Coastal Communities-Hastings Part 2 Project 2005 Andrew TellingThiago Pinto da Cunha University of Portsmouth | UK Our project sought to explore new relationships between an urban landscape and the seashore. Through the vehicle of a new residential neighbourhood, we wished to challenge the spatial logic of Hastings’ now largely irrelevant seafront – derived essentially from the 19thc, and struggling to accommodate various contemporary social and cultural demands.A new urban grain was proposed that worked at a larger scale, establishing three spatial bands parallel with the coast – boulevard, park, beach – but which was countered by domestically scaled streets that cross all three and engender a new way of inhabiting the water’s edge. Andy and Thiago were fascinated by the site's past and its potential as a residential gateway to a reinvented Hastings sea-front.By working together, they were able to master a complex urban programme that provided a template for residential development responsive to the unique environmental qualities of the coastal landscape. Their design is democratic in the way the settlement pattern is arranged perpendicular to the coastline, environmentally shrewd in the way this provides both exposure to and shelter from the sea, and sensitive through its use of beach, park and boulevard to structure its relationship to the sea.