Between City and Sea: The Design of Coastal Urban Seascapes with Oysters as an Architectural Response to Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is reshaping architectural practice, especially along coastlines where the formerly fixed boundary between land and sea is dissolving. As sea levels rise and intertidal ecosystems shift, rigid separations between human development and natural systems become untenable, demanding an architectural paradigm attuned to coastal flux. This dissertation investigates a hydrocentric turn in design that positions oysters as both literal infrastructure and conceptual catalysts to reconfigure human-water relationships. Drawing together decolonial critique, new materialist ontology, hydrologic thought, and care ethics, the research analyses how oysters operate not simply as ecological indicators but as active participants in the formation and stewardship of coastal environments. The study employs a multi-sited material ethnography by ‘following the thing,’ tracing the oyster’s appearance as inter-tidal bivalve, node of infrastructure, civic agent, and cultural icon from Sydney to New York. Methods include embodied fieldwork along the coast, exhibition analysis, and interviews with design professionals, marine scientists, cultural practitioners, policymakers and community organisers, offering insight into how oyster-based interventions are conceptualised, designed and implemented. Emerging from this inquiry is the concept of the Ostreacene: an emergent epoch defined not only by technological innovation or ecological restoration, but by a fundamental reimagining of relationships between cities and seas, human and more-than-human worlds, and the temporalities of capital investment and the slower rhythms of biological growth – with the oyster as protagonist and interlocutor. The dissertation proposes that building coastal resilience in the twenty-first century requires moving beyond hard engineering toward reparative, process-based engagements with rising seas, wherein adaptive, accretive practices exemplified by the oyster become a model for enduring, multispecies stewardship.