Speaker
Description
The ever-changing relationship between the water body and urban hinterland has been weakened by the increasing presence of industrial and port spaces in the inner-city waterfront that pushed cities away from the water and ended up as enclaved spaces in the longer term. Changing conditions in the inner-city waterfronts over the last half-century gave the possibility of re-integrating water-urban interfaces into public life, particularly through waterfront redevelopment processes. The projects and policies developed under the motto of reclaiming waterfront areas and reintegrating them into urban life for public use have been significantly altered over time. Especially recent waterfront regeneration strategies and practices demonstrate the opposite tendencies of the prior examples in the field regarding their profound impact on built environments, urban programs, and open spaces. Consequently, inner-city coasts are again defined by new enclaves that exclude the public realm.
Within this context, this research revolves around the question of how the waterfront redevelopment concept has chronologically shifted and their direct impact on public grounds. Increased influence of the market, changing involvement weights of stakeholders, the underlying rationale for waterfront regeneration, and their reflection on the hinterland’s spatial and programmatic development of the waterfront projects from the emergence of the phenomenon to the current timespan are discussed by addressing back to the main idea of the “reclaiming waterfronts for the public”.
This issue is examined in the case of Genoa, which has undergone different canonical waterfront projects since the late 1980s. It comparatively evaluates the public nature of the transformed spaces, from the Porto Antico regeneration to the ongoing Waterfront di Levante redevelopment, by focusing on the key dimensions of public space- ownership, accessibility, management, and inclusivity. Thus, the research employs digital humanities methodologies to advance spatial mapping strategies for the longitudinal analysis of public spaces emerging from waterfront redevelopment processes and their dynamic interrelations with broader urban hinterlands. The intergenerational shifts in Genoa’s waterfront projects are analyzed within a broader framework to assess their impact on public ground, integration, and exclusion.
| Keywords | Genoa, waterfront redevelopment, public space, Waterfront di Levante, Porto Antico |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
