WHY URBAN RIVERFRONT RENEWALS OFTEN FAIL

Many cities worldwide now have available waterfront land, often in the city center, thanks to de-industrialization and concentration of navigation elsewhere. As cities seek to take advantage of this remarkable real estate, they may be prone to some classic ‘traps’ such as copying projects successful in another city but which fail in the new location due to differences in scale, topography, urban form, etc. In this recent publication, Pedro Pinto and Matt Kondolf present an idiosyncratic list of ‘wrongs’ that are evident in many such projects. The paper is freely available, via open access here.

Pinto, JP, and GM Kondolf. 2020. The fit of urban waterfront interventions: matters of size, money and function. Sustainability 12: 4079; doi:10.3390/su12104079

Figure 1. Viana do Castelo, Portugal: three recently built, out-of-scale public buildings cut off the old town from the Lima riverbanks. (source Google)