Yevpatoria: The Flat Coastal Model of Resort Urbanisation
Yevpatoria is a coastal resort town situated on the western shore of the peninsula. It represents an exemplary case of a type of coastal settlement that is at once widespread and yet still insufficiently studied in any systematic way: the horizontal seaside resort, whose urban identity is built upon the tension between a recreational frontage strip facing the shoreline and residential quarters set back behind it.
The aim here is to analyse the urban fabric as a historical system of forms, articulating planning units, plot structure, architectural types and land uses. Ecological urbanism provides, in this perspective, the tools necessary for examining the metabolic flows of the city — in particular its water and bioclimatic resources, which are critical within any coastal system.
As for abductive reasoning, it enables the construction of explanatory hypotheses from observable spatial anomalies, without imposing a deductive theoretical framework a priori. Yevpatoria constitutes a particularly relevant object of analysis for several closely related reasons.
First, from a morphological standpoint, it represents the most “typical” Crimean seaside resort: a flat coastal configuration, a rectilinear promenade, the dominant weight of the sanatorium and spa complex in the urban economy — traits that recur across dozens of cities along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastlines. It is precisely this typicality that lends Yevpatoria its scientific interest: understanding its morphological regularities makes it possible to extend conclusions to the entire category of flat coastal seaside resorts.
Second, the city is currently subject to an unprecedented level of investment and development pressure.
Third, several infrastructure projects are being carried out simultaneously, thus opening a particularly productive window of observation onto the ongoing transformations of the coastal space.
Finally, the city’s historico-cultural potential is attested by the presence of 182 protected heritage objects. This heritage, concentrated for the most part in the Old Town quarter, crystallises a fundamental contradiction between conservation imperatives and the logics of urban development — a contradiction that the flat morphology of Yevpatoria tends to intensify, while offering no possibility of resolving it through mechanisms of topographic segregation.
