Description
Paper Title:Urgency on the Beach
Abstract:
In the 1960s, the National Trust diagnosed the British coast as being on the brink of vanishing. The perceived threat was of environmental, as much as of aesthetic nature, with the coastline turning into an unregulated space dedicated to holiday and pleasure - the beach. It was argued that in order to protect the coast as the very fabric of national existence, individual (and collective) leisurely patterns of behaviour urgently needed to change. The Trust saw itself as being uniquely positioned to restore what had already been disfigured by the beach-loving public and to preserve the coastline in perpetuity.
The paper traces affective underpinnings of historical and present urgencies on the British coast, in particular as they relate to the problematic of bodies—human and non-human, individual and collective—from the postwar phenomenon of mass-tourism to the present-day realities of climate change. While the coastline represents the liminal ecotone zone replete with life resulting from the dynamic encounter between bodies of water and land, the beach centres the body as a site of sensation and, in doing so, speaks to the middle scale of experience and relation.
As the coast is under coastal erosion slipping away with ever-increasing speed and, with it, exposing that holding the coast in perpetuity is simply untenable, turning our attention to the beach as a quintessential geography of where bodies matter might offer us clues on how to affirm the role of sensation as crucial in navigating the challenges of eroding coasts. The paper argues that environmental urgency is as much felt affect as abstract measure and its modulation should thus be approached as an aesthetic skill integral to contemporary landscape practice - thoroughly political, profoundly social and as something that does public work.
| Period | 21 Nov 2024 → 23 Nov 2024 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Norwich, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |