Governance and Planning Issues in European Waterfront Redevelopment 1999–2019

Abstract

Since the first redevelopment projects appeared in the 1960s in North-America, urban waterfronts in port cities around the world have experienced continuous spatial and functional change. Waterfront redevelopment started as an opportunity to recover brownfields for urban uses and new relations with the water, but rapidly became a target for investors and politicians to leave their mark on the port city landscape. To many planners, waterfronts have, thus, become a symbol of capital accumulation, consumerism, and of cities attempting to economically revive or reinvent themselves. Four decades after the first waterfront projects of this kind in Europe, it is possible to evaluate the results of this post-modern urban refurbishing, and most importantly, reflect on the sustainability of the transition that has taken place. Since the publication of an earlier volume on European Port Cities in Transition (Hoyle and Pinder, in The Dock & Harbour Authority 79(887):46–49, 1992), sustainable development has gradually become an important objective in urban and port policies. The aim of this chapter is to assess how European waterfront redevelopment projects are influenced by this objective across the continent. This has been done by making an actor-institutional comparison of projects in six European port cities, following a renewed trend in planning research that seeks to expose and understand the ‘rules of the game’ in urban governance and planning practices. This institutionalist perspective leads to a fresh understanding of port-city relationships in Europe, and the role of recent waterfront projects therein. This account of the 1999– 2019 period focuses on how key actors negotiate and attempt to reconcile the inherent tensions involved in planning sustainable waterfront redevelopment schemes, and identify the forces that enable or prevent them to do so.