Colonizzazione delle spiagge, spazio urbano e rischio ambientale in una comunità del genovesato nel XVIII secolo

[Machine translation] The essay addresses the topic of the history of resource management and the definition of the category of environmental risk, starting from a case study dedicated to a specific context, the beaches and the “beach sites” of a community in the Republic of Genoa, Sestri Ponente, which is located a few kilometers from the capital of the Dominion. The coastal territory of this community, located during the 18th century, is affected by an intense activity of transformation. Thanks to special and highly analytical sources, including cartographic sources, generated by government intervention throughout the territory of the Republic, it addresses the way in which the practices of private appropriation of those spaces are confronted, even in a conflictual way, with their originally public nature, and with the demands of their common use, and how this negotiation designs and transforms the delicate hydrogeological balances of a coastal community. The essay is based on unpublished and original sources, and deals with a space, that of the coast and beaches, that has a particular originality from a historiographic point of view. It also deals with the more general discussion on the history of the environment, with a specific attention to the approach to the local analytical scale, thus placing itself in a very flourishing debate in recent years on environmental issues, and promoting a discussion both at the intersection with other more general themes (the history of power, the history of property) and with broader disciplinary approaches (from cartographic and geographical knowledge to the possible applied perspectives of history).