Theoretical, conceptual, ethical and methodological stakes to induce a new age: M.U.D.

Book chapter, 2012

The M.U.D project develops ways of thinking about shared territory (here: the Belgian coastline) and tries to be coherent with the ideas of fl ux/fl ood/fl oating/fl ows etc. Its design presents an ‘artist’s impression’ pre-fi guring the age of the hybrid called M.U.D. Its designers turn the coastal area into a zone of ‘future confl ict’ where fl oods and fl ows are anticipated, accepted, even welcomed. In consequence the use of land as well of sea will be negotiated in permanence. To compensate for ‘loss’ of land and ‘solids’, a new ‘liquid’ exploitation is proposed. Changing grids scan M.U.D for fl ow-through of source material, energy and waste, fl uxes of data transport, population and migration and recode all these as transactional knowledge, technology and culture. The ‘urban network coast’ formerly known as ‘linear coastal city’ and once, long ago, as ‘coastal resorts’, dissolves, atomizes, explodes further and further into a enormity of small interactions and changes, shifts of interstitial, making the coastal area, again, truly, a ‘coast’, that is: a Space of Flows.