Call 08 | Roots

ROOTS

Coastal traditions, land use, and Mediterranean landscape heritage

READ IN ITALIAN

“Les hommes ne font pas l’histoire autant qu’ils la subissent, surtout celle du très long terme, cette histoire presque immobile où les structures résistent, se plient, mais ne cèdent qu’après de très longs silences.”
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 1949 

With this issue, SEASCAPE continues its series dedicated to the territorial drivers of contemporary coasts — those structuring devices that, at varying scales and speeds, have shaped and continue to mold the morphology, identity, and settlement forms of coastal landscapes. This eighth issue turns its gaze toward what precedes and sustains every driver: roots.
Here, the term does not hold a generic metaphorical value. In a technical and disciplinary sense, “root” designates the deep anchoring system through which a territory has built its adaptive capacity over the longue durée — what Braudel called “structure,” the semi-permanent reality that survives conjunctures and unconsciously orients subsequent transformations. The roots of a coastal territory are its settlement traditions, its constructive knowledge, its land-use practices, and its archaeological stratifications: not vestiges to be passively conserved, but active matrices from which contemporary design can derive principles, logics, and forms.
The Mediterranean — in the multiplicity of its geographical articulations, from the Maghreb and Levantine shores to the Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Iberian coasts—constitutes the primary field of investigation for this issue. Over millennia, Mediterranean coastal communities have developed complex systems of territorial rooting: reclamation of coastal wetlands, agricultural terracing on coastal slopes, hydraulic regulation of river mouths, anthropic modeling of dunes, and the long-term management of brackish lagoons and coastal pine forests. These operations — anonymous, collective, and iterative — constitute forms of territorial design ante litteram, based on empirical knowledge finely calibrated to the natural cycles of coastal systems: sedimentary regimes, longshore drift dynamics, and seasonal variations of tides and winds.
Superimposed on this living layer of tradition is a deeper, archaeological dimension: Mediterranean coasts harbor beneath the surface of the soil and sea the remains of settlements, port infrastructures, and systems of production and exchange that document millennia of human rooting in the coastal territory. This submerged or buried stratification is not an inert archive: it defines the geomorphological and topographical preconditions within which contemporary design operates, posing unavoidable questions about the continuity and discontinuity of coastal landscapes over the long term.

In a context of accelerating anthropic and climatic pressures — erosion, subsidence, aridification, flooding — critical rooting in tradition is not a conservative posture: it is the necessary epistemological condition for developing effective, lasting, and territorially grounded design strategies. SEASCAPE invites researchers, designers, and scholars to submit original contributions that articulate a critical reading of the territorial roots of Mediterranean coasts with reflections or proposals for their future design, according to three lines of research.

Topic 01 — GEOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING
Settlement, Identity, and Rooting in the Mediterranean Coastal Territory

The first research line investigates Mediterranean settlement traditions as morphological and identity-rooting devices for the coasts. The structure of fishing villages, the hierarchy of landing sites, the distribution of watchtowers, and the articulation of paths connecting the hinterland to the sea are not contingent outcomes: they are the product of long processes of adaptation to the geomorphological and productive conditions of the coastal context, where settlement form and territorial form have co-determined each other over time. The Mediterranean offers an exceptionally rich comparative field: from the rock-cut systems of the Apulian and Sicilian coasts to the Tuscan marine, from North African ribats to Catalan ramblas, from Levantine caravanserais to Adriatic stilt houses.

Topic 02 — ARCHAEOLOGIES OF INHABITATION
Constructive Stratifications, Minor Heritage, and Architectural Memory of the Coast

The second research line addresses the double depth of coastal built heritage: the vertical depth of archaeology and the horizontal depth of minor architectural typology. Beneath the surface of Mediterranean shores lie the remains of ancient port infrastructures, submerged fishing systems, maritime villas, horrea, warehouses, and coastal routes buried by sea-level rise or sediment accumulation. This archaeological stratification is inseparable from the history of the coastal landscape: it defines topographical preconditions, reveals original settlement logics, and documents the long duration of human presence.

Topic 03 — CULTURE OF THE LAND
Agrarian Practices, Ecological Knowledge, and Resilience of the Coastal Landscape

The third research line explores land-use traditions as active practices of ecological rooting and the construction of both natural and anthropic coastal landscapes. Land reclamation, terracing, extensive aquaculture in fishing lagoons (valli da pesca), salt pan cultivation, the planting of Mediterranean dune scrub, and the hydraulic arrangement of estuaries: these are territorial transformation operations of great technical and ecological complexity. Their landscaping outcomes testify to a capacity for co-evolution with coastal natural cycles — dune dynamics, sediment drift, wetland water balance — that contemporary management systems struggle to match.

Participation Guidelines

To take part in the Call for Abstracts, you must submit a proposal in either Italian or English (only one per applicant, and mandatory in English for non-Italian speakers) within the specified deadlines and following the required format (the format must be downloaded from the website):
Title (max 100 characters), Subtitle (max 150 characters),
Field of Research (01/02/03),
Abstract (max 2500 characters),
Up to 2 optional images with captions (images must be copyright-free or accompanied by publication permission from the authors).
The abstract must be sent via email to editorial.seascape@gmail.com with the subject line: “Abstract- Seascape 08-Surname”. Submissions via other methods will not be considered.

Fees

Selected articles will be published upon payment of a symbolic fee.
For more information on costs, please visit: https://seascape.it >> Publish with us

Timeline

– Saturday, June 6, 2026_ Abstract submission deadline
– Saturday, June 20, 2026_ Notification of acceptance (to begin drafting full papers
for double-blind peer review)
– Saturday, August 8, 2026_ Full paper submission deadline

For information

web site: http://www.seascape.it
editorial.seascape@gmail.com