A Visit to Rusty Ships. Tourism as a Strategy of Rejuvenating Shrinking Towns in Coastal Areas

The aim of the paper is to analyse, whether and to what degree that tourism is a way of rejuvenating shrinking cities located on the coast. The research is based on three cities, and the adjacent regions, located in Uzbekistan (Mo'noq), Romania (Sulina) and Georgia-Abkhazia (Sukhumi). Tourist attractions connected with nature, culture, history and cuisine are examined, along with the land use and tourist infrastructure. The research indicates that the three sites have great tourism potential, with a focus on nature-oriented tourism. It also suggests that infrastructure, transport, access to information and land use can have a strong, positive or negative impact on tourism attractiveness. Additionally, the threats that uncontrolled tourism can bring are considered - it has been shown that unsustainable tourism and an excessive influx of tourists are threats to the environment and to local societies. A balance between economic and environmental value should therefore be maintained in the process of developing tourism.

Coercing the Delta. The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1732

The long-term transformation of the Louisiana delta beginning in 1699 has been primarily understood as a French colonial struggle for the control of nature. Yet, in order for French colonisers to control nature, they first sought to control enslaved Africans. While slave coercion was a daily problem for French inhabitants, documentation of the 'routinized violence' of chattel slavery is predictably absent in records of the built environment. As a result, the building of colonial New Orleans, beginning in 1718, has become a story of French design, not of enslaved African labour. This paper examines the accounts and correspondence of French colonisers who veiled their own dependence on indigenous, indentured and enslaved people by adopting a performative language of mastery as they projected or described labour projects essential to the 'control of nature'. What colonisers could not master in person they performed on paper via pronouns, tenses, constructions and the passive voice. The 'French' Louisiana delta is better understood as an African-built landscape reinscribed on Indigenous territory under French coercion.

More-than-human Infrastructure for Just Resilience: Learning from, Working with, and Designing for Bald Cypress Trees (Taxodium distichum) in the Mississippi River Delta

Humans design infrastructure for human needs, with limited regard for the needs of nonhumans such as animals and plants. Humans also often fail to recognise nonhuman lifeforms such as trees as fellow engineers designers, or architects, even though the contribution of trees to ecosystem services is well established and their right to justice ought to be recognised. Studies have shown that flood-control infrastructure near the Mississippi River inadvertently left Southern Louisiana more vulnerable to coastal threats. We examine this characteristic outcome and identify infrastructural injustices in multispecies communities. Based on theories in philosophy and design supported by historical analyses, we defend the proposals to extend 1) the understanding of resilience to include more-than-human communities; and 2) the notion of justice to include non-human stakeholders. The reframing in more-than-human terms is already under way in a variety of disciplines. However, these efforts rarely extend into considerations of practical design and have attracted criticism for insufficient engagement with historical processes and the accumulations of power and responsibility. To illustrate these injustices, we trace the history of bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) in the Mississippi River Delta and show how infrastructure impacted the trees. This analysis demonstrates that designs that do not consider the needs of vulnerable stakeholders can cause harm in multispecies communities. In response, we propose that humans can work to improve infrastructural resilience by including humans and nonhumans as collaborators.

Histories of Urban Deltascapes: A Comparison of Arles and Kolkata

To confront food insufficiency caused by the Great Leap Forward, China's central government promoted a national policy of 'agriculture as the priority'. The Shanghai municipal government launched a campaign to expand cultivated land within its jurisdiction by transforming wetlands on Chongming Island through a military-style campaign. Tens of thousands of urban workers were drafted into a Land Reclamation Army to meet national and municipal food self-sufficiency goals. Their campaign featured both attacks on nature and interpersonal abuse. In accordance with the central directives, wetlands totalling 8,000 hectares were drained for conversion into farmland. This conversion proved to be costly, as land with low fertility was created through the permanent destruction of the wetland ecosystem and reclamation workers suffered physical and psychological mistreatment. Although the transformation of wetlands was completed quickly, food production fell far short of targets. Furthermore, the land reclamation campaign imposed irrevocable costs on the island's established communities.

From Wetlands to Farmlands: A Campaign Against Nature on China's Chongming Island, 1960-1962

To confront food insufficiency caused by the Great Leap Forward, China's central government promoted a national policy of 'agriculture as the priority'. The Shanghai municipal government launched a campaign to expand cultivated land within its jurisdiction by transforming wetlands on Chongming Island through a military-style campaign. Tens of thousands of urban workers were drafted into a Land Reclamation Army to meet national and municipal food self-sufficiency goals. Their campaign featured both attacks on nature and interpersonal abuse. In accordance with the central directives, wetlands totalling 8,000 hectares were drained for conversion into farmland. This conversion proved to be costly, as land with low fertility was created through the permanent destruction of the wetland ecosystem and reclamation workers suffered physical and psychological mistreatment. Although the transformation of wetlands was completed quickly, food production fell far short of targets. Furthermore, the land reclamation campaign imposed irrevocable costs on the island's established communitiesotivations in authoritarian regimes operating diverse political and economic agendas.

As Inland Becomes Coastal: Shifting Equity and Flood Risk in the Amite River Basin (USA)

Coastal Louisiana is experiencing the most rapid relative sea-level rise in the US due to a combination of a subsiding delta and rising coastal waters. Consequently, the influences of extreme coastal weather are reaching farther inland and impacting urban areas where traditional environmental policy, organised at the parish (county) level, is unable to address this changing flood risks. This situation is most prominent in the metro Baton Rouge region with the largest city situated upstream from two small, but rapidly growing, parishes. Following a massive flood in 2016, the upstream parishes have undertaken policy adjustments to facilitate the expulsion of water toward downstream neighbors and foster redevelopment in the floodplain. The lower parish has expressed concerns about the anticipated increases in discharge to be sent its way. Although the state is concerned with rising sea levels, it has not merged coastal and inland flood policy considerations. Downstream residents have little voice in upstream policy making and the absence of basin-wide management strategy perpetuates emergent risks and environmental injustices. As climate change drives coastal conditions inland, the misalignment between locally based governance and regional environmental realities will become more pronounced and exacerbate social injustices.

Sea Visibility and the Anxious Coastal Gaze

A number of historians have drawn attention to the incomplete or highly selective visibility of oceanic activity to land-dwellers. Some have gone so far as to refer to 'sea blindness'. However, particularly for scholars with an interest in coastal areas, 'sea blindness' does not capture the intense visibility of beaches and coastal cities in the twentieth century. It also does not engage with changes in science and technology which have permitted the creation and dissemination of vivid images from deep underwater. A critical interrogation of sea visibility, then, is urgently needed. A new term, the 'anxious coastal gaze,' is proposed. This short article discusses two examples of sea visibility in the context of the anxious coastal gaze: oil spills and illegal waterborne migrants. It concludes with a discussion of the future of the anxious coastal gaze in an era of climate crisis and sea level rise.