Waterfront Urban Space

This book explores potentialities and emerging issues to strategies and waterside planning and design, developing research results and detailed cases of interest in response to city change, to promote sustainable development in a variety of ways. It seeks to include some key waterfront matters in linking new spatial patterns to social dynamics and climate change, for future practice. The book is structuring into two parts: The first one – ‘Advancing Riverfront Transformation’ – examines proposals on urban waterfronts and relations between urban spaces and social dynamics to revitalise and re-appropriate urban environment with sustainable design solutions. The second one – ‘Outlining Blue-Green Opportunities’ – develops proposals on waterfront urban spaces and places with promotion of sociability and enjoyment, integrating cultural and economic values, health and wellbeing.

Some cities have long-treasured waterfront promenades, many cities have recently built ones, and others have plans to create them as opportunities arise. Beyond connecting people with urban water bodies, waterfront promenades offer many social and ecological benefits. They are places for social gathering, for physical activity, for relief from the stresses of urban life, and where the unique transition from water to land eco-systems can be nurtured and celebrated. The best are inclusive places, welcoming and accessible to diverse users. This book explores urban waterfront promenades worldwide. It presents 38 promenade case studies—as varied as Vancouver’s extensive network that has been built over the last century, the classic promenades in Rio de Janeiro, the promenades in Stockholm’s recently built Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district, and the Ma On Shan promenade in the Hong Kong New Territories—analyzing their physical form, social use, the circumstances under which they were built, the public policies that brought them into being, and the threats from sea level rise and the responses that have been made. Based on wide research, Urban Waterfront Promenades examines the possibilities for these public spaces and offers design and planning approaches useful for professionals, community decision-makers, and scholars. Extensive plans, cross sections, and photographs permit visual comparison.

Activating Urban Waterfronts shows how urban waterfronts can be designed, managed and used in ways that can make them more inclusive, lively and sustainable. The book draws on detailed examination of a diversity of waterfronts from cities across Europe, Australia and Asia, illustrating the challenges of connecting these waterfront precincts to the surrounding city and examining how well they actually provide connection to water. The book challenges conventional large scale, long-term approaches to waterfront redevelopment, presenting a broad re-thinking of the formats and processes through which urban redevelopment can happen. It examines a range of actions that transform and activate urban spaces, including informal appropriations, temporary interventions, co-design, creative programming of uses, and adaptive redevelopment of waterfronts over time. It will be of interest to anyone involved in the development and management of waterfront precincts, including entrepreneurs, the creative industries, community organizations, and, most importantly, ordinary users.

Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism is the first resource to address cities’ transformations of their coastlines and riverbanks and the resulting effects on environment, culture, and identity in a genuinely global context. Spanning cities from Gdańsk to Georgetown, this reference for design, development, and planning explores the transition of waterfronts from industrial and port zones to crowd-drawing urban spectacles within the frameworks of urban development, economics, ecology, governance, globalization, preservation, and sustainability. A collection of contextual studies, local perspectives, project reviews, and analyses of evolution and emerging trends provides critical insight into the phenomenon of waterfront development and urbanism in cities from the East to the West. Features: Explores the transformation of waterfronts from industrial hubs to urban playgrounds through the lenses of preservation, governance, economics, ecology, and more. Presents chapter-length case studies drawn from cities in China, Bangladesh, Turkey, the United States, Malaysia, the European Union, Egypt, and other countries. Includes contributions from an interdisciplinary team of international scholars and professionals, a much-needed corrective to the historical exclusion of researchers and issues from the Global South. An ideal reference for graduate students, scholars, and professionals in urban planning, architecture, geography, and history, the Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism deserves to be on the shelf of urban authorities and any internationally minded academic or practitioner in real estate development, water management, preservation, or tourism.

Waterfront regeneration and development represents a unique opportunity to spatially and visually alter cities worldwide. However, its multi-faceted nature entails city-building with all its complexity including the full range of organizations involved and how they interact. This book examines how more inclusive stakeholder involvement has been attempted in the nine cities that took part in the European Union funded Waterfront Communities Project. It focuses on analyzing the experience of creating new public realms through city-building activities. These public realms include negotiation arenas in which different discourses meet and are created – including those of planners, urban designers and architects, politicians, developers, landowners and community groups – as well as physical environments where the new city districts' public life can take place, drawing lessons for waterfront regeneration worldwide. The book opens with an introduction to waterfront regeneration and then provides a framework for analyzing and comparing waterfront redevelopments, which is followed by individual case study chapters highlighting specific topics and issues including land ownership and control, decision making in planning processes, the role of planners in public space planning, visions for waterfront living, citizen participation, design-based waterfront developments, a social approach to urban waterfront regeneration and successful place making. Significant findings include the difficulty of integrating long term 'sustainability' into plans and the realization that climate change adaptation needs to be explicitly integrated into regeneration planning. The transferable insights and ideas in this book are ideal for practising and student urban planners and designers working on developing plans for long-term sustainable waterfront regeneration anywhere in the world.

Filled with 34 high-caliber projects from around the globe, and presented with beautiful full-color photographs and detailed plans, designers provide their unique insights into modern trends for rejuvenating river and coastal waterfronts into vital traversable public spaces people can enjoy.

Waterfronts Revisited addresses the historical evolution of the relationship between port and city and re-examines waterfront development by looking at the urban territory and historical city in their complexity and entirety. By identifying guiding values, urban patterns and typologies, and local needs and experiences, cities can break the isolation of the harbor by reconnecting it to the urban structure; its functions, spaces and forms. Using the UNESCO recommendation for the "Historic Urban Landscape" as the guiding concept and a tool for managing urban preservation and change, this collection of essays illustrates solutions to issues of globalisation, commercialization of space and commoditisation of culture in waterfront development. Through sixteen selected case studies, Editors Heleni Porfyriou and Marichela Sepe offer planners and urban designers a broad spectrum of alternative solutions to waterfront regeneration interventions and redevelopments, addressing sustainability, regional cultural diversity, and the debate between conservation and transformation.

In port cities around the world, waterfront development projects have been hailed both as spaces of promise and as crucial territorial wedges in twenty-first century competitive growth strategies. Frequently, these mega-projects have been intended to transform derelict docklands into communities of hope with sustainable urban economies—economies intended to both compete in and support globally-networked hierarchies of cities. This collection engages with major theoretical debates and empirical findings on the ways waterfronts transform and have been transformed in port-cities in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean. It is organized around the themes of fixities (built environments, institutional and regulatory structures, and cultural practices) and flows (information, labor, capital, energy, and knowledge), which are key categories for understanding processes of change. By focusing on these fixities and flows, the contributors to this volume develop new insights for understanding both historical and current cases of change on urban waterfronts, those special areas of cities where land and water meet. As such, it will be a valuable resource for teaching faculty, students, and any audience interested in a broad scope of issues within the field of urban studies.