absorb uncertainty, redistribute it fairly, and forge new alliances among infrastructures, ecosystems, and social uses of space. MIRACLE works in this intersection between land and water. The work proposes an operational vocabulary that links contextual analysis, interpretive cartographies, perception maps, and strategic guidance to orient informed decisions and scalable actions. The “grammars of risk” are not a glossary: they are a set of concepts, theories, tools, and design principles that reveal ties between physical processes, institutional arrangements, local economies, and collective imaginaries. aiming to inhabit the ordinariness of risk without normalizing the injustices that often accompany it.