Mili challenges the treatment of wet coastal land as empty development territory. Working through architectural education and design research at ENAU, she examines proposed “instant cities” on Tunisian coastal sebkhas and asks how development can engage landscapes that already perform hydrological and ecological work. Sebkhas regulate water flows through storage, filter runoff, contribute to coastal-erosion protection, sustain biological productivity, provide avifauna habitat and support specialised halophytic vegetation. The iconic contribution is the reversal of conventional site logic: the wetland is not a constraint added after urban form is conceived, but a pre-existing metropolitan infrastructure that must structure the project from the beginning. Methodologically, geology, geomorphology, ecology and design speculation are combined, and the pedagogical framework explicitly allows conclusions such as building differently, building less or not building. The bridge to landscape architecture is powerful: ecological knowledge becomes a design premise rather than an environmental mitigation layer.
