ABSTRACT
Contemporary global climate change promotes gradual sea level rise and increased frequency of extreme weather events, affecting urban coastal areas: strips of land of variable thickness, where most of the world’s urban population inhabits.
‘The form in the fog’ refers to the uncertainty of anthropogenic and natural limits between water and land, aiming to draw the echoes of the dissolution of limits due to the overlapping of these two entities. This chapter addresses three case studies of vulnerability to sea level rise in the littoral area of distinct geographical contexts: Portugal, Mozambique and Macau. This chapter supports the hypothesis that delayering specific strata of the coastal urban landscape enables the definition of the contours of a threshold space between sea and land.
A comparative interpretation of these urban seashores is developed to reveal ‘the form in the fog’, the contours of a variable thickness, a limenes where land and water coexist and overlap, defining a place of specific identity that must be considered for consequent operative adaptation of the vulnerable urban seafront.
