Climate change and multi-risk conditions increasingly challenge urban and coastal landscapes, demanding new approaches that integrate scientific knowledge with local perceptions and collaborative planning practices. This paper presents a design-driven methodological framework developed within the MIRACLE project, which aims to strengthen the resilience of urban and metropolitan areas through participatory, multi-scalar risk assessment. The framework positions visualisation; spanning empirical cartography, participatory mapping, and interactive storymaps; not merely as a means of representing analytical outputs, but as a cognitive infrastructure capable of connecting heterogeneous actors, knowledge domains, and spatial scales. Central to this contribution is the argument that climate risk knowledge can no longer be produced exclusively within academic or technical contexts or understood as mainly a technical thing; rather, it must be reconceptualised as a relation condition and negotiated and co-constructed together with the subjects who inhabit and plan the territories in question. Implemented through co-design workshops across several Italian coastal landscape sincluding Venice, Rimini, Ravenna, the Po Delta, Vicenza, Verona, Bagnoli, and Castellammare di Stabia– the methodology generated cartographic layers and narrative elements that were integrated into the MIRACLE storymap. Qualitative observations from the workshops indicate improved collective understanding of climate-related vulnerabilities, while the progressive refinement of visual artefacts across successive iterations demonstrates the potential of narrative cartography to support more horizontal and relational models of spatial knowledge production. The results contribute to emerging debates on participatory mapping, spatial storytelling, and science-to-policy communication in climate governance.
