‘Urban Seascaping’ as a catalyst for urban transformation

Integration of the sea and marine-based ecologies as part of the city’s landscaping, sustainable urban drainage systems and coastal protection in East Jutland as a response to sea level rise and climate change

PhD project by Soo Jung Ryu

The research focus of the PhD is linked to an interdisciplinary research project that examines the potential of inviting the sea and marine-based ecologies (i.e. seaweed) as a key driver in the transformation of sustainable urban drainage systems, coastal protection and waterfront recreational landscaping in Eastern Jutland. The project proposes a design model called ‘Urban Seascaping’ which envisions the urban integration of ecosystem services that make innovative use of the supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural affordances of the sea and the seaweed as a response to increasing sea-level rise due to climate change. As such, the guiding vision of the proposal is to ‘invite the seascape into the city’, thus making sustainable marine-based ecologies an active part of the social cityscape and its future resilience.

As a response to the impact of sea level rise on the coastal cities of Denmark due to climate change, this project asks the following question: How can a practice of Urban Seascaping with a specific focus on the integration of the sea and seaweed into the built urban landscape and its blue and green infrastructure through the implementation of sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) and coastal defense infrastructure address the increasing need for urban transformation and adaptation as a consequence of sea-level rise and climate change?

The concept of Urban Seascaping represents the innovative hallmark of the research proposal and includes investigating the potentials of implementing seaweed into the urban coastal landscape in ways that benefit socio-cultural practices related to sustainable and local food production, recreation in the coastal city, and marine-based eco-aesthetics as well as environmental factors related to carbon sequestering, anthropocentric pollution filtering, and increase in biodiversity. In concrete terms, the project proposes to apply a research-by-design methodology along with a set of value-based regulating, supporting, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services criteria in order to create and inform a design typology for seaweed SuDS and coastal defense infrastructure that can (1) model solutions for future stormwater retention and coastal defense and (2) induce relevant cross-disciplinary discussions on the value of integrating natural lifeforms (i.e. seaweed) into the cityscape and contemporary urban life.

The overall idea is to ‘invite the sea into the cities’ to facilitate the transition into a future- and development-oriented scenario in which the sea will become a vital and proactive part of living not just by the sea, but with the sea.