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Description
In the context of climate change and the prospect of rising sea level and floods, urban waterfronts are seen as increasingly vulnerable geographies between the urban fabric and the sea. At the same time, they are attractive terrains for investment that transform varied coastlines to new landscapes of leisure and high end residential developments. Such large scale projects of waterfront regeneration, typically engaging both private and public actors in new schemes of entrepreneurial urban governance, aim at boosting the city’s economy by promoting an attractive image to the world. Indeed, urban waterfronts having lost their productive industrial character, are often projected in planning terms either as dormant opportunities for cities’ overall image and their competitiveness in world economy or as vulnerable zones of ecological importance that need to be protected. A large amount of literature has presented urban waterfronts from both these often contradicting perspectives, foregrounding their environmental or the strategic role.
This paper discusses urban waterfronts as places of the everyday around which environmental movements are articulated. Moving beyond, dualistic approaches to waterfronts - natural / technical, formal /informal, global/local - the paper embraces the approach of urban political ecology, viewing the waterfront as socio-natural urban terrain, to unveil the variety of conceptualization of nature, of “ecological imaginaries” (Gandy, 2006) that are vested on it. It suggests that, beyond its global character as an eldorado of real estate in the context of large urban regeneration projects and its natural character as zones of protection of biodiversity and management of climate risks, urban waterfronts are sites of - formal and informal - heritage, public spaces of common access, lived places of the everyday. Such varied imaginaries, often overlooked by formal plans, are foregrounded by local movements that resist proposed plans and actively claim their right to the waterfront, as a common good and a socio-natural heritage.
Adopting this understanding of the waterfront as a terrain where dominant imaginaries of “ecological modernization” coexist and collide with varied, lived ecological imaginaries of the everyday, the paper then examines the case of the waterfront of the city of Thessaloniki. The waterfront of Thessaloniki has been the object of various urban plans and projects of different scales, initiated by different actors, during the last decade. The proliferation of projects is related to developments in planning policy and the management of public land that were introduced during the years of the financial crisis in Greece. The paper maps the projects that have been proposed and/or are already underway, identifies the actors’ involved and their representation of the waterfront, their “waterfront imaginaries”. Next to and in constant interaction with the formal actors, different movements that have resisted, and acted against, these developments are charted. Such resistance is not homogeneous or static in time. It originates from various actors, organized movements or ad hoc intitiatives, may be highly localized or city-wide. They may also be expressed as “nonmovements” (Bayat, 2010)) i.e. “ shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, ... rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations”. Although there is no homogeneity or stability, these nascent urban cultures of resistance articulated around the waterfront, unveil this prominent stretch of land as a space of cultural, social and environmental value produced in different scales and temporalities.
The case study is based on recent schemes proposed on the eastern, less developed, part of Thessaloniki’s waterfront as well as on interviews of people participating in local movements.
References
Bayat, A. (2010) Life as Politics. How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Bunce S. & Desfor G. (2007) Introduction to ‘‘Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations’’, Cities, 24(4), 251–258.
Gandy, M. (2006) Urban nature and the ecological imaginary. In N. Haynen, M. Kaika & E. Swyngedouw In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, Routledge, 63 -74.
| Keywords | urban waterfronts, environmental imaginaries |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
