js6676@columbia.edu
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urban planningurban technologytransportation
climateurban design
master’s thesis
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© Jui Shih, 2023 - 2026
Dialectic of the Shore: Heritage as Infrastructure
Case Study: Saline Conti Vecchi
Subject(s)
Urban Planning, Political Economy, Heritage Studies
Course
Design Clinic: Erasing the Shoreline
Tools
Adobe Premier, Photoshop, GitHub Pages, HTML/CSS
Project Location
Sardinia, Italy
Completed Period
May 2026
My output is not only telling the history of the place but making an argument: the site has always been defined by a contest between industry and nature and that heritage has become a mechanism through which that contest is organized and softened.
Visit full website: https://hellojujube.github.io/Shoreline/
My website structures Saline Conti Vecchi’s story as a sequence of phases, each representing a different configuration of the tension. What’s interesting is that these phases are not successive; they overlap and simultaneously coexist on the same ground.
Saline Conti Vecchi is not just one thing. It is an active industrial supply chain producing 400,000 tonnes of salt per year; it is an ecological sanctuary hosting flamingos and five hundred other bird species and protected under the Ramsar Convention (an international treaty for the conservation of wetlands of global importance, whereby the Santa Gilla lagoon has been listed under it since 1977); it is a heritage monument with a restored chemical laboratory, foundry, and gift shop selling fleur de sel and other salt or flamingo themed merchandise; and it is a corporate sustainability showcase, curated by one of Europe’s biggest fossil fuel corporations. These are simultaneous conditions concurrently operating on the same shore at the same time, despit their contradictions. The website advances this argument through a mix of archival photographs, field research photographs captured during site visit in March 2026, and written analysis, building the framework for the case spatially and narratively.
I organized my project around a central tension: the relationship between productivity and nature and the role of narrative as the site moves between these different identities and how heritage is utilized to manage that movement.
In the first phase of land reclamation and industrialization, the marshlands of Santa Gilla was seen as an obstacle for humanity. It was ecologically unruly, infested with malaria carrying mosquitoes, and economically marginal. The terrain was redesigned through draining and reclaiming the lagoon’s margins into a system of evaporation basins, replacing wild wetland with controlled water. This redesign extended beyond the salt pans and into the surrounding social infrastructure. The territory was industrialized ecologically, socially, and spatially. Industry dominated in this phase working with natural processes utilizing sun, wind, and evaporation. Here, nature was not eliminated but was made to work.
In the postwar decades, the site experienced gradual degradation, where workers left, the company village emptied, and the site fell into disrepair, becoming neither fully industrial nor fully natural. Here I wondered what happens to a landscape when the logic that produced it withdraws. The emptied village, the infrastructure of production do not get reverted back to nature when industry leaves, it remains as a kind of ruin, deteriorating as time passes until the next logic arrives. Which then brings us to the third phase- a takeover by a petrochemical giant corporation, ENI, a completely different industrial logic, while it simultaneously began positioning itself as a sustainability leader, with the salt pans and the natural flamingo habitat as a visible face of that claim. Here, the question shifts to how nature gets deployed into a corporate image and narrative and what gets obscured from this process.
In the fourth and current phase- “heritagization” through ENI-FAI partnership, the latter being a National Trust missioned to protect, restore, enhance, and manage Italy’s historical, artistic, and landscape heritage, which began with a reopening of the site to the public. This phase represents the most recent configuration of the nature-production tension, where this project examines most closely given the slightly better access to information available online.
The FAI restoration preserves specific things: the management buildings, the lab, the foundry, the director’s residence, which makes up the guided tour. The contemporary industrial operation consisting of mechanical scrapers and diesel truck fleets are kept off of the tour, while the artisanal craft of solar-powered and historically picturesque elements are memorialized. The museum creates a specific version of the productivity-nature tension, a past in which extraction was communal and human-scaled, evoking a gentler narrative of industry that stands in subtle contrast to the industrially mechanized extraction happening today, which is clearly omitted in the marketing narrative.
So what does this tell us? That heritage at Conti Vecchi does not sit outside the productivity-nature tension but is itself a tool for managing it. A particular version of the site’s industrial past, one in which production worked with nature, where labor was physical and
seasonal rather than mechanical, the heritage narrative gives off a harmonious essence. This image allows ENI's industrial footprint to be absorbed into the story of ecological stewardship and preservation.
Through examining Saline Conti Vecchi, I have come to see heritage as the latest in a long series of narratives used to manage the tension between industry and nature- a tension that is never resolved, only continuously reframed. Each narrative is selective and organized
around the interests of whoever holds the shore. Across each of its historical phases, from reclamation, industrialization, decline, petrochemical integration, to heritagization, the balance between these two poles has shifted. It has legitimized intervention, organized value, and determined what would be visible and what not.
Saline Conti Vecchi is not just one thing. It is an active industrial supply chain producing 400,000 tonnes of salt per year; it is an ecological sanctuary hosting flamingos and five hundred other bird species and protected under the Ramsar Convention (an international treaty for the conservation of wetlands of global importance, whereby the Santa Gilla lagoon has been listed under it since 1977); it is a heritage monument with a restored chemical laboratory, foundry, and gift shop selling fleur de sel and other salt or flamingo themed merchandise; and it is a corporate sustainability showcase, curated by one of Europe’s biggest fossil fuel corporations. These are simultaneous conditions concurrently operating on the same shore at the same time, despit their contradictions. The website advances this argument through a mix of archival photographs, field research photographs captured during site visit in March 2026, and written analysis, building the framework for the case spatially and narratively.
I organized my project around a central tension: the relationship between productivity and nature and the role of narrative as the site moves between these different identities and how heritage is utilized to manage that movement.
In the first phase of land reclamation and industrialization, the marshlands of Santa Gilla was seen as an obstacle for humanity. It was ecologically unruly, infested with malaria carrying mosquitoes, and economically marginal. The terrain was redesigned through draining and reclaiming the lagoon’s margins into a system of evaporation basins, replacing wild wetland with controlled water. This redesign extended beyond the salt pans and into the surrounding social infrastructure. The territory was industrialized ecologically, socially, and spatially. Industry dominated in this phase working with natural processes utilizing sun, wind, and evaporation. Here, nature was not eliminated but was made to work.
In the postwar decades, the site experienced gradual degradation, where workers left, the company village emptied, and the site fell into disrepair, becoming neither fully industrial nor fully natural. Here I wondered what happens to a landscape when the logic that produced it withdraws. The emptied village, the infrastructure of production do not get reverted back to nature when industry leaves, it remains as a kind of ruin, deteriorating as time passes until the next logic arrives. Which then brings us to the third phase- a takeover by a petrochemical giant corporation, ENI, a completely different industrial logic, while it simultaneously began positioning itself as a sustainability leader, with the salt pans and the natural flamingo habitat as a visible face of that claim. Here, the question shifts to how nature gets deployed into a corporate image and narrative and what gets obscured from this process.
In the fourth and current phase- “heritagization” through ENI-FAI partnership, the latter being a National Trust missioned to protect, restore, enhance, and manage Italy’s historical, artistic, and landscape heritage, which began with a reopening of the site to the public. This phase represents the most recent configuration of the nature-production tension, where this project examines most closely given the slightly better access to information available online.
The FAI restoration preserves specific things: the management buildings, the lab, the foundry, the director’s residence, which makes up the guided tour. The contemporary industrial operation consisting of mechanical scrapers and diesel truck fleets are kept off of the tour, while the artisanal craft of solar-powered and historically picturesque elements are memorialized. The museum creates a specific version of the productivity-nature tension, a past in which extraction was communal and human-scaled, evoking a gentler narrative of industry that stands in subtle contrast to the industrially mechanized extraction happening today, which is clearly omitted in the marketing narrative.
So what does this tell us? That heritage at Conti Vecchi does not sit outside the productivity-nature tension but is itself a tool for managing it. A particular version of the site’s industrial past, one in which production worked with nature, where labor was physical and
seasonal rather than mechanical, the heritage narrative gives off a harmonious essence. This image allows ENI's industrial footprint to be absorbed into the story of ecological stewardship and preservation.
Through examining Saline Conti Vecchi, I have come to see heritage as the latest in a long series of narratives used to manage the tension between industry and nature- a tension that is never resolved, only continuously reframed. Each narrative is selective and organized
around the interests of whoever holds the shore. Across each of its historical phases, from reclamation, industrialization, decline, petrochemical integration, to heritagization, the balance between these two poles has shifted. It has legitimized intervention, organized value, and determined what would be visible and what not.