Researcher Joana Gaspar de Freitas is presenting a conference at FAUP to discuss the tensions underlying the coastline, rising sea levels and the construction of sand dunes and beyond. The session, organized as part of the Fishing Architecture project underway at the Centre for Architecture and Urbanism Studies, will discuss the results of the Sea, Sand and People research project, funded by the European Research Council.

We drew a line in the sand and called it the coastline. This line is fictitious, but by believing in it we have built our modern civilization. To maintain it, in various regions of the world, dunes are being rehabilitated and integrated into coastal protection projects, as part of a strategy known as "working with nature", in order to increase the resilience of natural systems. Dunes have become eco-technological structures and millions of euros are being spent to preserve them and guarantee the promise they hold: to act as barriers against rising sea levels. This is because urbanized coastlines are at the forefront of the battle for sustainability and sand and what we do with it are key to ensuring the survival of coastal buildings. In this presentation, we show how dunes, highly valued for the ecosystem services they provide, are strange things that allow for complex associations far beyond their obvious connection to natural processes. Dunes have a long history shared with human beings which, although little known, tells us a lot about our past and present relationship with the coast. Dunes are spaces of fear, resources, traditions, prohibitions, dreams and hope. They are also soft divans where we can lie down and think about ourselves, the world around us and how we can learn to live with the variability of the coastal zones of the future.

Joana Gaspar de Freitas, coordinator of the project Sea, Sand and People: An Environmental History of Coastal Dunes, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), is a researcher at the History Center of the University of Letters and has a PhD in Contemporary History. She works on the socio-environmental evolution of coastal areas, exploring themes such as coastal erosion, natural disasters, risks and vulnerabilities, traditional ecological knowledge and forms of adaptation of coastal populations. In 2015 and 2014, she was a researcher at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and at the Linda Hall Library in the United States. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary publication Coastal Studies and Society.dunes.letras.ulisboa.pt