Coastal Peripheries: Historical Perspectives on Peripheral Coastal Settlements

Coastal areas have long served as material records of the changing relationships between human societies and the sea. Beyond major port and coastal cities, which have concentrated capital, technology, and global connectivity, the coast has also been shaped by peripheral and heterogeneous environments, such as fishing villages, rural marshlands, leisure developments, and small industrial towns.

In the post-war period, these settlements underwent significant transformations. Industrialisation, increased mobility, and the expansion of tourism reshaped patterns of inhabitation, introducing new spatial dynamics and environmental pressures. Settlements previously structured by local communities, seasonality, and short-distance networks were progressively reconfigured or displaced as coastal economies were reorganised into more continuous regimes of production and consumption. Interwar informal and small-scale leisure developments, ribbon suburbanisation along coastal roads, and hybrid industrial towns by the sea contributed to the emergence of increasingly fragmented and unequal territories.

Today, in-between coastal areas constitute a complex and layered archive of human–sea relations. They reveal how architecture and settlement patterns respond to ecological variability, economic change, and shifting cultural values. However, due to their marginal and dispersed condition, often distant from dominant economic interests and only partially captured in official documentation, many of these environments have remained outside dominant historical narratives. Studying these contexts therefore requires methodological and disciplinary reflection, prompting a reconsideration of how built environments are examined and which tools and sources are employed.

This thematic issue seeks to expand the field of coastal studies by foregrounding the history of coastal peripheries. We invite contributions that examine how low- and middle-density coastal settlements have been produced, transformed, and reinterpreted from the post-war period to the present. We welcome interdisciplinary research from architecture, urbanism, environmental history, geography, anthropology, and related fields. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Adaptive coasts: Environments shaped by continuous adaptation to economic, social, and ecological change.
• Coastal conflicts: Sites of conflict between competing uses, actors, and territorial regimes.
• Seasonal coasts: Environments marked by cyclical patterns of occupation and fluctuating populations.
• Coasts of failure: Sites of abandoned or underperforming projects that expose the limits of coastal development.
• Degraded coasts: Environments shaped by pollution and climate pressures, exposing risks, remediation challenges, and uneven responsibility.
• Productive coasts: fishing, resource extraction, and coastal industries as drivers of settlement and architectural form.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Ocean and Society is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

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