Tese de doutoramento, Urbanismo, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Arquitetura, 2022The city is an artefact, an unfinished object in transformation in time and space. Today, the coastal urban settlement is subject to the effects of climate change, particularly the rise in average sea level, which require new and different adaptation processes: whether metamorphosis or sedimentation. In the literature review, coastal cities are usually referred to as territory in crisis due to flooding and erosion, caused by extreme events. Yet, crisis from the Latin crisis and the Greek κρίσις, means ‘to choose’. The contemporary choice to which the architect and urban planner must respond is “how” to transform the cities. However, to implement this choice critical techniques are needed that go beyond the limits of morphological knowledge, - a showcase in which elements of the city we exposed by the remotion of layers, such as dead flesh from a body - in order to re-appropriate the operating methodological process (Muratori, 1960).This research aims to discuss how to decode the public space in contact with the sea, the seashore street, through three instrumental concepts: type, limit and elements; as syntactic compositional principles that enable the design of the urban object. A process in which we re-appropriate the space and time of the project, abandoning the immobility of the diorama in which the decoding of urban form has often been confined. In this moment of transformation we are experiencing, we need to read the territory through “typological criticism” (Tafuri, 1969) to find the invariant forms on which to base our design choices. There are no territories in crisis but cities in transformation, as always.N/
