Waterfront Redevelopment Five Decades Later: An Updated Typology and Research Agenda

Since the second half of the twentieth century, when maritime practices began migrating outside their traditional central city areas, urban regeneration at the water’s edge has been one of the key issues in port cities’ planning agendas. Waterfronts in port cities have become strategic areas for a range of reasons, such as economic growth, city branding, and addressing housing pressures. However, recent studies also show how their transformation is now more profoundly influenced by hypermobile capital and global finance, and by broad sustainability concerns. The established narrative of waterfront redevelopment as a response to weakening port‐city relationships no longer necessarily represents the present of all port cities, as more nuanced accounts are needed. With examples from Europe and across the world, this article reflects on waterfront redevelopment practices, by building on existing attempts to provide typologies and periodise the history of this phenomenon and focussing on the key approaches emerging in the last decades. It is argued that today’s approaches to waterfront redevelopment, and ultimately contemporary relationships between ports and cities, are changing and possibly differentiating from the “port out, city in” rationale underpinning past schemes. Current practices appear to be ranging from the wholesale transformation of redundant waterfronts into neoliberal urban spaces for consumption and capital accumulation to more “fine‐grained” planning strategies to build more (environmentally, but also economically, socially, and culturally) sustainable urban waterfronts by integrating or restoring port‐related activities within mixed‐used areas.