This Ph.d. project deals with the phenomenon of waterfront redevelopment in the changing industrial city and with focus on the Northern European context. It deals with the aspects, determinants, impacts and values involved in the change of the urban landscape of waterfronts in industrial port cities and the new position that these sites occupy in city and regional development.The research focuses on Copenhagen as a main case study and deals in parallel with other selected minor cases: Amsterdam, Gothenburg and Oslo.

Waterfront redevelopment projects and planning for waterfront redevelopment have in many cases been conceived within reductional approaches that have ignored the wider urban context of the port sites, their relationship to neighboring areas and their changing role in city and regional development. The potentials of the port patrimony and its opportunity have not always been well exploited.

The research suggests that many opportunities have been missed in the case of Copenhagen. Therefore, the research aims at prompting a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the change of the waterfront’s urban landscape and the new position of port areas in industrial port city. This approach which would provide for a more qualified background for its planning and for planning for inner city areas. Furthermore, the research aims at highlighting the manner in which harbor-front redevelopment can benefit the port cities and contribute to urban revitalization.

The habourfront development is an issue of current interest to the postindustrial city. A growing number of habourcities develop their own habourfronts with projects of various content and branding ability. The scenery of the habourfront is increasingly filled with office buildings, cultural buildings, housing, promenades, canal neighbourhoods, rowing boats, refurbished silos etc. This development has changed the urban landscape of the habourfront and produced a new spatial practice.

In conclusion, the research stresses the necessity of dealing with the redevelopment of the old harbor and industrial areas in the framework of a comprehensive integrated planning vision that is aware of the nature of their change, barriers to their development, their potential and the impacts resulting of their transformation. It emphasizes the necessity of allocating an urban regeneration dimension to waterfront redevelopment strategies. For reaching such a value, the research emphasizes the necessity of maintaining a catalyzing role for the public sector.

It also underlines the usefulness of developing a visionary integrative sustainable planning framework that capitalizes on realizable self-critical planning, which conceive the process from strategy making to implementation. Such planning framework should therefore simultaneously deal with aspects of city planning, conception of space and implementation partnership. It should also consider the politicoeconomic changes of the industrial port city and understand the relationship between planning and the urban development process.

Further, this planning framework should link overall strategies to physical planning and urban form policies in order to improve the values that result of urban development schemes and single architectural projects.

Centre of Urban Development, Department of Economy, Municipality of Copenhagen
Denmark
Roudaina Al Khani, tel. 0045 3366 2547

/12/2006

Roudaina Al Khani

research

Urban Policy > Economy knowledge & employment

Urban economy