The Future of the Promenade
The Future of the Promenade: A Climate-Changed Form examines climate change reshaping the geography of leisure, public space, and urban planning through the northward migration of the beach promenade. As warming temperatures alter the climatic conditions under which seaside leisure becomes viable, planners and developers are imagining new forms of coastal life across the North Sea and Arctic-adjacent regions. The project approaches the promenade as a climatic and social infrastructure through which public life, mobility, comfort, tourism, and environmental change become organized.
Drawing on long-term anthropological work across the global North, the project follows the experts, planners, architects, tourism developers, and municipal actors designing future leisure environments under conditions of climate transition. Particular attention is given to the environmental thresholds that make promenade life possible, including changing temperatures, seasonal rhythms, coastal engineering, and emerging forms of northern urbanism. The northernmost existing beach promenade, in Arkhangelsk along the White Sea, serves as both an empirical anchor and a conceptual limit case for thinking through how climate change reorganizes public infrastructures of everyday life.
Bringing together ethnography, infrastructure studies, environmental humanities, and visual research, Promenade explores how climate futures become materialized through new landscapes of leisure, circulation, and atmospheric design.