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.

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.

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.

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.

Large-scale development is once again putting Toronto's waterfront at the leading edge of change. As in other cities around the world, policymakers, planners, and developers are envisioning the waterfront as a space of promise and a prime location for massive investments. Currently, the waterfront is being marketed as a crucial territorial wedge for economic ascendancy in globally competitive urban areas. Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront analyses how and why 'problem spaces' on the waterfront have become 'opportunity spaces' during the past hundred and fifty years. Contributors with diverse areas of expertise illuminate processes of development and provide fresh analyses of the intermingling of nature and society as they appear in both physical forms and institutional arrangements, which define and produce change. Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront is a fundamental resource for understanding the waterfront as a dynamic space that is neither fully tamed nor wholly uncontrolled.

This book focuses on the relationship between gastronomy and urban space. It highlights the intrinsic role of eating establishments and the gastronomy industry for cities by assessing their huge impacts on urban changes and discussing some of the challenges posed by new developments. Written by authors with a background in geography, it starts by discussing theoretical aspects of studies on gastronomy in urban space to place the subject in the broader context of urban geography. Covering both changes and challenges in gastronomy in urban space, it presents a wide range of problems, which are described and analysed using various case studies from Europe and other parts of 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.