1st Edition

Waterfront Regeneration Experiences in City-building

Edited By Harry Smith, Maria Soledad Garcia Ferrari Copyright 2012

    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.

    Preface by Michael Carley  Part 1: Context and Key Issues for Waterfront Regeneration  1. Introduction: Sustainable Waterfront Regeneration around the North Sea in a Global Context (Harry Smith and Soledad Garcia)  2. Negotiating City-building in Waterfront Communities Around the North Sea: An Analytical Framework (Harry Smith and Soledad Garcia)  Part 2: Case Studies of Waterfront City-building Processes Around the North Sea  3. Physical and Institutional Resources in Sustainable Waterfront Regeneration: Land Ownership, Land Use Control and Leadership (Soledad Garcia and Harry Smith)  4. Urban Vitality: Social Supervision in Schiedam, The Netherlands (Kees Fortuin and Freek e Meere)  5. On Dialogues and Municipal Learning in City Building: Examples from Waterfront Development in Gothenburg (Joakim Forsemalm and Knut Stromberg)  6. Experiences in Participation in the Port City of Hamburg (Harry Smith and Soledad Garcia)  7. Harbourscape Aalborg: Design-based Methods in Waterfront Development (Hans Kiib)  8. How Visions of a Living City Come Alive: The Case of Odense, Denmark (Solvejg Beyer Reigstad)  9. Successful Placemaking on the Waterfront (Soledad Garcia, Paul Jenkins and Harry Smith)  10. Design Strategies for Urban Waterfronts: The Case of Sluseholmen in Copenhagen’s Southern Harbour (Soledad Garcia and Derek Fraser)  Part 3: Conclusions  11. Lessons from Shared Experiences in Sustainable Waterfront Regeneration around the North Sea (Harry Smith and Soledad Garcia)

    Biography

    Dr Harry Smith is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Environment and Human Settlements at the Institute for Building and Urban Design, School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. With professional experience in architecture and urban planning in Europe, in recent years he has been involved in a number of research projects focusing on the production and management of the built environment. His research experience spans countries in Europe, Latin America and Africa.

    Dr Maria Soledad Garcia Ferrari is a Senior Lecturer in architectural design at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Professionally qualified in architecture and urbanism in Uruguay, she has taught at Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo and worked as a research consultant, including for the Organisation of American States on coastal growth in Latin American cities. Her main research focus is on current processes of urban development and regeneration in Europe and Latin America.