Digital Seascapes: digital technologies for building resilience of coastal environments

Abstract

Global strategic goals for creating sustainable resilient cities and growing concern over the climate crisis, including human impacts upon coastal waters and degradation of marine environments, requires that coastal cities empower and inspire communities to cherish city seascapes by developing innovative solutions. (Leyshon, 2018, Toomey et al., 2020, Fletcher and Potts, 2008, Zsamboky et al., 2011, Nursey-Bray, 2017). Place based digital technologies in this regard have the potential to create marine citizenship by building and nurturing relationships between people and marine environments to establish and care for the sea as a shared resource. (Cigliano et al., 2015, Conrad and Hilchey, 2010, Kelly et al., 2020, Willis and Gupta, 2023, Holland, 2021)

This research used a community co-design approach in Plymouth- UK’s first national marine park to explore whether place-based digital technologies can engage communities with the marine spaces and make coastal areas more accessible; especially for excluded neighbourhoods close to the sea. Using the collaborative community-led concept of a city marine park (Pittman et al., 2019), it also explored the role of digital technologies within marine spatial planning practices for creating marine citizenship against the challenge of building coastal resilience.

By facilitating access to temporal and biodiverse marine spaces such as rocky shores (inter-tidal rockpools), place-based digital technologies can create new ways for communities to access and engage with the sea/marine environment; in turn establishing a sense of place. We argue this can contribute to coastal resilience by establishing stewardship of city seascapes as a ‘blue commons. Further, an integrated approach using digital placemaking within marine spatial planning can help build community capacity and the necessary cross-sector collaborations for addressing challenges around resilience.