Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow (Routledge Advances in Geography)

Transforming Urban Waterfronts

Routledge Advances in Geography

1. The Other Global City Edited by Shail Mayaram 2. Branding Cities Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism, and Social Change Edited by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Eleonore Kofman and Catherine Kevin 3. Transforming Urban Waterfronts Fixity and Flow Edited by Gene Desfor, Jennefer Laidley, Quentin Stevens and Dirk Schubert

Transforming Urban Waterfronts Fixity and Flow

Edited by Gene Desfor, Jennefer Laidley, Quentin Stevens and Dirk Schubert

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Gene Desfor, Jennefer Laidley, Quentin Stevens and Dirk Schubert to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transforming urban waterfronts : fixity and flow / edited by Gene Desfor . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (Routledge advances in geography) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Urban renewal—Case studies. 2. Waterfronts—Case studies. 3. Coastal zone management—Case studies. I. Desfor, Gene. HT170.T73 2011 307.37416—dc22 2010015652 ISBN 0-203-84129-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87493-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84129-7 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Fixity and Flow of Urban Waterfront Change

ix xiii xv 1

GENE DESFOR AND JENNEFER LAIDLEY

PART I The Waterfront and the City 1

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

17

PETER V. HALL AND ANTHONY CLARK

2

Fragmentation on the Waterfront: Coastal Squatting Settlements and Urban Renewal Projects in the Caribbean

35

MÉLANIE GIDEL

3

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization in Dublin

54

ASTRID WONNEBERGER

4

Waterfront Revitalizations: From a Local to a Regional Perspective in London, Barcelona, Rotterdam, and Hamburg

74

DIRK SCHUBERT

PART II Global and Local Dynamics on the Waterfront 5

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility: Lessons from Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct Debate KEVIN RAMSEY

101

vi

Contents

6

London Docklands Revisited: The Dynamics of Waterfront Development

121

SUE BROWNILL

7

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

143

JASPER RUBIN

8

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites for Analyzing Neoliberalism and its Contestations

166

SUSANNA SCHALLER AND JOHANNES NOVY

PART III Naturalizing Development and Developing Nature 9

Deep Water and Good Land: Socio-nature and Toronto’s Changing Industrial Waterfront

191

GENE DESFOR

10 Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront: Under the Bridges of Puerto Madero and La Boca

211

STEPHANIE C. KANE

PART IV New Practices of Property-Led Development 11 The German ‘City Beach’ as a New Approach to Waterfront Development

235

QUENTIN STEVENS

12 Exploring Innovative Instruments for Socially Sustainable Waterfront Regeneration in Antwerp and Rotterdam

257

TUNA TAŞAN-KOK AND YESIM SUNGU-ERYILMAZ

13 Flows of Capital and Fixity of Bricks in the Built Environment of Boston: Property-Led Development in Urban Planning? SUSANNE HEEG

274

Contents vii Conclusion: Patterns of Persistence, Trajectories of Change

295

QUENTIN STEVENS

Contributors Index

317 323

Figures

1.1

Federal and provincial government signs announcing the Gateway (Photograph A. Clark).

19

Port and transport systems in the Lower Mainland, BC (Map K. Wuschke, using data from DMTI and Statistics Canada).

21

1.3

Deltaport at Roberts Bank (Photograph P. Hall).

26

2.1

Fort-de-France waterfront (Image M. Gidel).

37

2.2

Port of Spain waterfront (Image M. Gidel).

37

2.3

Volga-Plage (Photograph M. Gidel).

38

2.4

Sea Lots and Saint Ann’s River (Photograph M. Gidel).

39

3.1

Map of the Dublin docklands area showing the boundaries of the docklands as defi ned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Custom House Docks development of 1987, and the boundaries of the communities’ territories as perceived by their residents (Map A. Wonneberger).

57

3.2

The IFSC’s ‘Berlin Wall’ (Photograph A. Wonneberger).

62

3.3

Old and new buildings on the North Wall Quay (Photograph A. Wonneberger).

68

London, Docklands and Thames Gateway (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

80

Barcelona, Port Vell, Port Olympic, and Forum Universel de les Cultures (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

85

1.2

4.1

4.2

x 4.3

4.4

5.1

Figures Rotterdam, Kop van Zuid, Stadshaven, and Maasvlakte 2 (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

87

Hamburg: “String of Pearls”, HafenCity, and “Leap across the Elbe” (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

92

Alaskan Way Viaduct with downtown waterfront, sports stadiums, and Duwamish Industrial Area in the background (Photograph K. Ramsey).

104

Map of Alaskan Way Viaduct displayed with selected neighbourhoods, industrial areas, and port operations (Map K. Ramsey).

105

The Canary Wharf development (Photograph courtesy of D. Earl and E2BN).

121

6.2

Map of London Docklands (Map S. Brownill).

124

6.3

The dynamics of Docklands’ regeneration (Diagram S. Brownill).

127

‘Second wave’ developments in the Royal Docks: Britannia Village (Photograph S. Brownill).

133

Axonometric drawing of San Francisco Port’s northern waterfront (courtesy of the Port of San Francisco).

149

A sketch of the proposal for Embarcadero City by Bolles and Born, circa 1960 (courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library).

151

The Ferry Building and Harry Bridges Plaza (Photograph J. Rubin).

159

“Selected planning and economic development initiatives” within a recent city publication (courtesy of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New York City Department of City Planning).

169

Several new green spaces, public promenades, and bike lanes dot New York’s waterfront, as seen in this view of West Harlem (Photograph J. Schaller).

172

Willets Point, Queens, New York (Photograph J. Schaller).

175

5.2

6.1

6.4 7.1 7.2

7.3 8.1

8.2

8.3

Figures 8.4

xi

Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York (Photograph J. Schaller).

179

Workers move pipes that carry sludge dredged from lake bottom for the construction of Toronto’s Port Industrial District, circa 1914 (courtesy of the Toronto Port Authority Archives).

193

Ashbridge’s Bay Area, Toronto, 1894 (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

195

Toronto’s central waterfront in the late 1980s (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

196

Ashbridge’s Bay Improvement Plan, by Beavis and Brown, 1889 (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

205

Central waterfront of Buenos Aires (Map S.C. Kane, adapted from Pampa Fértil [2006]).

212

10.2

La Boca’s rural connections (Photograph S.C. Kane).

224

10.3

Pendant Bridge (Photograph S.C. Kane).

225

10.4

Womankind Bridge and silo (Photograph S.C. Kane).

227

11.1

Strand Pauli, Hamburg, 2007 (Photograph courtesy of Juriaan Simonis).

236

11.2

Sandburg Cologne, 2009 (Photograph courtesy of 2o.9).

242

11.3

Strandbar Mitte, Berlin, 2005 (Photograph courtesy of Axel Kuhlmann/www.abbilder.com).

246

Rheinstrand, Mainz, 2008 (Photograph courtesy of Matthias G. Barth).

247

9.1

9.2

9.3

9.4

10.1

11.4 11.5

Traumstrand, Berlin, adjacent to the city’s new central railway station, 2009 (Photograph courtesy of Claire Colomb). 250

11.6

Oststrand, Berlin, 2009. Remaining section of Berlin Wall visible top left (Photograph Quentin Stevens).

252

Planning zones in Kop van Zuid (Map T. Taşan-Kok, digitalized by OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies).

264

12.1

xii 12.2

13.1 13.2

Figures Planning zones in Het Eilandje (Map T. Taşan-Kok, digitalized by OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies).

266

South Boston Waterfront and its sub-districts (Map S. Heeg).

281

South Boston Waterfront and Boston CBD (Map S. Heeg).

282

Tables

4.1 5.1

Comparative Information on London, Barcelona, Rotterdam, and Hamburg

78

Three Options Proposed for Replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct as of January 2007—All Options Include the Removal of the Current Viaduct and Development of New Bike Lanes and a Streetcar Line

104

6.1

A Short History of Docklands Development

123

12.1

Logic and Institutional Context of Waterfront Redevelopment in Antwerp and Rotterdam

261

Property Development’s Influences on Economic Regeneration

277

Comparison of Boston’s Planning Goals in 1996–1999 with Approved/Existing Developments in 2004–2005

284

13.1 13.2

Acknowledgments

This book arose out of a 2008 conference of the International Network of Urban Waterfront Research held in Hamburg, Germany. Thanks go to all those who were involved as participants in the conference, the conference organizers and attendees, as well as the individual chapter authors featured in this book, for their time, energy, patience, and expertise. The conference was generously supported through the fi nancial assistance of the following: Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant 410-2005-2071, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung Köln, HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, the Hamburg Port Authority, International Building Exhibitions (IBA) Hamburg GmbH, and Klostertor-Verwaltungs GmbH Klausmartin Kretschmer. We wish to acknowledge the assistance of Julia Ross in the preparation of the index. We want to point out that, in addition to the assistance of the individuals and organizations mentioned above, chapters have an initial endnote containing acknowledgments specific to the body of work in that chapter.

Introduction Fixity and Flow of Urban Waterfront Change Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley

Stepping down from the warehouse district of Hamburg’s historic freeport, we looked out over the Sandtorkai Promenade. Smartly outfitted children ran along the pontoon walkway on that sunny October day, their parents strolling among the decorative mooring cleats and huge claw anchors from long-deceased shipping vessels. Our guide explained that the buildings overhead, cantilevered out over the water, were the fi rst residential buildings constructed in the area in over 120 years. Across the water, the adjacent quarter was still being built, even though many buildings were already occupied. A short walk brought us to the heart of Dalmannkai, with its mix of offices, shops, and apartments. Two young boys played basketball with their father in a small urban park while older couples enjoyed afternoon coffee and cakes at upscale eateries nearby. Our large group drew polite but curious stares as we trooped up the Marco Polo Terraces, pointing into the distance at the as-yet-unimpeded views across the River Elbe. Teenagers flipped tricks on skateboards as young couples walked hand in hand and toddlers waited for another spoonful of dad’s ice cream. This is HafenCity Hamburg, Europe’s largest inner-city urban development project, reclaiming 157 hectares of former port lands to enlarge the city centre by 40 percent (HafenCity Hamburg 2009). The visit to HafenCity was just one of two tours our hosts organized during the 2008 International Network of Urban Waterfront Research (INUWR) conference in Hamburg, Germany. From the water-level vantage of a sightseeing boat, we also toured the Port of Hamburg—one of the largest, most dynamic, and most capital-intensive shipping facilities in Europe. Since German reunification and the expansion of European markets, the Port of Hamburg has become one of the world’s leading seaports and logistics centres. With a steadily increasing capacity, its 4,331 hectares will be enlarged by 919 hectares to accommodate port expansion (Port of Hamburg 2009). The tours gave the conference participants important fi rst-hand evidence about the transformation of a particular port at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century. Our conference, from which chapters in this volume originated, engaged primarily with a new wave of urban waterfront development that has

2

Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley

recently emerged as waterfronts such as Hamburg’s have become vital sites of promise for cities seeking economic growth and socio-cultural development in the post-industrial period. Policymakers, planners, and developers around the world are looking to waterfronts as locations for massive investments that can potentially elevate particular metropolitan regions within globalized urban hierarchies and, concurrently, reconstitute or create new forms of social interaction in dislocated or disused central city locations. So-called ‘problem spaces’ are being converted into spaces of opportunity for the new “creative class” (see Florida 2005) as cities position themselves to compete in globally scaled growth strategies. Recent events demonstrate that the ‘spaces of opportunity’ proposed for many waterfront developments have generated considerable controversy, resistance, and struggle. For example, one year after our conference a group of artists, intellectuals, and concerned citizens in Hamburg, called ‘Not In Our Name’, issued a manifesto about recent urban developments in that city, particularly on the waterfront. Fed up with the application of the ideas of the “creative class” to their city, the statement demanded “that the ‘planned’ city and its extensive ‘gentrification’ be immediately stopped and that it not be used to create socially and class segregated ‘ghettos’ that privilege the few over the culture, social space and life of the city and its many diverse communities.” For them, city politics have been increasingly subordinated to an image of the city as a “pulsating capital”, which offers a “stimulating atmosphere and the best opportunities for creatives of all stripes.” And they declared that: “A city is not a brand” (Not In Our Name 2009). This struggle to achieve a different understanding of the city and urban space is the kind of issue with which authors in this volume engage. Authors who are concerned not only with urban geography, but also with sociology, planning and urban design, culture, environmental studies, ethnography, political ecology, and anthropology present a fresh body of critical work on changing waterfront spaces. As such, this volume expands the boundaries of traditional geographical analysis while making new and timely insights into the ways that social, economic, cultural, political, and natural processes are intertwined in the development of urban waterfronts.

WATERFRONT MODERNIZATION Hamburg’s changing waterfront bears witness to modernization’s processes of creative destruction that are reshaping waterfronts around the world. Historic spaces at the water’s edge that were once home to manufacturing plants, cargo handling facilities, passenger ship terminals, sailortowns, and warehouses had slipped into a devalued, under-utilized, and feared condition. Economic, political, and biophysical processes are coming together to make those spaces come alive again with twenty-fi rst-century activities

Introduction 3 oriented to a globalized urban life housed in mixed-use buildings, convergence centres, entertainment complexes, centres of higher learning, and sleek corporate headquarters. In port cities around the world, waterfront development projects have been hailed both as spaces of promise and as crucial territorial wedges in twenty-fi rst-century competitive growth strategies. Large investments have been made, and more are being planned, in urban waterfront development projects intended to transform derelict docklands into communities of hope with sustainable urban economies—economies intended to both compete in and support globally networked hierarchies of cities. Hamburg’s current wave of waterfront development combines projects that expand the port with a massive redevelopment of older sections of inner-city port areas, and both are expected to have major influences on the urban region. But reinventing port cities from the water’s edge is not new. Waterfronts have been centres of urban transformation for centuries and will, no doubt, continue to be so. Whether the port or the city is the main influence on waterfront activities (see Norcliffe, Bassett, and Hoar 1996), we argue that waterfronts have been and continue to be spaces where an ensemble of actors, both societal and biophysical, and representing global, regional, and local forces, engage in intense struggles that change the urban. The protagonists in these struggles frequently have dissimilar or contradictory spatial and temporal perspectives as well as class interests, and the waterfront projects that emerge from these struggles at any temporal moment, the fi xities, have embedded within them the controversies, tensions, and ambiguities from those processes. Internal tensions in particular development projects arise because waterfront spaces are dependent on local economies but are also crucial sites for competitive global growth strategies; these spaces embody the past and represent opportunities for the future; they generate growth within the city and impel growth outside the city; they are both subject and object of cities’ ambitions and growth strategies; they are within a jurisdiction but are often outside that jurisdiction’s control; they are both colonized and colonizing territories; they are represented as spaces of promise but have often been spaces of oppression; they are planned and unplanned; and of course, they are both natural and artificial. Authors confront this constellation of tensions and contradictions in this collection of new and original research. The collection engages with major theoretical debates and empirical fi ndings on the ways waterfronts both transform and have been transformed in cities around the world. It brings together authors from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds to tackle, from a variety of perspectives, vital questions of urban growth and development generally, and particularly as related to and linked with waterfronts. Waterfronts have always been special places where land and water meet, and they continue to be leading sites for urban transformations as cities compete on a global scale to attract the new information processing and creative economy opportunities with high-income jobs. The

4

Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley

overall approach in this volume is to focus on complex economic, political, cultural, and biophysical processes as they become intertwined with one another to transform urban waterfronts.

THE NEED FOR AN UPDATE Since the onset of economic restructuring in the mid-1970s, major edited books illustrating and analyzing waterfront developments have appeared on a roughly ten-year cycle. These have alternated between academic volumes critiquing the political, social, and economic context within which these development projects occurred (Malone 1997; Hoyle et al. 1988), and more congratulatory, large-format, highly illustrated volumes with short descriptive articles by the projects’ developers, planners, and politicians (Marshall 2001; Bruttomesso 1993). The four leading texts (Hoyle, Malone, Bruttomesso, and Marshall) are now between seven and twenty years old, although they are still highly cited by a new generation of researchers world-wide. But with increasing shifts in the global economy and the growing expertise of corporate developers, urban planners, and architects, these books no longer adequately engage with today’s realities or tomorrow’s expectations. We distinguish between professionally oriented studies and scholarly analyses of waterfront development. Professionally oriented perspectives generally provide prescriptive approaches with much less emphasis on reflective studies. Scholarly work, on the other hand, is less prescriptive, more analytic, and more reflective in its approach to waterfront change, examining waterfront change within the context of broader social systems, historical events, scientific processes, and nature–society relations. In this way, our book goes beyond the professional concerns of architects, landscape designers, and physical planners to provide a richer, more nuanced and critical examination of a range of economic, social, environmental, political, and management issues. It highlights a wide range of approaches and a multiplicity of actors who were or are actively involved in the contested processes through which waterfront development projects have been formulated and implemented. And it offers an independent, critical edge, examining opportunities for, impediments to, and confl icts within waterfront change.

THE FIXITY AND FLOW OF WATERFRONT CHANGE To provide a coherent and critical structure through which to analyze the dynamic tangle of relations associated with waterfront change, we have framed this volume around the theme of ‘fi xity and flow’. This theme captures many of the ambiguities and complexities that characterize processes

Introduction 5 of waterfront change. It posits that a variety of fi xities (such as built environments, institutional and regulatory structures, and cultural practices) and flows (such as processes of capital accumulation, information, labour, fi nance capital, energy, and knowledge) are central categories of a conceptual framework for understanding change, particularly on the waterfront, but also more generally in urban regions. Notions of fi xity and flow allow the authors to go beyond exploring a simple dichotomy between static and shifting aspects of urban landscapes and point toward more complex and contradictory meanings embedded in these terms. ‘Fixity’ and ‘flow’ are dialectically related concepts for understanding the processes of waterfront change. As Swyngedouw (2004, 21) notes, “fi xity is the transient moment that can never be captured in its entirety as the flows perpetually destroy and create, combine, and separate.” The notion of ‘fi xity’ is multidimensional with many layers of meaning. It carries the meaning of something that is solid, something that is secure and anchors space at a particular time. But, of course, within the dynamics of modernizing society, “everything that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1848). To be modern means to know “both the thrill and the dread” of a world in which everything changes (Berman 1982, 13). For us, focusing on processes by which ‘fi xities’ are transformed is central to understanding not only the particulars of waterfront development, but also more general processes of social change. This transformation, as noted by Swyngedouw, can be best understood by unraveling the dynamics of relations between the perpetual movement of ‘flows’ and the transient moments of ‘fi xities’. In this reading, both fi xity and flow are inherently active and continually produced. Indeed, the ‘fi xities’ that characterize waterfront developments are concerned as much with a constant turnover as are the ‘flows’ of waterfronts that are influenced by structure and inertia. We are not the fi rst to use the specific phrase ‘fi xity and flow’, and its conceptual background has an important history. Tim Cresswell introduced it in urban geography when discussing the roles that various kinds of movement have played in Western society. Cresswell’s 2006 book, On the Move, uses the phrase to summarize his ideas about the ways that place, spatial order, and movement inform thought and action. Cresswell is primarily concerned with understanding “how the fact of movement becomes mobility. How, in other words, movement is made meaningful, and how the resulting ideologies of mobility become implicated in the production of mobile practices” (2006, 21). He argues that ‘mobility’ permeates Western society and that deeply rooted ideologies of mobility are pervasive in contemporary social and cultural theory. Mobility is, indeed, a concept that may be important in considerations of waterfront change. Waterfronts are typically places where the movement or flow of people, nature, goods, and capital make their entrances to and exits from the city, and where they leave their marks on it.

6

Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley

Cresswell identifies in Western thought a “metaphysics of fi xity and flow” comprised of two different categories. The fi rst, a sedentarist metaphysics, “sees mobility through the lens of place, rootedness, spatial order, and belonging” (Cresswell 2006, 26). According to this metaphysics, mobility is morally and ideologically suspect, a by-product of a world arranged through place and spatial order. A nomadic metaphysics, on the other hand, puts mobility fi rst and minimizes the importance of attachment to place. It “revels in notions of flow, flux, and dynamism” where “place is portrayed as stuck in the past, overly confi ning, and possibly reactionary” (Cresswell 2006, 43). Mobility, therefore, is more than simply movement— more than simply flow; it is a contested arena in which difference systematically exists in an asymmetrical field of power. As Cresswell (2006, 220) writes, “mobility as a social and cultural resource gets distributed unevenly and in interconnected ways.” Cresswell’s conceptualization of mobility as a social construction that is highly dependent on understandings of relations of power is helpful for understanding particular aspects of waterfront change. For instance, engaging in discussions of migration, the movement of goods through ports, the growing securitization of ports, and the emergence of settlements near ports, necessitates, in our view, an understanding of relations of power that make these patterns possible. However, this understanding of mobility is only one aspect of the confluence of fi xity and flow and the implications it has for waterfront change. Activity on and around waterfronts can certainly be understood with notions of mobility and movement; but such activity also embodies historical, more nuanced but contingent relationships that should be considered within a framework that focuses on interdependencies with other places and spaces—such as within network analyses. Waterfronts are spaces best understood as operating within networks of historical relations, through the shipping of objects, information, and people. And these historical relations greatly influence the formation of power relations throughout the network. While Cresswell engages the cultural and societal implications of mobility as a power relation, the works of theorists such as Manuel Castells discuss the ways flows have similar implications in space. In his 1996 book The Rise of the Network Society, Castells discusses the ways that the development of information processing technologies has revolutionized our economies and in particular our life in cities. He suggests that the information technology revolution in the 1980s was the start of a restructuring of the capitalist system. The rise of electronic communications and information economies lies at the heart of a new mode of capitalist development in which a series of complex networks are influential in producing “spaces of flows”. Cites operate within networked flows of production, distribution, consumption, and, most importantly for Castells, information. The physical territories of cities are considered to be the relatively fi xed nodes of a network, whereas the flows of

Introduction 7 people, energy, information, disease, etc., connect these nodes in a network of relations. The dynamics of a spatial network of cities are greatly influenced by those spaces (for example, ports) that serve to enhance or retard flows and circulation in the network. One of the interesting consequences of Castells’s analysis of networked cities is his suggestion that global flows of information in a post-modern society tend to homogenize places and dislodge local identities. As a result, relationships between architecture and society become blurred and the individuality of a place becomes difficult to maintain. This is certainly reflected in the tendency during the late 1970s and 1980s for waterfront developments around the world to include strikingly similar festival markets, marine museums, and aquariums in the mold of the Rouse Corporation’s projects in Baltimore and Boston. This professed tendency towards a loss of local identity in conjunction with the importance of ‘flows’ in constituting urban change is picked up by a number of other authors. In 2005, Kim Dovey, together with Leonie Sandercock, Quentin Stevens, Ian Woodcock, and Stephen Wood, produced an important volume on the transformations of Melbourne’s waterfront. Inspired by the ideas of Appadurai, Deleuze, and other post-modern social theorists, Fluid City conceptualizes urban change as a confluence of both global and local forces that are represented as flows. The theoretical foundation for the analyses of waterfront change is informed by Deleuze’s “immanent flows of desire” that are central to the ways that identities are constructed and reflected in waterfront sites. With these Deleuzian ‘flows’ in mind, Dovey posits that changes to Melbourne’s waterfront may be characterized by an “ungrounding” (Dovey 2005, 3) of urban development— that is, the identity of place has been disassociated from the particularities of local history, traditions, events, memories, site conditions, and environmental characteristics. His narrative relates the story of a place becoming unhinged as “urban identity is reconstructed as it is commodified” (Dovey 2005, 13). Fluid City reminds us of the important contribution that Deleuze and Guattari have made to the understanding of urban space. For them, urban space is both the basis for and a result of processes of urbanization, wherein the city exists in the midst of processes of deterritorializing and reterritorializing. Cities are constituted through circuits of circulating capital, commodities, energies, and labour. Because the city exists within such mutually constituting spaces of different scales, it can be understood as being simultaneously deterritorialized and reterritorialized. It is deterritorialized in that it necessarily exists within a network of flows (both global and local), but it is reterritorialized as those flows materialize in space and time. Any particular city, then, while being simultaneously deterritorialized and reterritorialized in its abstract spatial relations needs to be considered within a network of grounded (everyday) relations at any specified historical moment.

8

Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley

Here, then, we see the emergence of waterfronts as liminal spaces— spaces not only on the margins but also in transition and encompassing considerable ambiguity. Waterfronts embody the marginality and ambiguities that Deleuze and Guattari discuss. They are ‘on the edge’ in more ways than just their physical location. And they are deterritorialized spaces in that their identity is constructed by relations within a complex network of flows, but also reterritorialized by the particularities of the many fi xities that exist in and on them at any historical moment in time. Sailortowns (see Hilling 1988) are a good example of this liminality. They were, clearly, on the margins of mainstream society. Everyday life in a sailortown embodies a deterritorialized set of relations among shipping companies, international labour regulations, markets and processes, and shipping technologies. That same everyday life in a sailortown is reterritorialized by the particularities of local housing conditions, social practices, history, and so forth. The ‘improvement of nature’ (see Desfor in this volume) that saw the development of major infrastructure projects during the industrial and post-industrial eras also provides excellent examples of the liminality of waterfront spaces. On the waterfront, material forms of nature, such as water and land, intersect with each other with great fluidity. And human attempts at manipulating the complex relationships among these components have left urban waterfronts not as pristine places, but as prime examples of how socio-nature has been produced through inseparable human and biophysical processes. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial practices were institutionalized in port, canal, and railway infrastructure development as well as in landfill technologies and the construction of factories adjacent to ports. Indeed, in many port cities throughout the world, the manipulation of socio-nature into spaces for industrial production and large-scale planning projects has defi ned notions of ‘progress’ and modernization. But, the liminality of these techno-nature projects soon became apparent as a supposedly domesticated nature gave rise to new and frequently more threatening problems—for example, as straightened and encapsulated rivers increased the potential for flooding. Liminal spaces tend to be highly contested and the politics of their specific form, as territories, rests, in Harvey’s formulation, on dynamic relations between mobile and immobile capital (Harvey 1982, 1985; also Cox 1998). The politics of urban land-use change frequently emerges from tensions and contradictions embedded in both spatially fi xed forms of capital (such as airports, infrastructure, and manufacturing plants) and more mobile forms of capital (such as information and fi nancing). While value is often produced within fi xed forms of capital (for example, within an office building or a manufacturing plant), more mobile capital tends to devalue fi xed capital as part of a continual search for higher levels of profit. Prominent actors in these politics represent fi xed and mobile forms of capital at a range of scales from the local to the global. These actors engage in processes that seek to reconcile their various interests and frequently opt to

Introduction 9 pursue spatial and temporal fi xes that enable accumulation to proceed, at least temporarily. Harvey’s 1996 book, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, sets out his dialectical approach to understanding the politics and economics of space, place, and nature. His work offers us principles that enrich our understanding of spatial, temporal, and environmental issues that are directly relevant to theoretical understandings of the ways that urban waterfronts change. In his dialectical analysis, Harvey emphasizes that “processes, flows, fluxes, and relations” should be the focus of attention, rather than an “analysis of elements, things, structures, and organized systems.” He writes that: There is a deep ontological principle involved here, for dialecticians in effect hold that elements, things, structures, and systems do not exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain, or undermine them. For example, in our contemporary world, flows of capital (goods, and money) and of people give rise to, sustain, or undermine places such as factories, neighborhoods, and cities understood as things. . . . We typically investigate flows of goods, money, and people by examining relationships between existing entities like factories, neighborhoods, and cities. . . . Dialectical reasoning holds, however, that this epistemological condition should get reversed when it comes to formulating abstractions, concepts, and theories about the world. This transforms the self-evident world of things with which positivism and empiricism typically deals into a much more confusing world of relations and flows that are manifest as things. (49–50) He goes on further to say, “A dialectical conception of both the individual ‘thing’ and the structured system of which it is a part rests entirely on an understanding of the processes and relations by which things and structured systems are constituted” (Harvey 1996, 50). And he adds, for our purposes, an essential qualifier: that these constituting processes operate within bounded fields. Although Harvey does not elaborate on what constrains a field of operations, we argue that introducing spatial or temporal specificity (for example) into a dialectical analysis grounds it to particular circumstances. Our interest in the everyday convinces us that we must address the fi xity of ‘things’ when considering processes within a bounded spatial and temporal field. For our analyses, ‘things’ foreground the importance of the everyday. While examinations of processes of change are vital for revealing the embeddedness of unseen and foundational forces, we believe that concrete experiences of everyday physicalities—such as spatial patterns of the built environment, institutions, legislation, and societal structures—need to be specified within our case studies of waterfront change. These ‘things’ or structures do not usually change in short- and medium-term periods

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of analysis. For example, in most of the cases of waterfront property–led development analyzed in this book, the institutional field (urban, regional, and national governments, urban development corporations, propertyrights legislation, and so on) is fi xed during a particular temporal period. This does not mean, however, that we accept the conceptualization of Ash Amin, who notes the usefulness of “a relational reading of place that works with the ontology of flow, connectivity and multiple geographical expressions, to imagine the geography of cities and regions through their plural spatial connections” (2004, 34). Amin argues against a politics in which local actors can have effective control or management of a social and political space, because power flows across territorial boundaries. We argue instead for reordered and more nuanced analyses, analyses that do not fixate on ‘things’ and that also give due regard to processes that constitute the everyday groundedness of space and time. Political actions at a local level are influential in altering processes that produce the ‘things’ of waterfront development, but they cannot disregard networked flows of power. Harvey’s elaboration and interpretation of a dialectical approach has had substantial influence on many urban disciplines and inspired many analysts throughout the Western world. Maria Kaika’s 2005 City of Flows is informed by Harvey’s approach and gives prominence to flows, modernity, and nature as the basis for understanding urban change. In Kaika’s analysis, the physical and social environments of the city are constituted through historical geographical processes of the urbanization of nature, and the urbanization of nature is fundamentally associated with modernization. Kaika develops the notion of a “Promethean project”, through which modernity “would defy the power of nature, reject divine order, and launch on a quest to free Man from his premodern fears, serve human needs and deliver social equity and material goods to everybody through progress, truth, reason, and rationality” (2005, 12). She posits that “excavating the flows that constitute the urban would produce a political-ecology of the urbanization of nature” (2005, 25). Her work is intended to unravel spatial expressions of the dualism of nature and society relations, and investigate how modern cities have been infused by particular visions and ideologies of nature. Kaika’s City of Flows contributes substantially to enriching our understanding of urban change, but our volume’s theme differs from it, not only in our concentration on changing waterfront spaces, but also by emphasizing the importance of the ‘fi xities’ of everyday life that are apparent within a bounded field of space and time. Finally, notions of ‘fi xity and flow’ have been employed in recent urban political ecology literature to analyze a variety of issues. For example, Roger Keil and Harris Ali (2008) have found these notions useful in their analysis of a political pathology of emerging infectious disease within a dialectic framework of fi xity and mobility. Their approach to understanding how SARS spread and emerged as a major urban problem considered relationships between a fi xed network of global cities and mobilities that emerged

Introduction 11 through constant flows of people, information, and microbes along well-established communication and transport routes. Though the particularities of Keil and Ali’s work is not directly related to our project of understanding waterfront change, it is interesting that notions of ‘fi xity and flow’ have been found to be useful for analyzing a range of urban problems broader than those usually associated with the construction of built environments. The ‘fi xity and flow’ theme serves to unite the contributions in this volume, but it is not intended to be a theory of waterfront change. Rather it is a broad topic that resonates with a range of existing disciplinary approaches and that may be applied in different circumstances from a variety of perspectives, each adding a new layer of meaning to complex processes of waterfront transformation. Indeed, the editors have asked chapter authors to engage with the theme to generate new insights from their case studies of particular waterfront developments. In addition, the theme has helped put into perspective the complex array of inseparable social and biophysical processes that come together to transform urban waterfronts. Whether it is the development of sustainable mixed-use projects on devalued industrial and warehousing lands, the provision of high-priced waterfront housing, the restructuring of port authorities and local governance agencies, the mobilization of social investments for constructing deep water and good land, the renewing of property-led development practices, or the production of new techno-nature infrastructural projects, all these changes are constituted through processes in which fi xities and flows are centrally involved. By engaging with the fi xities and flows embedded within particular urban settings, the authors in this book unravel both historical and contemporary cases of waterfront development to reveal new understandings of processes through which waterfronts have been transformed.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK This collection, which arose out of the 2008 INUWR conference, is organized to present fi xities and flows of waterfront transformation processes in a wide range of port cities. Participants in the conference examined changing patterns of relationships among waterfront development projects, ports, and cities; this collection begins with chapters that explore these patterns from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. It then proceeds to look to three categories of influences on those relationships that conference participants used to better understand the ways that fi xities and flows have manifested themselves in a range of cases: global and local dynamics, nature–society relations, and new practices of land development. The conclusion reflects upon the concepts and methods by which the contributors have analyzed and interpreted the dynamics of waterfront change. Chapters in the fi rst part, “The Waterfront and the City”, examine changing spatial, political, social, and socio-economic relations between

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waterfront and port areas and their cities. As flows of technological, economic, environmental, and social change are played out in waterfront areas, these chapters assert, new fi xities are created that have led to new forms of representation, new understandings of urban organization, and, sometimes, reassertions of established connections and flows. The chapters explore these issues in waterfront cities in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and the U.K. The four chapters in the second part, “Global and Local Dynamics on the Waterfront”, explore the confluences of global and local political economic and governance activities on waterfronts in cities in North America, the U.K., and Europe. These explorations include examinations of the fi xities and flows of the actors involved and the impacts of these multi-scaled activities, demonstrating the historically important role of waterfronts in issues of urbanization and urbanism in Western cities. The waterfront is one of the most visible areas of a city where the natural and the urban exist in intertwined and mutually constitutive relations. The two chapters in the third part, “Naturalizing Development and Developing Nature”, explore these relations in the very different cities of Toronto and Buenos Aires, highlighting the ways in which social, ecological, and economic flows interact in the production of both common and surprising urban fi xities. Urban development approaches that are based on maximizing the economic potential of real estate have had an increasingly important role in waterfronts around the world and are being undertaken by both the privateand public-sector authorities, often in new kinds of partnerships. Three chapters in the fourth part, “New Practices of Property-Led Development”, examine recent processes involved in waterfront real estate development in European and North American waterfront cities, and the challenges involved in reorienting particular kinds of urban fi xity based on certain types of political and economic flows.

REFERENCES Amin, Ash. 2004. Regions unbound towards a new politics of place. Geografi ska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86(1): 33–44. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All that is solid melts into air. London and New York: Verso. Bruttomesso, Rino. 1993. Waterfronts: A new frontier for cities on water. Venice: International Centre for Cities on Water. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. New York and London: Routledge. Cox, Kevin. 1998. Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for local politics. Political Geography 17(1): 1–23.

Introduction 13 Dovey, Kim. 2005. Fluid city: Transforming Melbourne’s urban waterfront. New York and London: Routledge. Florida, Richard. 2005. Cities and the creative class. New York: Routledge. HafenCity Hamburg. 2009. Accessed 14 November 2009. Harvey, David. 1982. The limits of capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1985. The urbanization of capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1996. Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hilling, David. 1988. Socio-economic change in the maritime quarter: The demise of sailortown. In Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment, eds. Brian Hoyle, D.A. Pinder, and M.S. Husain. London: Belhaven Press. Hoyle, Brian S., David A. Pinder, and M. Sohail Husain, eds. 1988. Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment. London and New York: Bellhaven Press. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of fl ows: Modernity, nature, and the city. New York and London: Routledge. Keil, Roger and Harris Ali. 2008. The urban political pathology of emerging infectious disease in the age of the global city. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, 19 April. Marshall, Richard, ed. 2001. Waterfronts in post-industrial cities. London: Spon. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Online edition Accessed 2 December 2009. Norcliffe, Glen, Keith Bassett, and Tony Hoar. 1996. The emergence of postmodernism on the urban waterfront. Journal of Transport Geography 4(2): 123– 134. Not In Our Name. 2009. Not In Our Name: Hamburg artists speak out against a segregated city. Accessed 18 January 2010. Port of Hamburg. 2009. Accessed 14 November 2009. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

The Waterfront and the City

1

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection 1

Peter V. Hall and Anthony Clark

Half a century of change in ports, shipping, and trade has profoundly reshaped relationships between ports and their cities. The concept of disconnection has been used to describe the process whereby once tight physical, economic, and institutional relationships between general cargo ports and their cities have changed with the introduction of containerization and other shipping innovations (Hall 2007). Disconnection has had profoundly negative consequences for city-regions containing ports; as the (private) benefits of increased cargo throughput have become more widely dispersed geographically, the (social) costs are concentrated locally (Hesse 2006; McCalla 1999). The simultaneous spatial concentration and dispersal of port-related activity shares much with the processes of global city formation that Sassen (1991) and others have related to the changing spatial organization of fi nance and advanced business services. For port cities, the critical analysis of these scholars describes a period in which ‘flow’ has dominated ‘fi xity’, when carriers and shippers have enjoyed unprecedented ability to detach from local relationships. That is, the past fi fty years was a period in which the interests that represent the flows of goods (e.g., railroad and shipping companies) dominated the interests that represent the fi xity of both the surrounding built environment and its associated institutional structures and relationships. However, there are indications that aspects of this relationship may now be changing. Instances of a reassertion of a ‘fi xed’ relationship between port and city are visible in efforts to address traffic congestion in and around major freight ports through infrastructure investment, in local resistance to the environmental impacts of goods movement and resultant attempts to (re)regulate port activity, and in the regional rescaling of port governance. As with any ideal-type representation, the specifics of a particular case will depart from its generalized depiction due to the complexities and contingencies involved in any multidimensional and multi-scalar ‘real world’ process. Indeed, the disconnection of ports from their city-regions was never complete; even though they may have abandoned historic waterfronts, most of the world’s major cargo ports remain within, and dependent upon, core metropolitan regions.

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How then are we to think about contemporary relationships between maritime ports and the city-regions that contain them? The old, symbiotic relationship between the working waterfront and the trading cities that surrounded them is well documented (see Levinson 2006), as is the commercial, residential, entertainment, and image-making role of the waterfront redevelopments that have replaced them (Brown 2008; Sandercock and Dovey 2002; Gordon 1997). But what role do maritime port interests and users play in the current shaping of city-regions? Despite, or rather because of, the global reach of contemporary supply chains, shipping interests work very hard to secure the conditions that make continued flows of goods, people, and capital possible. We argue that shipping interests cannot secure these conditions solely by disconnecting from the city-regions that contain them and jumping to higher scales of action (see Harvey 1985); in many places, especially in the port city-regions of Western democratic states, they need to (re)establish closer and more fi xed relationships in port city-regions. This leads us to ask about the politics of reconnection; who is involved, and at what scales and in which arenas do these politics unfold? And what are the consequences for wider processes of urban-regional development? We explore these questions through the case of Vancouver. Canada’s busiest port handles about half of the ocean shipping containers that move through all Canadian ports, in addition to cruiseship passengers, motor vehicles, and a variety of resource exports such as coal, lumber, grain, sulphur, and potash. The port is managed by Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), a not-for-profit corporation created by the government of Canada. In a dramatic rescaling of port governance (see Ginnell, Smith, and Oberland 2008), PMV was created in 2008 through the amalgamation of the Fraser River Port Authority, the North Fraser Port Authority, and the Vancouver Port Authority. Amalgamation established a single regional port authority for the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, with responsibility for operating and developing port facilities on over six hundred kilometres of ocean and river frontage. In this chapter we argue that contemporary infrastructure spending decisions in and around the Vancouver port can be understood as the result of an unfolding political contest over the process, terms, and scaling of a reconnection between the port and the city-region. The city-region is the key scale at which this reconnection is taking physical form; this is the scale upon which efficient goods movement depends. We explore how the politics of infrastructure provision have played out across multiple scales, involving networks of actors in federal and provincial governments, public authorities, the transportation industry, and in key import- and export-dependent sectors. Construction of several infrastructure projects, including new bridges and roadways known collectively as the federal government’s Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative and the provincial government’s Gateway Program, is now well underway (see Figure 1.1). These investments, predominantly to the east and south of the core urban area, will undoubtedly reshape the greater Vancouver region. At the same time that they enable goods movement, they will also change commuting and residential development patterns.

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

19

Figure 1.1 Federal and provincial government signs announcing the Gateway (Photograph A. Clark).

We find Cox’s (1998) linked notions of the ‘spaces of dependence’ and ‘spaces of engagement’ useful in understanding the politics of this reconnection. The central question motivating Cox’s seminal paper is to understand whether the politics that play out at a particular scale necessarily directly concern that scale. He argues that they do not. Actors are driven to engage in politics because they seek to secure certain outcomes at a particular scale within their ‘spaces of dependence’. A particular space of dependence is immobile, framed by sunk investments in fi xed capital, government jurisdictions, and embedded social relationships. For example, a given port complex or waterfront cannot easily be relocated. To secure these spaces, actors may engage in politics at a variety of scales, within what Cox calls ‘spaces of engagement’. While actors may be deeply concerned to protect the local conditions that are important to them, they will not necessarily engage in politics locally to achieve this outcome. Hence “(l)ocal politics appears as metropolitan, regional, national or even international as different organizations try to secure those networks of associations through which respective projects can be realized” (Cox 1998, 19). Conversely, just because politics plays out at a national (federal) or provincial stage, it may be no less local in its substance. In the following sections we fi rst discuss general relationships between ports and cities, identifying broad characteristics of the process of

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disconnection. We then turn to the specific case of Vancouver, highlighting the ways this federally administered resource-exporting port has always been somewhat disconnected from the city. An examination of how and why major port interests have sought to (re)connect to the city-region follows. We close by commenting on the way tensions between fi xity and flow of a working waterfront continue to influence the shaping of a city-region.

PORTS, CITIES, AND DISCONNECTION The results of processes of disconnection between ports and cities are visible in physical infrastructure, port economies, and institutional arrangements. Where coastal configurations have allowed, cargo ports have migrated downstream from traditional river-front locations, leaving behind lands and infrastructure that have, in turn, blighted and then sometimes reinvigorated the post-industrial waterfront (Hoyle, Pinder, and Husain 1988). In Vancouver, physical disconnection can be seen in the construction of a causeway and coal terminal beginning in 1968 and, starting in 1994, a container terminal at Roberts Bank (now called Deltaport; see Figures 1.2 and 1.3), some thirty-five kilometres south of downtown Vancouver and well outside Burrard Inlet, the traditional maritime trade core of the city. The physical dimensions of disconnection are a direct result of the large economies of scale in containerization. Larger ships imply larger terminals, deeper and wider shipping channels, and higher-capacity landward connections. The scale and shape of modern container terminals has also made them highly impervious to surrounding urban uses, even before the security clampdowns following the events of 9/11. However, where marine cargo terminals moved from the core of the port city to more remote locations, this displaced, rather than eliminated, interactions and conflicts between cargo-related activities and those of residents. For example, trucks carrying containers to and from marine terminals still share local roads and highways with commuters. Hence seaports are also associated with considerable local negative environmental externalities, such as the health impacts caused by particulate matter released from ship smokestacks and diesel-powered trucks (Hricko 2006). Containerization is both directly and indirectly implicated in economic disconnection. Tight, localized economic relationships between cargo handling operations and urban economies have become loosened. Fewer people are employed in direct cargo handling and many cargo-related jobs need no longer be near the waterfront (Levinson 2006). The economic benefits of ports have not ceased altogether, however; rather, they have become more geographically dispersed. With larger ships calling at fewer ports, the economic hinterlands of ports have become more extensive; ports on the west coast of North America serve producers and consumers across the continent. Ports are now better understood as “elements in value-driven chain systems” (Robinson 2002, 252) than as local economic engines, with relative

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

21

Figure 1.2 Port and transport systems in the Lower Mainland, BC (Map K. Wuschke, using data from DMTI and Statistics Canada).

negative implications for the economies of port cities. For instance, Grobar (2008) finds that household unemployment and poverty rates are significantly higher in neighbourhoods around the ten largest container ports in the U.S., while Hall (2009) finds that apart from longshore workers on the U.S. west coast, port-logistics workers in major U.S. container ports do not receive higher annual earnings than comparable workers in other places. These labour market outcomes provide further evidence that the economic benefits of ports are disconnected from the city-regions that contain them. A third dimension of disconnection is institutional, referring to the shift in decision-making power away from local to national and global interests. In many ways, this is a consequence of the economic and infrastructural disconnection between gateway ports and the cities that contain them (Hoyle, Pinder, and Husain 1988). One institutional problem facing many major seaports is the mismatch between the increasingly expansive geographic scale of their port service area and economic hinterland and the often fixed scale of their governance arrangements. Port planners and administrators struggle to secure local support for seaport developments precisely because the economic benefits of seaport gateways have shifted from more local port communities to widely spatially dispersed carriers, shippers, and final customers (McCalla 1999). This has occurred at the same time that the infrastructure

22

Peter V. Hall and Anthony Clark

requirements of gateway seaports are growing in cost, complexity, and spatial extent. In turn, residents of port cities often find that they cannot influence port decision-making without resorting to lawsuits and protests (Hall 2007; Gulick 2001). Recent port reforms and industry reorganization have arguably exacerbated the problem because they have allowed decision-making power to shift from local public to private sectors. Despite most ports remaining under public ownership, global private-sector actors are able to exercise considerable control over individual terminal facilities (Olivier and Slack 2006). On the west coast of North America, including in Vancouver, long-term leases under a landlord model have become the norm for container terminals. In the language of fi xity and flow, disconnection implies a situation in which capital is able to ensure the condition of continued flow with relative ease; that is, without becoming too fi xed in, or dependent upon, any particular place. Nevertheless, transport providers (carriers) and users (shippers) continue to require the seaport terminals that lie at the convergence of marine- and land-based transportation networks. Relative to the communities and polities adjacent to these facilities, shipping corporations are able to exert control over these critical supply chain assets without bearing the full risks and costs of constructing and operating them. For example, Slack (1993) describes how consolidation in the ocean shipping industry accompanied by large public-sector investments in port infrastructure created a situation where shipping lines could play ports off against each other in order to extract leasing, pricing, and employment concessions. Ships continued to call at ports, but did so on terms increasingly favourable to the carriers. However, there are signs that, in some sense, disconnection is confronting its own limits. A series of research reports by the U.S. federal government highlighted how crowded highways and at-grade crossings have impeded access to ocean terminals (see US DOT 2002). Maritime trade interests have also faced increasing competition for waterfront land, and increasing resistance to the environmental externalities of cargo movement (Hall 2007). In a context in which urban mega-projects generally have faced increasing difficulty to secure the necessary approvals, permissions, and finance (see Altshuler and Luberoff 2003), disconnection has left maritime interests with few local allies for their specific expansion plans. In Vancouver, where congestion, competition, and environmental externalities have all been experienced, maritime interests have turned to a politics of reconnection to ensure a continued flow of cargo.

THE PORT OF VANCOUVER: NEVER REALLY ITS CITY’S PORT Vancouver’s port has long been institutionally and economically disconnected from the city. There are three primary reasons for this: (a) The history of control of the port by the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) and its dominant role in the city’s development; (b) the role of the federal

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

23

government in port governance and administration; and (c) the strong economic connections between the port and western Canada’s resource hinterland. Vancouver also emerged relatively late as an import container port, and so does not totally correspond with the periodization of disconnection we have proposed. Nevertheless, the case does demonstrate a new politics of reconnection at the city-regional scale. The impact of the CPR on Vancouver’s early development cannot be overstated. Few agencies, if any, can claim such a profound impact on the city’s waterfront, street layout, residential districts, and parks (MacDonald 1977; Gibb 1932). Under the terms of the Canadian Pacifi c Railway Act of 1881, the terminus of the trans-continental railway was to be Port Moody, some nineteen kilometres east of Vancouver. In 1884, however, the government of British Columbia and the CPR agreed that in exchange for the extension of the main line westward from Port Moody, the company would receive about 2,428 hectares in land grants in the region and around the new terminus (Eagle 1989). The CPR thus secured large amounts of the waterfront along Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet and English Bay. In May 1886, L.A. Hamilton, the CPR’s surveyor and elected member of Vancouver’s city council, began planning the new city (MacDonald 1977). Just months after completing the line to Vancouver, the CPR extended a branch line to False Creek and built a wooden trestle over the creek to the south. Construction of the trestle cut off the area to sailboats and steamers that had been using the waterway to reach the burgeoning industrial zone along the shore (Armitage 2001). The trestle also enabled the CPR to alienate four hectares through the centre of the thirty-two hectare Kitsilano Indian Reserve on False Creek’s south shore (Barman 2007). Until 1913, the port was entirely dependent on private interests, with the CPR being the dominant force for investment and development. However, the opening of the Panama Canal prompted federal intervention in the port with the establishment of the Vancouver Harbour Commission in 1913 to oversee development of port infrastructure (Russwurm 2007). This contrasts with ‘local-level’ Harbour Commissions or departments that were being established elsewhere in Canada (e.g., the Toronto Harbour Commission) and in the United States at precisely the same time. To understand why it was the federal government that took on this role in the Vancouver port, it is important to understand how Canada’s constitutional division of powers and responsibilities has framed the terrain for the political contests that have played out in and around the Vancouver port. While ‘local works and undertakings’ do fall under the exclusive powers of provincial legislatures, federal powers explicitly include interprovincial connections and “(s)uch Works as, although wholly situate within the Province, are before or after the Execution declared by the Parliament of Canada to be for the general Advantage of Canada or for

24

Peter V. Hall and Anthony Clark

the Advantage of Two or more of the Provinces” (Canada 1867, Section 92). The federal government, understanding Vancouver’s port to have such “general advantage”, asserted a dominant role in the port’s politics and development. The original intent of Harbour Commissions was to act as buffers between the Canadian government and local concerns, especially those of local politicians (Gibb 1932). Ottawa reinforced the insulation of the port from local concerns with the National Harbours Act in 1936, disbanding the Vancouver Harbour Commission and replacing it with the National Harbours Board, an Ottawa-based Crown Corporation (Brooks 2007). Subsequent rounds of port reform have reduced the role of the federal government (Ircha 1999), but the federal government retains ownership of major ports such as Vancouver’s, and port governance structures give little prominence to community and local government voices. The present board of PMV is ‘local’ only in a partial sense. A majority of board members (eight of eleven) are appointed by the federal minister of transport. Seven of these members are selected from nominations by port users; economic interests predominate (Yarnell 1999). Institutional disconnection in the form of federal government administration of the port thus has a long history in Vancouver. Vancouver’s insertion into the western Canadian staples export economy was both reflected in and enabled by federal government involvement in the port. Staples exports, such as wood, grain, and coal, drawn from a wide hinterland and by defi nition destined for overseas export markets, imply a form of economic disconnection between port and city. Instead of serving a diverse industrial economy tied to the locality, key interests in the Vancouver port have long been federal and interprovincial in nature. Rail links with the grain-producing areas of the Prairie Provinces have historically allowed for a “regular flow of grain through Vancouver [that] largely depends [on a] close connection between the terminal elevator and the country elevator” (Gibb 1932, 158). In the early years of the twentieth century, the CPR was not in a position to invest in Vancouver’s waterfront due to declining freight earnings during the First World War (Innis 1923). A local politician and port booster, Harry Stevens, convinced the federal government to make its fi rst major infrastructure investment in the port, the fi nancing and construction of the fi rst grain terminal on Burrard Inlet, Dominion No. 1, built in 1914. Stevens wanted Vancouver’s port to take advantage of the recently opened Panama Canal, which had its fi rst official transit in 1914, though the fi rst bulk grain shipment didn’t leave the port until 1921 (Armitage 2001). By the end of the 1920s, ports in the Vancouver region were exporting almost one-third of Canada’s grain. Contributing to this growth in grain exports were changes to federally regulated freight rates for grains transported by the nation’s railway companies (Munro 1987).

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

25

While timber and grain were initially the dominant staples exports of the Vancouver port, coal has exerted an increasingly important influence on the port’s regional footprint. The CPR syndicate built the railway along a southerly route, in order to capture traffic to and from the U.S. and also to secure access to coal-rich regions of southern Alberta and British Columbia (Johnson 1936). Then, in the mid-1960s, Kaiser Steel Company of California acquired rights to coal from southeast BC with an eye to exporting to the rapidly expanding Japanese market (Langdon 1983). In early 1968, Kaiser and Mitsubishi Trading Company, on behalf of nine Japanese steel companies, reached an agreement for forty-five million metric tonnes of BC coal over fi fteen years. The contract between Kaiser and the Japanese consortium stipulated that coal shipments would start in 1970. That meant that construction of a major coal port and terminal facilities had to be completed in a mere sixteen months (Port of Vancouver 2004). The National Harbours Board and BC’s provincial government were solidly behind the creation of a new ‘superport’ facility in the Vancouver region. By 1966, the National Harbours Board was developing plans to extend the boundaries of the Port of Vancouver beyond Burrard Inlet to include all tidal waters to the Canada–U.S. border to the south of Vancouver in order to develop an outer port area for the region (Port of Vancouver 2004). However, the speed with which the proposed superport was to be developed raised alarms with the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board (LMRPB), Vancouver’s regional planning authority at that time. Even though the LMRPB regarded this facility at Roberts Bank as perhaps “the most significant development to take place in the Lower Mainland since the coming of rail to tide water in 1885” (LMRPB 1968, iii), it had no official involvement with the development. The LMRPB characterized the whole experience as “the same sort of independent, single-interest railroad building that characterized the period at the turn of the Century” (LMRPB 1968, iii). In 1968, after ongoing quarrels between the provincial government and the LMRPB over the Roberts Bank proposal and other provincial government plans, the provincial government dissolved the LMRPB “without much warning, fanfare, or public debate” (Hodge and Robinson 2002, 333). The politics of this outcome are instructive because they demonstrate the continued inability of locally based interests to shape the course of port development. Indeed, inasmuch as the Roberts Bank coal terminal development represented a regionalization of port activities beyond the traditional confi nes of the urban core, it represents a further strengthening of extra-local involvement in shaping the urban region. The regional planning authority would not be allowed to stand in the way; work began on Roberts Bank in 1968 to create a twenty-hectare artificial island connected to the mainland by a five kilometre causeway (see Figure 1.3). The first shipment of coal left the terminal on 15 June 1970.

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Figure 1.3

Deltaport at Roberts Bank (Photograph P. Hall).

In 1975, the National Harbours Board, along with “various industries, the railways and government departments” (National Harbours Board 1977, 1) projected the need for increased bulk export capacity on Canada’s west coast. The proposed expansion of Roberts Bank included four additional terminal areas of approximately twenty hectares each (two for coal, one for grain, and one for potash and/or sulphur), an administrative area, and the widening and deepening of shipping channels. By this time, planners understood a need to consult with local communities. During community consultations, the proponents noted that “[f]rom 1960 to 1974, the average annual growth rate of Delta Municipality was twenty percent, making it the fastest growing municipality in Canada . . . although superport plans have been made public since 1967, the population has tripled since that time, and many people are demanding a halt to development for aesthetic reasons. The major objection is to heavy industrial development, although objections also have been raised regarding coal dust” (National Harbours Board 1977, 11). After public reviews of the project, the Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office (1979) recommended that the full port expansion not proceed based on both environmental and socio-economic impacts. However, the review concluded that the expansion could proceed if certain mitigations to the project were put in place (Roberts Bank Environmental Review Committee 1996). The National Harbours Board agreed with the recommendations and work began on expanding Roberts Bank in 1981. The revised expansion plans called for the construction of three twenty-

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

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hectare terminals instead of the original four, plus an administration area. By 1984, construction was completed. However, only one terminal was used for coal exports; the two remaining terminals remained vacant for a decade until they became what is now the Deltaport container facility (Port of Vancouver 2004). Staples exports continue to exert a powerful influence on relationships between Vancouver’s port and the city. Exporting staples requires considerable investment in fi xed infrastructure, particularly railways and specialized terminals, yet these commodities provide very few connections between the cargoes handled in the port and the local economy. Instead, they provide a rationale for extra-local involvement, such as the federal government, in port governance and investment decisions. These investment decisions, increasingly regional in nature, have profoundly shaped Vancouver’s experience with the container revolution.

RECONNECTION, CONTAINER PORT EXPANSION, AND THE ASIA-PACIFIC GATEWAY In many port cities, containerization implied a dramatic shift in the relationship between port and city. The shape, extent, and location of port facilities changed, and shipping interests became enmeshed in extra-local economic relationships and less responsive to local communities. In the case of Vancouver’s port, the change was less dramatic and more the continuation of an existing trend—we have argued that the port was long disconnected from the city and emerged relatively late as a major container port. Until the 1990s, greater Vancouver had just three container terminals: the river-fronting Fraser Surrey docks, Centerm, and Vanterm, the latter two located on the south side of Burrard Inlet just east of downtown Vancouver (see Figure 1.2). By the 1980s, port and terminal managers were expressing concerns about the long-term prospects for these terminals, including problems of accessibility for port users. In an article in the Institute for Transportation Engineers Journal, Port of Vancouver manager and CEO Francis MacNaughton complained about the state of the roadway connecting the Burrard Terminals: “Major portions of this roadway now exist, yet their use is considerably hampered by the lack of continuity. As a result, traffic that is exclusively destined for the port frequently has to detour onto city streets, where it is subject to frequent delays and lack of capacity, often passing through residential neighbourhoods. An all-port route for this traffic would improve access and efficiency considerably” (MacNaughton 1988, 24). The Vancouver Port Corporation (VPC) projected that the terminals would reach their full capacity of 500,000 Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) by 1995 and so, in 1992, began exploring options to boost capacity by an extra 400,000 TEUs (Port of Vancouver 2004). In 1992, the

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VPC decided upon developing a new container facility at Roberts Bank, rather than attempting to expand container capacity in the Burrard Inlet. One of the terminals at Roberts Bank was vacant, road and rail infrastructure were less congested, and the cost of developing the site was estimated to be 50 percent less than developing the same capacity at Vanterm and Centerm near downtown Vancouver (Port of Vancouver 2004). By 1997, work was complete and Deltaport was opened. By 2006, Vancouver’s three primary deep-sea container terminals, Centerm, Vanterm, and Deltaport, had capacities of 720,000 TEUs, 650,000 TEUs, and 900,000 TEUs respectively (Canada 2006b). The impact of this physical development on port throughput was dramatic. According to American Association of Port Authorities statistics, in 1984 Vancouver handled only just over 150,000 TEUs. In the same year, Long Beach handled 1.4 million, Seattle just over one million, and Oakland and Los Angeles just under a million each. By 2008, with just under 2.5 million TEUs, PMV was the third largest container port on the west coast of North America, having overtaken Oakland, Seattle, and Tacoma and lagging only behind the considerably larger ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Between 1990 and 2008, the number of TEUs handled at the three Vancouver area terminals grew by 550 percent—more than double the phenomenal rate of 216 percent for all ports on the Pacific Coast of North America. Not only was the growth in container traffic dramatic, but the dominant direction of that traffic also shifted; in 2002, Vancouver’s ports, for the fi rst time, handled more imported than exported containers. The massive growth in container movements, entailing a shift towards road-based transportation and involving new terminal development well to the south of the urban core, greatly influenced the politics of the rescaled connection between port and region. Late in 2005, the then-Liberal federal government tabled Bill C-68, An Act to Support Development of Canada’s Pacific Gateway (Canada 2005). Had it passed, Bill C-68 would have created an advisory council known as “Canada’s Pacific Gateway Council” to provide advice “for the purpose of maximizing the effectiveness of the Pacific gateway and its contribution to Canada’s prosperity”, to “promote consensus among interested stakeholders”, and to “promote collaboration, engagement and complementarity of activities with existing networks of stakeholders that have an interest in the Asia-Pacific region or Canada’s Pacific gateway” (Canada 2005, 4–5). The bill was accompanied by proposals to spend $190 million on transportation infrastructure, mostly within the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The then-federal minister of transportation, Jean Lapierre, explained to the parliament of Canada that one of the council’s mandated activities would be to make recommendations about how to spend a further $400 million in infrastructure investment. He also noted that Bill C-68 built on the experience of the Greater Vancouver Gateway Council (GVGC), an organization “formed in 1994 to pursue a vision for Greater Vancouver as

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

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the Gateway of Choice for North America, able to capitalize on opportunities from expanding world trade and tourism” (GVGC 2009). The members of the GVGC are various Vancouver-based private- and public-sector transportation service providers (McCalla 2009). In its fi rst decade, the GVGC (2003) conducted several studies and planning exercises advocating investment in the road, rail, and water commercial transportation system, as well as action on marine, trade, and tourism policy. The council proposed in Bill C-68 can thus be understood as an institutionalized and scaled-up version of the GVGC, and the spending announcements as the realization of this previous organization’s goals. However, the proposed council was not created. The bill establishing the council died before it could be passed when a November 2005 vote of nonconfidence in the Liberal minority government led to a federal election. The newly elected minority Conservative government did not attempt to revive the bill. Instead, in October 2006, it released its own package of transportation investments for western Canada, now branded the “Asia Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative” (APGCI). The federal contribution of $591 million was to be matched by investments from the private sector and other levels of government, resulting in “over $3 billion in related capital investment in Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor-related projects between 2004 and 2010” (Canada 2006a). Subsequent funding announcements raised the federal commitment to $1 billion (Canada 2007). The shift from Liberal to Conservative federal governments and their different approaches to port investment entailed a subtle shift in scalar politics. The Conservative government draws on a western support base and gives more prominence to western Canadian provincial governments. Hence the APGCI included several major infrastructure investments funded in the interior of British Columbia, and in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, as well as those in and around the Vancouver port. The province of British Columbia also continues to play an assertive role in securing the conditions for flow at the waterfront and beyond. Among the key investment programs matching the federal initiative is the British Columbia government’s “Gateway Program”. Announced in January 2006, this program consists of three road and bridge projects designed “to open up the province’s transportation network, improving the movement of people, goods and transit throughout Lower Mainland” (British Columbia 2008). The three British Columbia projects, which were all included in spending priorities recommended by the GVGC, are: 1. the expansion of Highway 1 and the Port Mann Bridge over the Fraser River 2. the South Fraser Perimeter Road from Delta to Langley 3. the North Fraser projects, consisting of the North Fraser Perimeter Road, Pitt Meadows Bridge, and Mary Hill Interchange (see Figure 1.2)

30

Peter V. Hall and Anthony Clark

Opposition to the federal APGCI and provincial governments’ Gateway Program to increase port, road, and rail capacity has emerged within the Vancouver region, including that of a range of municipalities, activists, and community groups that oppose the projects’ congestion, noise, and environmental impacts. Vancouver’s regional government, the Greater Vancouver Regional District, gave only tepid support to the Gateway Program, arguing that the Highway 1/Port Mann Bridge expansion, one of three provincial infrastructure projects, was “not consistent with the Livable Region Strategic Plan” (Greater Vancouver Regional District 2006, 14), the region’s growth strategy. Some of the municipalities within the region that will be directly affected by the Gateway Program proposal have expressed more vociferous opposition. The Council of the City of Burnaby, located at the western end of the Highway 1/Port Mann Bridge project, published a three-page newspaper pullout entitled “Gateway to Gridlock”, which stated the city’s belief that the Gateway Program was “short-sighted and will result in negative long-term consequences” (City of Burnaby 2008, 1) for the City and BC’s Lower Mainland. In the May 2009 provincial election, former Delta City Councilor Vicki Huntington successfully ran as an independent, campaigning vigorously against several infrastructure projects affecting Delta, including the expansion of the Roberts Bank container terminal and construction of the South Fraser Perimeter Road. The local Member of Parliament, John Cummins (Delta-Richmond), of the governing federal Conservative Party, also lashed out at against the project: “Quality of life is being sacrificed in communities south of the Fraser River as the federal and provincial governments push ahead with the Asia Pacific Gateway Corridor project” (Cummins 2007, 1). Faced with a need to secure container flows through their ‘space of dependence’, the Vancouver port and surrounding city-region, key port interests engaged in politics that included but was not limited to activity at the local scale. And federal and interprovincial ‘spaces of engagement’ have been significant in the successful political strategy. These political spaces are populated by staples exporters, the railroads, and, increasingly, importers of containerized goods also located well within the port’s hinterland. Despite local opposition, and despite the need for alliances with western provinces to secure federal government funding, throughout the multiple ‘gateway’ funding announcements, core elements of the GVGC spending proposals remained unchanged.

CONCLUSIONS: DEPENDENT AND ENGAGED SPACES AND THE VANCOUVER PORT In this chapter we have sought to understand the process by which Vancouver-based port- and transport-providing interests have gone about securing a continued flow of goods through the port and the metropolitan area by

Maritime Ports and the Politics of Reconnection

31

ensuring investment in fi xed infrastructure. The disconnection of maritime ports from their city-regions that occurred during the early decades of containerization is deceptive because it may lead us to think that current waterfront politics are confi ned to relatively localized contests over property redevelopment and public versus private access to formerly industrial lands. While such contests are critical to quality of life in port cities, so too are the politics of maritime port development. Even though they may play out on a wider stage, struggles involving contemporary freight logistics systems remain intensely local (city-regional) in important ways. The working waterfront and its immediate metropolitan hinterland is a ‘space of dependence’ for a variety of actors in the goods movement industry. We have argued that this space is increasingly regional, because at the regional scale marine terminal activities operate more efficiently, especially those related to containerization where huge fi xed capital investments are spread over a larger volume of shipments. While key sites on the waterfront remain central to the mobilization of flows that are the daily work of numerous transportation fi rms and to the circulation of capital by producers and retail distributors, port operations have themselves taken on a form that stretches across the metropolitan region in highways, warehouses, and other facilities that are no longer located on the docks. In other words, the ‘space of dependence’ has taken a more regional character due to changes in commodity mix, modes of transportation, and ongoing urban development. Maritime industry actors are engaged in a politics of reconnection to ensure the substantial fi xed investments required to secure the ongoing conditions of flow. Despite the local-regional character of the space that is vital to the container trade, in the case of Vancouver we have shown that these politics play out in federal and provincial ‘spaces of engagement’. We argue that this reflects a series of historical contingencies that have long exerted a disconnecting influence on the relationship between Vancouver’s communities and their port. These include the federal powers provided by the Canadian constitution, the jurisdictions and responsibilities of provincial governments, as well as the mix of commodities moved through and transportation technologies used by the Vancouver port. The port’s primary economic connections have long been with a resource-exporting hinterland, while early dominance by the railroads gave way to control by the federal government in Ottawa. Although the territories of these politics of reconnection are not local, what is being contested here is intensely urban and local; it concerns the future shape of the entire city-region. Hence, we argue that relationships between ports and cities, in more general terms, are open-ended, continuous, and historically contingent political processes in which actors seek to exploit, and if necessary to create, spaces of engagement. Ensuring the conditions of unimpeded flow of goods through maritime ports entails substantial investment in city- and region-shaping transportation infrastructure.

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Key interests in the Vancouver port have ensured these fi xed investments largely by forgoing local political engagement in favour of federal and interprovincial relationships in order to secure an increasingly regional ‘space of dependence’. In the Vancouver region today, as in the past, community interests continue to be dominated by business and extra-local ones.

NOTES 1. The authors wish to acknowledge funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant 410–2008–0829) and the mapping assistance of Katie Wuschke.

REFERENCES Altshuler, Alan and David Luberoff. 2003. Mega-projects: The changing politics of urban public investment. Washington, DC: Brookings. Armitage, Doreen. 2001. Burrard Inlet: A history. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing. Barman, Jean. 2007. Erasing indigenous indigeneity in Vancouver. BC Studies. 155(Autumn): 3–30. British Columbia. 2008. Gateway program backgrounder. . Accessed June 19, 2010. Brooks, Mary R. 2007. Port devolution and governance in Canada. Research in Transportation Economics 17:237–257 Brown, Peter H. 2008. America’s waterfront revival: Port authorities and urban redevelopment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Canada. 1867. The Constitution Act, 30 & 31 Victoria, c. 3 (U.K.). . 2005. Bill C-68, An Act to Support Development of Canada’s Pacific Gateway. 1st sess., 38th Parliament. . 2006a. Prime Minister Harper launches Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative. Accessed 30 October 2009. . 2006b. The use of containers in Canada. MariNova Consulting Ltd. and Partners. Accessed 30 October 2009. . 2007. Speaking notes for the Honourable David Emerson, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Pacific Gateway and the VancouverWhistler Olympics on the occasion of the announcement of APGCI Projects. Accessed 30 October 2009. City of Burnaby, The. 2008. Gateway to gridlock. Accessed 30 October 2009. Cox, Kevin R. 1998. Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for local politics. Political Geography 17(1): l–23. Cummins, John, MP. 2007. Special report: Better way for Gateway project. Accessed 30 October 2009.

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Eagle, John A. 1989. The Canadian Pacific Railway and the development of western Canada, 1896–1914. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office. 1979. Report of the Environmental Assessment Panel—Roberts Bank port expansion. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. Gibb, Sir Alexander. 1932. Dominion of Canada—National ports survey 1931–32. Ottawa: Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. Ginnell, Kevin, Patrick Smith, and H. Peter Oberland. 2008. Making biggest bigger: Port Metro Vancouver’s 21st century re-structuring—Global meets local at the Asia Pacific Gateway. Canadian Political Science Review 2(4): 76–92. Gordon, David L.A. 1997. Financing urban waterfront redevelopment. Journal of the American Planning Association 63(2): 244–265. Greater Vancouver Gateway Council. 2003. Economic impact analysis of investment in a major commercial transportation system for the Greater Vancouver Region. Accessed 30 October 2009). . 2006. Notice of Special Meeting. Accessed June 19, 2010. . 2009. About the council. Accessed 30 October 2009. Grobar, Lisa M. 2008. The economic status of areas surrounding major U.S. container ports: Evidence and policy issues. Growth and Change 39(3): 497– 516. Gulick, John. 2001. The urban ecological contradictions of Port of Oakland globalism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 13(3): 1–39. Hall, Peter V. 2007. Seaports, urban sustainability and paradigm shift. Journal of Urban Technology 14(2): 87–101. . 2009. Container ports, local benefits and transportation worker earnings. GeoJournal 74(1): 67–83. Harvey, David. 1985. The urbanization of capital. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hesse, Markus. 2006. Global chain, local pain: Regional implications of global distribution networks in the German North Range. Growth and Change 37(4): 570–596. Hodge, Gerald and Ira M. Robinson. 2002. Planning Canadian regions. Vancouver: UBC Press. Hoyle, Brian S., David A. Pinder, and M. Sohail Husain, eds. 1988. Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment. London and New York: Bellhaven Press. Hricko, Andrea M. 2006. Ships, trucks, and trains: Effects of goods movement on environmental health. Environmental Health Perspectives 114(4): A204–A205. Innis, Harold A. 1923. A history of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ircha, Michael C. 1999. Port reform: International perspectives and the Canadian model. Canadian Public Administration 42(1): 108–132. Johnson, Arthur J. 1936. The Canadian Pacific Railway and British Columbia: 1871–1886. Vancouver: UBC Press. Langdon, Frank. 1983. The politics of Japanese–Canadian economic relations, 1952–1983. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Levinson, Marc. 2006. The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board. 1968. Rail service to the Roberts Bank Port facility—A proposal presented within the perspective of the overall planning for the Lower Mainland Region. Vancouver: Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board. MacDonald, Norbert. 1977. The Canadian Pacific Railway and Vancouver’s development to 1900. BC Studies 35(Autumn): 3–35. MacNaughton, Francis J. 1988. The Port of Vancouver: Canada’s gateway to the Pacific Rim. ITE Journal 58(4): 21–24. McCalla, Robert J. 1999. Global change, local pain: Intermodal seaport terminals and their service areas. Journal of Transport Geography 7:247–254. . 2009. Gateways are more than ports: The Canadian example of cooperation among stakeholders. In Ports in proximity: Essays on competition and coordination among adjacent seaports, eds. Theo Notteboom, Pieter De Langen, and Cesar Ducruet. London: Ashgate. Munro, Gary. 1987. Changing the crow’s nest freight rate. Journal of Canadian Studies 22(4): 93–114. National Harbours Board. 1977. Environmental impact assessment of Roberts Bank Port expansion: Volume 1. Ottawa: Beak-Hinton Consultants Ltd. Olivier, Daniel and Brian Slack. 2006. Rethinking the port. Environment and Planning A 38:1409–1427. Port of Vancouver. 2004. History of development of Roberts Bank—An overview. Vancouver: Hemmera Envirochem Ltd. Roberts Bank Environmental Review Committee. 1996. Final report of the Roberts Bank Environmental Review Committee 1996. Vancouver: Roberts Bank Environmental Review Committee. Robinson, Ross. 2002. Ports as elements in value-driven chain systems: The new paradigm. Maritime Policy and Management 29(3): 241–255. Russwurm, Lani. 2007. Constituting authority: Policing workers and the consolidation of police power in Vancouver, 1918–1939. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University. Sandercock, Leonie and Kim Dovey. 2002. Pleasure, politics, and the ‘public interest’: Melbourne’s riverscape revitalization. Journal of the American Planning Association 68(2): 151–165. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Slack, Brian. 1993. Pawns in the game: Ports in a global transportation system. Growth and Change 24:379–388. US DOT. 2002. Intermodal access to US Ports: Report on survey fi ndings. Washington, DC: Department of Transport (Maritime Administration). Yarnell, Patrick. 1999. Port administration and integrated coastal management under the Canada Marine Act in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Coastal Management 27:343–354.

2

Fragmentation on the Waterfront Coastal Squatting Settlements and Urban Renewal Projects in the Caribbean Mélanie Gidel 1

A major issue in the current reshaping of urban waterfronts in the Caribbean stems from the presence of long-established squatting communities adjacent to port zones and to city centres. Forces for change, through the conversion and revitalization of urban waterfronts, stand opposed to the structural weight of fi xed factors such as poverty, housing deficiencies, and decades of uncontrolled urbanization (Conway 1989). The growing attractiveness of coastal areas challenges the previous uses of what were once seen as unhealthy, repulsive swamps and mangroves. The fate of coastal squatting communities remains highly dependent on how new waterfront projects have been designed, by whom, and for what purposes. So far little attention has been paid to these issues. This chapter presents an empirical study of two of these communities: Volga-Plage, in Fort-de-France (Martinique), and Sea Lots, in Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago). Although both settlements emerged and developed in a similar context, they now face divergent prospects: in one case, consolidation with and integration into the wider urban area and coastline; in the other case, further exclusion and possible relocation further away from the city. These opposed experiences exemplify the variety of impacts that waterfront developments may have on their adjacent areas and, more generally, on the whole city’s spatial and social fragmentation. It may seem paradoxical to raise questions about urban fragmentation while cities attempt to reincorporate their waterfronts and open up to the sea. However, land developments unevenly target different segments of the population and tend to favour specific uses and users at the expense of others (Dodman 2007). They may lead to further division of the city, which raises questions about the spatial dimension of social justice. My hypothesis is that the very different perspectives of the two coastal squatting settlements in terms of their “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968) result from a diverse expression of the global–local nexus on the waterfront. I argue that a combination of planning approaches, institutional frameworks, and local identity politics affect the ways in which the global and local scales intersect on urban

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waterfronts, with consequences for the coastal squatting settlements’ inclusion or exclusion from surrounding development. This chapter is based on data collected during fieldwork in 2006 and 2007, such as planning documents and interviews with city-planners, developers, port officials, local authorities, and other public bodies. I also carried out a survey among residents in the two communities using questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Following an overview of the spatial context, this chapter draws upon the metaphor of “urban mangroves” (Letchimy 1992) to describe how city– port divides have eroded the coastal squatting settlements’ role as interfaces between the sea, the port, and the city. The subsequent section presents the main waterfront developments in the two cities and discusses their integrative or disintegrative effects upon squatting settlements. The fi nal section examines the articulation of scales on the waterfronts, regarding planning processes, on the one hand, and identity politics, on the other, as explanatory factors for the two case studies’ antagonistic situations.

GENERAL CONTEXT Fort-de-France and Port of Spain are the respective capitals of two Caribbean island territories: Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago. Martinique, an 1,100-square-kilometre island, became a French Overseas Department in 1946 and was subjected to a systematic policy of cultural and institutional assimilation. Trade with mainland France accounts for two-thirds of imports and exports (Turner 2007) and the island remains in a relative state of isolation from its immediate geographical environment. Its administrative capital, Fort-de-France, accounts for about one hundred thousand inhabitants, or one-fourth of the total population. Despite a significant demographic decline in the 1980s to the benefit of its suburbs, Fort-deFrance still dominates the island’s urban hierarchy. Its coastal fringe is being reshaped by a set of developments aimed at opening the city to the sea, following the orientation defi ned by a wider urban renewal scheme, the Grand Projet de Ville (Great City Project) of 2001–2006. The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, with 1.3 million inhabitants, is located a few hundred kilometres south, close to the coast of Venezuela. This former British colony gained its independence in 1962. It is ranked among the fi rst countries in the Caribbean and Latin American region in terms of per capita income (Turner 2007) thanks to its natural resources (gas, oil, and asphalt) and its dynamic fi nancial and industrial sectors. About 250,000 people live in the capital city, Port of Spain, and its immediate surrounding area. Its waterfront was chosen as the location for the most significant urban development of the 2000s, the “International Waterfront Centre”, which symbolizes the country’s economic achievements and its influence in the region.

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 37

Figure 2.1

Fort-de-France waterfront (Photograph M. Gidel).

Figure 2.2

Port of Spain waterfront (Photograph M. Gidel).

Volga-Plage is a neighbourhood of four thousand (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques [INSEE] 1999) located on the eastern side of the Fort-de-France city centre, in between two major port infrastructures: the old port in the west and the new container terminal in the east (Figures 2.1 and 2.3). Land tenure varies, with mostly private properties inland and predominantly municipal- and state-owned lands closer to the shoreline. Sea Lots, in Port of Spain, holds half as many inhabitants. The settlement grew in the interstices of industrial facilities located on both shores of Saint Ann’s River (Figure 2.4), southeast of the city’s central business

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district. It is physically bounded by a motorway, the sea, and mangroves (Figure 2.1). Land is administered by several national bodies responsible for industrial, fishing, and port uses. These two squatting settlements are typical of an enduring, widespread feature of the urban Caribbean. From the 1950s onwards, the sugar crisis, combined with the development of the capital cities’ economies toward service sector and port activities, encouraged an intensive rural-to-urban drift that the formal housing market did not absorb (Mohammed 1988). In a context of strict land tenure regulations, this shift resulted in the rapid growth of informal settlements around city centres, generally in the least suitable lands: steep slopes and swampy coastal fringes. To a lesser extent, emigration from other islands also contributed to the expansion of squatting communities (Potter 2000). Land was reclaimed gradually through the accumulation of all kinds of materials, such as tires, old furniture, and garbage. People built and consolidated their houses, which they own in most cases, but the issue of land tenure regularization was never fully resolved. Mohammed (1988) stresses the authorities’ equivocal role in the taking root of squatting: while it was officially condemned, it was tolerated to maintain cheap housing and thus allow for low wages. Although these settlements were initially seen as temporary, they form a fi xed component of today’s changing waterfront landscapes.

Figure 2.3

Volga-Plage (Photograph M. Gidel).

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 39

Figure 2.4

Sea Lots and Saint Ann’s River (Photograph M. Gidel).

The two communities tend to have many socio-economic problems, such as poor education, high rates of HIV, and delinquency. Volga-Plage has the highest rate of unemployment in Fort-de-France—close to 45 percent, according to the last census (INSEE 1999). Like other squatting settlements in Martinique and Trinidad, Volga-Plage and Sea Lots are also characterized by a rather poorly built environment, often inadequate housing conditions, and a lack of facilities, such as incomplete rainwater drainage systems. In Sea Lots, no dwelling is connected to the regular urban sewer system (Central Statistical Office [CSO] 2000).

“Urban mangroves” in Danger? These settlements developed close relations with the sea that, as reported by community elders, provided a substantial source of income and food. Inhabitants also represented a significant source of labour for formal and informal port-related activities, as dockers, warehousemen, craftsmen, sailors, snack and drinks sellers, or charbonnières, a name given to the local women who loaded coal on boats during their stopovers in the port. Coastal squatting settlements have been described metaphorically as “urban mangroves” by a city-planner from Martinique, Serge Letchimy:

40

Mélanie Gidel Whilst being both marginalised and repulsive, the so-called ‘insanitary’ neighbourhoods play a vital role in the ‘urban ecosystem’ . . . similar to the role played by the mangrove in the natural ecosystem . . . They take part in the vitality and natural equilibrium of the city. (1992, 47–48)

The metaphor helps to describe the specificity of these communities in linking the sea, the port, and the city, just as mangroves develop at the point of contact between land and water. In addition, it depicts these communities as playing a discreet but nonetheless major role in the whole urban system. It pleads for recognition of the communities’ role within the city’s economy, culture, and society, as suppliers of workers, consumers, and citizens (Letchimy 1992). The ecological metaphor also expresses their vulnerability and sensitivity to environmental perturbations, especially in a context of port restructuring and urban change. Volga-Plage and Sea Lots were indeed severely affected by a classic and well-known process of city–port division that both Fort-de-France and Port of Spain experienced in the second half of the twentieth century. In the late 1950s in Fort-de-France, port activities were removed from Pointe Simon, south of the city centre (Figure 2.1), which weakened the existing port–city symbiosis (Thodiard 1993). The popularization of long-distance air travel also put an end to transatlantic passenger shipping, a source of vibrant port–city interactions. More recently, in 2003, a new container terminal was inaugurated outside of the urban area (Figure 2.1). This fully fenced-in facility completed the modernization of port activities and accentuated the city–port divide. According to the head of ASC Volga-Plage, a community group committed to helping young people into employment, no local youth were hired in the new port facility, due to a lack of adequate qualifications. The port system in Trinidad also went through a radical restructuring. Several specialized ports were created or further developed outside Port of Spain, such as the industrial port of Point Lisas, opened in the 1970s on the west coast of Trinidad, or the oil-and-gas-oriented port of Point Fortin in the south. As far as fishing is concerned, Sea Lots accommodates several fishing berths and a fish-processing plant (Figure 2.2), but most fishing boats moor a few miles north of Port of Spain in the town of Chaguaramas. According to inhabitants interviewed, the chances for local people to be hired by the fish factory are quite low because of the stigmatization and lack of trust granted by employers to people from the settlement. Volga-Plage and Sea Lots are still regarded as maritime communities, as indicated by their names. Plage is French for beach; the name ‘Volga’ was reportedly given to the settlement by one of the fi rst inhabitants, who was a communist militant. However, only a minority of these settlements’ populations’ activities and income remain sea-related. In Sea Lots, residents still mention the disused lighthouse as a landmark in their neighbourhood, and in both communities the eldest people interviewed remember with nostalgia

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 41 the old days when they would catch crabs and crayfish behind their dwellings. However, younger interviewees did not mention any specific connection with the sea, apart from occasionally going to the beach on other parts of the island. Therefore, the sea, rather than being an integral part of the inhabitants’ daily experience and income, has tended to become a neutral element of daily life, or even a constraint, in terms of floods and puzzling land tenure regulations. The settlements’ lack of connection with the port and the sea appears all the more salient in a context in which urban waterfronts have become more fragmented, both spatially and socially. In terms of their spatial fragmentation, these areas are surrounded by physical barriers that restrict access to the shore and, in Port of Spain’s case, views of the sea (Figure 2.2). These barriers leave little interaction between port and urban areas. They enclose specialized zones that include cruise and inter-island terminals, cargo facilities, and in Fort-de-France even a naval base. Social fragmentation is particularly acute in Port of Spain, wherein a growing gap exists between the fi xity of squatting settlements and the recent flow of middle- and upperclass populations who are attracted by views of the sea and proximity to the city centre, and who have begun to settle in luxury gated condominiums like Westmoorings (Mycoo 2006). Nonetheless, the “urban mangroves” metaphor has not totally lost its relevance. Long seen as hostile and useless, mangrove forests have recently been recognized as valuable ecosystems sheltering a number of species and limiting risks of coastal erosion and marine floods (Desse and Saffache 2005). Similarly, following Letchimy’s perspective, supporting “urban mangroves” and valorizing their role as a sea-port-city interface would profit the whole city. New developments may either stimulate or resist the current fragmented nature of urban waterfronts. The manner in which they take coastal squatting settlements into consideration will be examined in the following section.

A NEW DEAL ON THE WATERFRONT: WHAT QUARTER FOR THE LESS PRIVILEGED? Many projects aimed at valorizing urban coastal fringes near the city centre have been considered in the last few decades, but few were implemented due to limited resources, deficiencies in city-planning (Conway 1989), and a complicated land tenure structure (Klein 2003). In Fort-de-France, for instance, a Schéma Directeur de la Frange urbaine du Port (port urban fringe master plan) has been under discussion since the early 1990s, but disagreements between the number of actors involved keep delaying the document’s approval. Each of these actors, including the Chamber of Commerce (to which port zones have been leased by the state), local and regional authorities, and the Ministry of Defence (because significant portions of the littoral are occupied by a series of military zones), has its own approaches and

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objectives for portside areas, and many of these conflict. In Port of Spain, planning recommendations set out in a number of reports dealing with the waterfront have remained largely unenacted. It may be surprising that urban waterfronts in Fort-de-France and Port of Spain have been neglected for a long time, given that cities on Caribbean islands are largely sea-oriented. Indeed, as stressed by the “plantopolis model” (Potter 2000), the genesis and structuring of Caribbean urban systems were both intimately associated with maritime exchanges within the colonial framework of the plantation system, based on slavery and indentured labour, exports of agricultural produce, and imports of consumption goods from the metropole. The relative neglect suffered by urban waterfronts until recently, however, demonstrates the ambivalent and changing nature of Caribbean cities’ relations to the sea, despite their historical connection. Their “maritimity” was initially purely functional within the colonial space, then shifted to a “forgotten maritimity” when the restructuring of port activities cut cities off from the sea, until the latest phase of “marketed maritimity” began, related to tourism and a rising interest in seaside landscapes and activities (Desse 1996). The early 2000s marked a turning point in both Port of Spain and Fortde-France. Rising gas and oil prices dramatically increased Trinidad and Tobago’s financial resources, stimulating the local building industry. In Fortde-France, a vigorous urban renewal plan was given force by a newly elected mayor: Serge Letchimy, the city-planner who had promoted the “urban mangrove” metaphor. In this context, old planning documents were dusted off, new studies commissioned, decisions taken, and budgets opened up. Port of Spain’s and Fort-de-France’s waterfront landscapes started to undergo massive transformations, within which their respective squatting settlements received quite different treatment. Two distinct urban approaches inform developments in Volga-Plage and Sea Lots, although official documents, maps, and websites related to these developments draw on a common rhetoric of ‘urban revitalization’ and ‘opening up to the sea’.

Fort-De-France: A Comprehensive Attempt to Reshape the Waterfront No fewer than fourteen urban development projects are currently being carried out on Fort-de-France’s waterfront (SEMAFF 2006). Five of these directly target underprivileged neighbourhoods, through socio-economic programs (Zone d’Activité Économique) or physical upgrading (Résorption de l’Habitat Insalubre). Volga-Plage is involved in a socio-economic program that follows a previous phase of physical regeneration conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. One hundred and sixteen concrete dwellings have been constructed in the southern part of the settlement to accommodate residents whose substandard and unhealthy houses were demolished. Frequently flooded lands have been reclaimed and playgrounds and public squares constructed (ADUAM 1993).

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 43 This focus on underprivileged coastal settlements shows a tangible concern for tackling problems of urban poverty as part of waterfront revitalization. Two other projects involve developing public space on the shore, so that the city is effectively opened up to the sea. The main project has been named le Malecón after Havana’s famous urban promenade. It will be linked to the city centre by the Savannah Park, which has been undergoing a complete redevelopment process since 2006. From west to east, the promenade starts at the new cruise ship terminal at Pointe Simon and the main taxi station, then runs alongside the berths of the intra-bay maritime shuttles, and eventually leads to the urban beach of La Française at the foot of Fort Saint-Louis’s massive historic walls. Concerts and other cultural events take place on le Malecón on a regular basis. The project “Almadies, Alizés, Régatiers”, named after the three public squares that are integrated within it, aims at continuing this city–sea connection outside the city centre and into the coastal squatting settlements (Figure 2.1). It includes pedestrian and bicycle lanes, playgrounds, and an aquatic centre. A whole neighbourhood called l’Etang Z’Abricots has also been created ex nihilo on the shore in the eastern part of the city, surrounding a new marina. Last but not least, construction of a ‘business centre’, mostly funded by private investors (notably from Trinidad), has started in Pointe Simon. The fi rst stage of the project includes a conference centre, offices, a luxury hotel, and high-rise apartments. A craft market for tourists will follow in a second stage. The Agence des Cinquante Pas Géométriques (ACPG)—literally, Fifty Geometric Steps Agency—encourages this comprehensive approach to waterfront development. As a public body instituted in 1996, the ACPG coordinates private and public actors involved in developing an eighty-metre wide ribbon along the urban shore, which is part of the public realm. Although construction was formerly banned or severely restricted in this zone, the French state has eventually adopted a pragmatic approach. It defi ned conditions allowing residents to become legal owners of the plots of land where they illegally built their dwellings (Klein 2003). The agency works with national and local authorities to facilitate urban coastal developments. However, both the officer in charge of the city of Fort-de-France at the ACPG and the director of SEMAFF, the main semi-public planning agency involved in the city’s waterfront redevelopment, admitted that coordination and cooperation between so many actors and bodies remain complicated. Nonetheless, the very existence of the agency provides a consistent institutional framework that tends to normalize coastal land management. Land tenure regularizations in Martinique have already helped to disentangle the inherited chaos in land and dwelling tenure on the urban coast. Fort-de-France provides an example of an attempt to establish a comprehensive approach to development in which objectives of urban waterfront revitalization have been aligned with socio-economic support for the poor populations already established in the area. The latter have not only been integrated into waterfront transformation, they have also played a role in

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legitimizing the city’s opening to the sea. Indeed, the survival of fishing activities in these coastal communities testifies to the city’s historical maritime connections. The municipality has funded expensive fishing facilities in VolgaPlage, Canal Alaric, and other squatting settlements, although only a handful of people hold professional fishing licenses. The less privileged who reside illegally on Port of Spain’s coastal fringe have had a different experience.

The International Waterfront Centre, Port of Spain A number of comprehensive waterfront schemes have been produced in Port of Spain since the 1970s, most notably the 1971 Port Plan and Development Programme, the 1982 and 1987 Port of Spain Land Use Plans, the 1990 Plan 2000 commissioned by the Port Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, and the 1992 Port of Spain Waterfront Development Plan (Colin Laird Associates and Design Callaborative 1992). However, the drop in international oil and gas prices in the 1980s drove Trinidad and Tobago’s economy into turmoil and disrupted implementation of some of these schemes. Others were simply abandoned after changes in government. A few ad hoc projects have been finalized, but their integration into the rest of the city and the coastal fringe has not been systematically planned. As a result, the sea remains invisible and barely accessible from the city. Pedestrians have little access to the refurbished “Breakfast Shed”, a catering facility situated on the seaside and separated from the city centre and its main pedestrian-friendly route, the Brian Lara Promenade, by a wide road (Figure 2.2). Two other major coastal developments, Westmoorings’ condominium complex and Movie Towne, a cinema complex built on reclaimed lands in Invaders Bay, have been conceived and designed as enclaves. They are separated from their surroundings by a wide highway, which is the main access route for residents and customers (Figure 2.2). But the most striking example is the International Waterfront Centre, located on former port land south of the city centre. This major development includes two twenty-six-storey office towers, a luxury hotel, and one of the largest convention centres in the Caribbean, which hosted the Fifth Summit of the Americas in 2009. Previous plans for this project also included a major performing arts centre and a waterfront boardwalk (Allahar 2007), but the cultural centre was finally built on the opposite side of the city centre and pedestrian access to the shore remains only hypothetical. Choices made by the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT), which was the contracting authority, suggest that it was not important that this project achieved aims of urban development or city–sea reconciliation, but rather that it would be a flagship project epitomizing Trinidad and Tobago’s economic success. A waterfront location, facing the outside world, stresses the country’s international aspirations. Pictures and drawings of the development appear on a number of official websites and publications as the outstanding emblem of Vision 2020, a national strategic plan whose objective is to “achieve developed-nation status by 2020” (Government of Trinidad and

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 45 Tobago 2005, i). The International Waterfront Centre is systematically represented as a shining island of wealth and modernity. The rest of the city is not pictured, nor is Sea Lots—which lies in the immediate vicinity. This official iconography constructs a representation of Port of Spain not as a city per se but as the iconic showcase of the country’s economy and insertion within the regional and global scene in the post–Independence era. It is described by UDeCOTT (2006) as “a testament to the burgeoning development of our twin-island nation”. UDeCOTT is a private company owned by the government. It was created in 1994 in order to facilitate development by sidestepping bureaucratic processes. It works “as property developer; as project manager; and as development facilitator” (Dodman 2008, 36). Its role increased dramatically when the country started being flooded with petrodollars in the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century. Dodman (2008, 41) shows that an urban corporation like UDeCOTT may enhance urban infrastructure, but also “results in reduced direct accountability to urban residents”, in particular the poorest. UDeCOTT’s commitment to the country’s global ambitions tends to overshadow logics of local city-planning. Indeed, the construction of the International Centre started before the new master plan for the central business district and waterfront was even submitted for approval, conforming to the widely-used principle of “decision fi rst, rationalization later” (Flyvbjerg 1998, 20). Many options for the Sea Lots area have already been suggested in previous plans, including port relocation, construction of a light industrial business park (1990), marina, hotel, open parkland (1992), as well as an airport opposite the current fish harbour (1971), all without clarifying the future of squatters. This group is often either ignored or mentioned as one among many planning constraints. In contrast to other plans, however, the 1992 Port of Spain Waterfront Development Plan explicitly identified the presence of informal residential uses in Sea Lots as a permanent component of the waterfront and advocated for the settlement’s upgrading and regularization instead of its removal. This comprehensive report was not implemented, nor were its predecessors. Lack of a clear plan for the area feeds a number of rumours that circulate in the settlement. One person assured me that “some in West Sea Lots were given notice to leave because of a car park”, while another remarked, “thirty years ago they told me I’d have to move, but I’m still here.” The construction of the International Waterfront Centre, whose high-rise buildings overlook Sea Lots’ self-built sheet metal roofs, renews uncertainty and the fear of eviction. When inhabitants were asked to what extent they thought they could be affected by developments on the waterfront, the majority answered with a simple shrug. Some described the waterfront centre as the emblem of their country’s achievements and a source of pride. Most, however, regarded it as an additional threat to their already vulnerable situation, fearing that the proximity of the development would hasten their relocation out of the city. The Waterfront Centre’s spatial configuration and

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lack of connectivity with the surroundings reinforce an already fragmented urban landscape and draw attention to the population’s uneven access to the national wealth (Riddell 2003). Nearby squatting settlements represent nothing but an ‘eyesore’ that may disturb the modern image that has been created for the country at great expense. While pointing at a derelict dwelling, one inhabitant told me: “Do you think this is like a 2020 Vision? They want to move us out of Port of Spain.” In contrast, in the survey conducted in Fort-deFrance, interviewees from Volga-Plage complained about traffic disturbances due to work on the waterfront, but the possibility that development could interfere in any way with their housing situation apparently did not come to anyone’s mind. Ironically, these opposing reactions—relative indifference in Volga-Plage, anxious attentiveness to the waterfront project and apparent fatalism in Sea Lots—reflect a common lack of community participation in waterfront restructuring, which is driven in both cases by the authorities.

SQUATTERS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF SCALES ON CHANGING WATERFRONTS Waterfronts are defi ned by their nodal position between global and local scales. Scale is “the product of processes of negotiation and compromise; it is contested and fought over, the temporary, transient, sometimes fragile, sometimes stable outcome of political tensions” (Randles and Dicken 2004, 2012). The relative importance given to different scales in any development is not neutral, but is a social and political construction. While a mega-project like the International Waterfront Centre in Port of Spain aims to enhance national economic growth and competitiveness at the international scale, smaller projects conducted on the Fort-de-France waterfront have been planned as components of urban renewal at the city scale. I understand the contrasting experiences of coastal squatters in relation to waterfront developments as largely resulting from distinct scales of reference within planning approaches on the one hand and local identity politics on the other.

Planning Approaches of Waterfront Developments The International Waterfront Centre in Port of Spain is typical of a number of major urban developments that are seen as strategic tools to foster the competitiveness of cities and regions in a changing economic context. Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez (2002, 543) observe that such projects are often: initiated by ‘exceptionality’ measures, such as the freezing of conventional planning tools, bypassing statutory regulations and institutional bodies, the creation of project agencies with special or exceptional

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 47 powers of intervention and decision making, and/or a change in national or regional regulations. However, the fact that the waterfront development in Port of Spain is envisaged in a national and international context is not the only reason that municipal authorities have been bypassed during its decision-making and implementation phases. In Trinidad physical planning is mostly led by national institutions (Conway 1989). The powers that the 1990 Municipal Corporation Act confers to local governments in Trinidad and Tobago concerning the built environment remain limited in scope: small infrastructural works, lighting, street cleaning, and so forth. Significantly, the 2004–2008 Strategic Plan issued by the Port of Spain Corporation includes no maps and pays no attention to the spatial dimension of planning. By tacit agreement and tradition, even the largest projects located in the capital city have been decided upon and implemented through the mere impulse of the Trinidadian Cabinet, with little consultation with the city council. This situation has not created conflicts between local and national authorities because both have been led by the same political party during most of the post–Independence era. This centralization of planning powers in national institutions explains the fact that the integration of the International Centre into its urban surroundings and consideration of the waterfront’s other uses and users have not been primary concerns. Such an approach to major urban developments tends to increase physical fragmentation and the social exclusion of adjacent poorer areas (Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002). In contrast, in Fort-de-France, most developments fall within the scope of planning authority where reference to municipal boundaries is essential. Projects carried out on the waterfront have formed a major component of the Great City Project (GCP), a comprehensive plan for urban renewal that ran from 2001 to 2006. Its general orientations have been maintained in the current Urban Contract of Social Cohesion (UCSC), which is a covenant between the state and the municipality for physical and social upgrading. GCP and UCSC projects have been co-funded by a number of actors operating at municipal, intercommunal, departmental, regional, and national levels. Despite the involvement of a variety of jurisdictions, reference to the city’s territorial scale remains fundamental. In contrast to the Trinidadian case, the emphasis is not placed on the projects’ economic impact on Martinique as a whole. Waterfront developments may be expected to attract an increased number of cruise ship stopovers at the island, but the GCP’s initiators insist that la Malecón and adjacent projects primarily aim to improve urban life in Fortde-France through a revitalization of its centre: “These places have always been focal points for Fort-de-France’s social life. Regaining them means giving their inhabitants an area in which they can carry out their activities, stroll about, practice sports, or just get some air. It is about validating their choice to remain in the city centre” (City of Fort-de-France and Prefecture of Martinique 2000, 9).

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These distinct scalar approaches to development affect the squatting communities’ legitimacy as residents of the waterfront and, more generally, of the city. In Fort-de-France, the squatters’ status cannot be questioned, whereas in Port of Spain, Sea Lots is seen as just one of many squatting communities that could be relocated anywhere. Volga-Plage has always benefited from the support of municipal authorities, who have actively contributed to the settlement’s establishment and consolidation on the city’s shore. They provided important public services such as fountains, tarred roads, kindergartens, a sewage system, electricity, and water drainage (Bouliane 1976), and gave inhabitants jobs, the municipality being the main employer in the city (Martouzet 2001). In contrast, Sea Lots residents have declared they have had no contact with the Port of Spain City Corporation, but instead have contact only with their representative in the national parliament. When expressing their concerns about local issues, they also make direct contact with national bodies such as the Ministry of Community Development or the Trinidad and Tobago Housing Development Corporation. Zoning decisions also provide evidence of the municipal scale’s weakness in addressing problems of housing and poverty, which are chronic issues in Sea Lots. The settlement has been included within the development area of the East Port of Spain Development Company, along with other underprivileged settlements, which are mostly situated on hills in the adjacent region of San Juan-Laventille outside Port of Spain’s administrative boundaries. The East Port of Spain Development Company was launched by the government in 2005 “to transform East Port of Spain through economic, social and physical regeneration in partnership with the community.” Although the agency’s goal is also to make the area “fully integrated into Greater Port of Spain and the greater society” (East Port of Spain Development Company 2009), the decision by the Trinidadian authorities to emphasize a structural division between east and west, poor and rich, informal and formal, which transcends the capital city’s proper boundaries, contrasts with the comprehensive urban approach expressed in Fort-de-France’s GCP and UCSC, which are based on principles of urban solidarity and integration at the scale of the city.

Politics of Identity Differences in the treatment received by Sea Lots and Volga Plage also stem from a divergent articulation of scales within post-colonial processes of identity construction in Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago. The city of Fort-de-France stands as the place of anti-colonial resistance and affi rmation of a Martinican identity, whereas Port of Spain has to serve the global and regional aspirations of a newly independent state in a context of national construction. The city of Fort-de-France became the territorial nexus of a confl ict between local authorities and the French state. Aimé Césaire, the famous poet and theoretician of Négritude (a school of thought born in 1930s Paris

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 49 that promotes Black identity), spent more than five decades at the head of the city council. Links can be found between his theories, poetry, and political action related to the squatting question. Standing for the squatters, as he did, amounted to standing for the oppressed people of Martinique against the (post)colonial metropole. The municipality and the state tussled over questions of squatting, especially on the coastal fringe, which legally falls within the control of the state. The municipal authorities’ mobilization in favour of the squatters’ “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968) was initiated with Césaire and continued with Letchimy, who expressed this intellectual and political agenda in the title of his work on “urban mangroves” (1992): From Precarious Housing to the City (De l’Habitat précaire à la Ville). It connects with a larger struggle, not directly for independence, but rather for the recognition of a specific local identity (Giraud 2005). Backing the poor and the squatters in the city has been a catalyst for the promotion of a French Caribbean identity. In Césaire’s wake, discourses by intellectuals tend to legitimize the informal city as the cradle and guardian of a local authenticity (De Bleeker 2008), opposed to the ‘white’ or ‘mulatto’ city spoiled by French culture and values (Torres 2005). The inclusion of coastal squatting communities into waterfront and urban revitalization has its origins in this confluence of the municipal political agenda and the intellectual construction of a post-colonial identity. Squatters benefited from the municipal authorities’ efforts to promote decent living standards, social justice, and cultural recognition for the Martinican people. Because the waterfront redevelopment has been designed as part of a wider urban vision, it has necessarily attempted to include all categories of inhabitants, with a specific focus on those identified as socially and economically disadvantaged. Trinidad and Tobago, as an independent state, faces different identity issues. Squatters do not benefit from a positive representation by local political and intellectual elites. The latter prefer to project hostility toward them. Conway (1981) points out the bias with which planners interpreted census data related to informal settlements; these settlements are essentially understood as a problem and thus in need of total transformation. In Trinidad, the construction of a national identity does not require defying a dominant metropole. Instead it calls for inventing and unifying a multi-ethnic society (Meighoo 2003). The Trinidadian population is extremely diverse, the main ethnic group being of Indian origin (descendants of indentured labourers), followed by Africans (descendants of slaves, in the census terminology), mixed, and a multitude of other groups (Chinese, Syrians, Europeans, etc.). In this specific context, “urban mangroves” have little reason to attract the local elites’ support and empathy, as they do in Martinique, despite their contribution to the Trinidadian culture and identity. For example, although calypso may be celebrated as part of the national cultural heritage of Trinidad and Tobago, it has been argued that it was officially recognized as part of the national culture only after it was absorbed by the commercial music industry and purged of much of its social and critical political

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content (Helmlinger 2005). Therefore, even though calypso finds its roots in squatting settlements, there has been little glorification of these communities in the production of a national identity. Furthermore, the issue of national identity may be a factor of fi xity and paralysis for the squatting situation in Trinidad, as exemplified by the authorities’ inability to yet make a formal decision on the fate of Sea Lots. Africans, whose urbanization began before that of East-Indians (Clarke 1993), are still over-represented in urban squatting settlements. In the 2000 population census, 83 percent of the inhabitants in Sea Lots declared themselves to be Africans (which is the highest concentration in Port of Spain) and only 3 percent to be Indian, although Indians accounted for more than 40 percent of the Trinidadian population overall (CSO 2000). Planners and officers interviewed during fieldwork often alluded to the sensitive character of policies directed towards urban squatting settlements: they may be seen as an unfair allocation of national resources for one ethnic group at the expense of the other. Trinidadian politics relies strongly on the ethnic cleavage and rivalry between Indians and Africans (Meighoo 2003). In contrast, the national strategic plan, Vision 2020, tends to privilege developments like the International Waterfront Centre, which engage the whole country on the international scene through a consensual, collective momentum that manages to overcome inner societal tensions. The development will accommodate the Association of Caribbean States’ headquarters and thus foster Trinidad and Tobago’s leading role in the processes of economic and political integration in the Caribbean region. Paradoxically, the regional scale has been decisive for newly independent Caribbean states to affi rm their national sovereignty and identity. Newstead (2005, 50) depicts regional integration in the Caribbean “as a way to defi ne and defend the meaning of independence and autonomy”. In contrast, French Martinique has limited access to the Caribbean scale. Resistance and affi rmation of a local identity have been expressed at the city scale, following Aimé Césaire’s impetus. In short, in Port of Spain the fi xity of poor coastal settlements collides with the country’s post-independence dynamics. Sea Lots remains excluded from the nationally and internationally oriented waterfront project. In Fort-de-France, however, there has been a calibration across scales that has addressed enduring squatting and poverty issues as well as processes of change on the waterfront. Volga-Plage has been acknowledged and celebrated as a legitimate part of city. It was integrated into waterfront revitalization as part of wider urban renewal schemes.

CONCLUSION Waterfront developments follow different logics in Fort-de-France and Port of Spain. In the first case, they focus on developing open public spaces together with socio-economic programs and the physical upgrading of depressed areas. In the Trinidadian capital city, intervention on the urban waterfront has been

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 51 more ambitious in terms of project size, cost, and potential outcomes for the country’s international image. However, it has focused on one isolated strip of land and has never integrated this strip into its urban environment. There is some coherence between these approaches to waterfront development and the way the squatting question has been addressed on urban coastal fringes. In Fort-de-France, there has been an attempt to integrate pre-existing users, even informal ones. Squatting settlements have been understood as an urban question and incorporated into waterfront plans that had been imagined and implemented as tools for city revitalization. In Port of Spain, where the ambitious waterfront development has been conceived as a flagship project symbolizing the nation’s inclusion within the global economy and its role in Caribbean politics, poor, illegal, undesirable residents have missed out on the benefits of waterfront revitalization. They have been tackled as a socio-economic problem disconnected from its spatial context, and consequently excluded from both the flow of investments and the prestigious waterfront projects nearby. The comparative dimension of the study brings to light various patterns of interaction between the local, national, and global scales, interactions that sometimes foster change on urban waterfronts and sometimes hinder it. The different futures faced by Volga-Plage and Sea Lots stem partly from inherited planning cultures and institutions that set their focus on different local, national, and international horizons. They also echo and actualize the ongoing construction of a post-colonial identity within which squatters and cities may play a distinctive role in French Martinique and independent Trinidad and Tobago. This study prompts me to reflect on the physical and social fragmentation of the waterfronts of the two cities and more generally throughout their urbanized areas. It may be that the lack of a comprehensive urban vision contributes to the spatial and social fragmentation of Port of Spain, as suggested by the insular design of the International Waterfront Centre and by the lack of integration of surrounding squatting settlements. However, the apparent dichotomy between Fort-de-France’s integrated waterfront philosophy and Port of Spain’s fragmentary planning logics warrants further examination. In the long term, provided that the economic crisis does not redirect or halt investment, other projects already mooted for Port of Spain’s urban coast could enhance access to the sea, connectivity to the city, and the general coherence of the waterfront landscape. Examples of such projects are a water taxi service linking the coastal cities, whose first phase was launched in December 2008, and the extension of the waterfront development announced by the Minister of Works in May 2009. Conversely, efforts in Fort-de-France to open up the city to the sea and integrate the whole population into urban renewal may have unforeseen effects. As “paradoxically, the social treatment of housing leads to an acceleration of the process of destabilization of social relations” (Crozat 2003–2004, 167), the celebrated authenticity and identity of “urban mangroves” might not endure outside the discourse of intellectuals. Efforts to maintain existing occupants in situ may not prevent the waterfront’s ecology being transformed by a silent process of gentrification. Local planners and

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architects informally confirmed that in the coastal squatting settlement of Texaco, some residents who benefited from a regeneration program sub-let their new dwellings to wealthier persons. Albeit marginal, this phenomenon raises doubts about the likelihood of the persistence of traditional, vernacular, and informal uses and users on Caribbean urban waterfronts. Will they be erased, as the case of Port of Spain tends to suggest? Or will they become linked into processes of change, with a chance of being absorbed into and diluted by a more conventional urban milieu, as may occur in Fort-de-France?

NOTES 1. The author thanks Eric Mosinger (University of California, Irvine), Joseph Visser, and Gerald Gorman for their generous assistance, and all those in Trinidad and Martinique who kindly helped with this research.

REFERENCES ADUAM. 1993. Etude de réalisation RHI Bas Volga-Plage, Pointe des Sables. Fort-de-France: ADUAM. Allahar, Haven. 2007. Resisting waterfront cluster. Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday, 29 March. Bouliane, Pierre. 1976. Volga-Plage (Fort-de-France) Martinique. Fieldwork Report, University of Montreal. Central Statistical Office. 2000. Housing and population census. Port of Spain: Ministry of Planning and Development, Trinidad and Tabago. City of Fort-de-France and Prefecture of Martinique. 2000. Grand Projet de Ville. Fort-de-France. City of Fort-de-France. Clarke, Colin. 1993. Spatial pattern and social interaction among Creoles and Indians in Trinidad and Tobago. In Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kelvin. A. Yelvington. London: Macmillan. Colin Laird Associates and Design Collaborative. 1992. Port of Spain waterfront development plan. Port of Spain. Port Authority of Trinidad and Tabago. Conway, Dennis. 1981. Fact or opinion on uncontrolled peripheral settlement in Trinidad: Or how different conclusions arise from the same data. Ekistics 286:37–48. . 1989. Trinidad and Tobago. In Urbanization, planning, and development in the Caribbean, ed. Robert B. Potter. London and New York: Mansell. Crozat, Dominique. 2003–2004. Enjeux de la manipulation de l‘image d‘un bidonville (Pedreira dos Hungaros à Oeiras-Lisbonne). Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims 115–118:163–182. De Bleeker, Liesbeth. 2008. Urban space in the French Caribbean Crime Novel. Confiant and Chamoiseau. In The Caribbean city, ed. Rivke Jaffe. Kingston, Miami, and Leiden: Ian Randle Publishers, KITLV Press. Desse, Michel. 1996. L’inégale maritimité des villes des départements d’outre-mer insulaires. In La maritimité aujourd‘hui, eds. François Péron and Jean Rieucau. Paris: L’Harmattan. Desse, Michel and Pascal Saffache. 2005. Les littoraux Antillais: Des enjeux de l’aménagement à la gestion durable. Matoury: Ibis Rouge Editions. Dodman, David. 2007. Post-independence optimism and the legacy of waterfront redevelopment in Kingston, Jamaica. Cities 24(4): 273–284.

Fragmentation on the Waterfront 53 . 2008. Developers in the public interest? The role of urban development corporations in the Anglophone Caribbean. Geographical Journal 174(1): 30–44. East Port of Spain Development Company. 2009. Accessed 8 October 2009. Flyvbjerg, Bent. 1998. Rationality and power: Democracy in practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giraud, Michel. 2005. Revendication identitaire et cadre national. Pouvoirs 113:95–108. Government of Trinidad and Tobago. 2005. Vision 2020 Draft National Strategic Plan. Port of Spain. Accessed 8 October 2009. Helmlinger, Aurélie. 2005. Mémoire et jeu d‘ensemble: la mémorisation du patrimoine musical dans les steel-bands de Trinidad et Tobago. PhD diss., University Paris Nanterre. Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques. 1999. Recensement de la Population de 1999. Paris: INSEE. Klein, Judith. 2003. Protéger le littoral dans les départements français d‘outre-mer. PhD diss., University Paris 4 Sorbonne. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Editions Anthropos. Letchimy, Serge. 1992. De l’habitat précaire à la ville: l’Exemple Martiniquais. Paris: L’Harmattan. Martouzet, Denis. 2001. Fort-de-France, ville fragile? Paris: Anthropos. Meighoo, Kirk. 2003. Politics in a half made society: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925– 2002. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers. Mohammed, Asad. 1988. Squatters and the State in Trinidad and Tobago. Colloqui: A Journal of Urban and Planning Issues (Spring): 29–40. Mycoo, Michelle. 2006. The retreat of the upper and middle classes to gated communities in the poststructural adjustment era: The case of Trinidad. Environment and Planning A 38(1): 131–148. Newstead, Clare. 2005. Scaling Caribbean (in)dependence. Geoforum 36:45–58. Port of Spain Corporation. 2003. 2004–2008 strategic plan. Port of Spain: Port of Spain Corporation. Potter, Robert B. 2000. The urban Caribbean in an era of global change. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Randles, Sally and Peter Dicken. 2004. “Scale” and the instituted construction of the urban: Contrasting the cases of Manchester and Lyon. Environment and Planning A 36(11): 2011–2032. Riddell, Barry. 2003. The face of neo-liberalism in the Third World: Landscapes of coping in Trinidad and Tobago. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 24(4): 593–615. SEMAFF. 2006. Convention de transfert des cinquante pas géométriques. Carua. Fort-de-France: City of Fort-de-France. Swyngedouw, Erik, Frank Moulaert, and Arantxa Rodriguez. 2002. Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode 34(3): 542–577. Thodiard, Frantz. 1993. Fort-de-France: Réconcilier le port et la ville. In City and port: Partners for the environment, ed. AIVP. Le Havre: Association villes et Ports. Torres, Gustavo. 2005. Quelle ville pour quelle société à la Martinique aujourd’hui? In Villes de la Caraïbe aujourd‘hui: Réalités sociales et productions culturelles, ed. Jean-Paul Révauger. Bordeaux: Pleine Page Editeur. Turner, Barry, ed. 2007. The statesman’s yearbook: The politics, cultures and economies of the world. 2008. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago. 2006. Accessed 8 October 2009.

3

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization in Dublin Astrid Wonneberger1

The Dublin docklands are in many ways a typical example of contemporary waterfront development. Derelict warehouses, docks, quays, and former coal-yards left from a time before containerization put an end to manual forms of labour and forced city ports towards the seafront have shaped Dublin’s docklands area since the 1970s. In the 1980s, these derelict waterfront areas were earmarked by urban planners, investors, and developers as having the potential for the development of new city quarters. As in cities all over the world, such as Melbourne and Sydney, Hamburg and Bremen, London and Liverpool, Copenhagen and Antwerp, Boston and Baltimore, Singapore and Shanghai, the ‘revitalization’ of dockland areas in Dublin has incorporated many different approaches to reorganizing port industries and redesigning old city quarters as places for tourism, residential or business use, or centres for leisure activities (see Moore 2008; Schubert 2008, 2001). But unlike developments in many other cities, Hamburg’s HafenCity for instance, the area being regenerated in the Dublin docklands not only consists of brownfield industrial sites, but is also home to a number of resident communities. Until the 1960s, these communities were almost entirely dependent on port economies and, even today, the members of these communities identify strongly with their port-related history, culture, and traditions. After containerization and new technologies brought an end to the era of thriving docks, the 1970s and 1980s saw the docklands characterized by unemployment and dereliction. The regeneration of the docklands began in the late 1980s and was expanded in the 1990s, accelerated by the Celtic Tiger economy. Derived from the East Asian Tiger economies, the name ‘Celtic Tiger’ refers to a period of rapid economic growth in the Republic of Ireland between the early 1990s and early 2000s. Low corporate taxation, EU funding, a low-cost labour market, and a policy of restraint in government spending are the most commonly cited causes for this boom. The Celtic Tiger boom has, on the one hand, been responsible for Ireland’s modernization, low unemployment rates, and economic growth and wealth generation that led Ireland from being a ‘backward’ country right into modern Europe. On the other hand, critical voices see the downside

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 55 in the widening gap between the rich and the poor and rising house prices that favour developers and investors but make it very hard for people with lower incomes to buy or even rent their own house or apartment (Coulter and Coleman 2003). The Celtic Tiger economy and plans for regeneration triggered hope for improvement in what long-term residents of the dockland area have perceived as ‘neglected areas’, but many aspects of the redevelopment plans have also been heavily criticized and debated, particularly those seen by community activists as threatening the functioning community structure. Indeed, the notion of ‘community’, a term widely used in Dublin in general and the docklands in particular, is a key element in the debate around the dockland redevelopment. This localized form of social organization is, in the five dockland communities that serve as the basis for this study, based on kinship, friendship, and localized residency. This chapter presents some of the results from my ongoing research project on micro-level effects of dockland regeneration on Dublin. Since 2002, I have carried out anthropological fieldwork among the five Dublin dockland communities, applying a variety of empirical methods, including biographical and other interviews with over one hundred residents, community activists, and developers; genealogical interviews; network analysis; and mental maps. The foundation of ethnographic fieldwork, however, is participant observation, where the researcher takes an active part in the life of the groups he or she is studying. Following this approach, I attended public events (for example, community festivals and political meetings), got regularly involved in communal activities (in day care centres and youth work), and fi nally took up a joint heritage project with one of the leading community organizations. Over the years, I developed many friendships and thus became part of the communities I was studying; this provided me with a profound insight into people’s everyday lives, concerns, and views, which would have been impossible to gain by qualitative interviews or quantitative methods only (see, for example, Bernard 2006). One of the biggest methodological and theoretical problems in social anthropology (and related disciplines) is the issue of consensus. No ethnic or cultural group or community is ever homogeneous. They all consist of individual people and therefore differ in their characteristics and belief systems. This is also the case in the Dublin docklands. During my research I talked to several hundred people, who varied in their perception of the regeneration process. However, a widespread pattern exists in that certain views are shared by the majority of the residents, so it does make sense to speak of ‘culture’ in this context. In order to tackle this problem, I also applied a consensus survey to determine the communities’ most important issues, which also supported my fi ndings. 2 Therefore, referring to the opinions or characteristics of ‘the communities’ or ‘the community members’ means that: (a) the majority of my interviewees held that opinion or shared that characteristic; and (b) that this opinion or characteristic was the official

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policy of community leaders, who, in order to fight for their interests in the redevelopment process, had had to clarify their position within their own community and with adjacent communities. Where interview quotations serve as illustration, they are selected in such a way that they represent the opinion of the majority of my interviewees. Based on these quantitative and qualitative data and experiences, this chapter analyzes urban transformation processes in the Dublin docklands from a social anthropological perspective. It explores how waterfront regeneration has affected the long-established communities and how representatives of these communities have become involved in the planning process, as well as their aims and criticisms. The analysis of the impact of redevelopment at the micro-level shows how important the physical urban environment is for the existing dockland communities, in terms of the construction of identities and everyday life, and how changes in the physical landscape, including their side-effects, have fundamental consequences on social structure. The ongoing debates between Dublin’s dockland communities and cityplanners can be compared with what Cresswell (2006) has identified as sedentarist metaphysical and nomadic metaphysical ways of viewing the world. While ‘the first sees mobility through the lens of place, rootedness, spatial order, and belonging’, the latter ‘puts mobility first, has little time for notions of attachment to place, and revels in notions of flow, flux, and dynamism’ (Cresswell 2006, 26). In the context of Dublin waterfront regeneration, while the local communities feel strongly attached to what they perceive as ‘their territory’ with its distinctive port-related architecture, city-planners promote a modern image of a ‘world-class city’ that is not focused on highly localized and therefore ‘fixed’ forms of residence and culture. Instead, this image centres on mobility, which finds its expression in less permanent ways of living and new forms of work that are no longer attached, as in the past, to a specific area like the docks. The communities see their local identities dislodged. In that respect, the current debate in Dublin is not only a debate about cityplanning, but also about the fixity and flow of urban waterfronts.

INTRODUCING THE DUBLIN DOCKLAND COMMUNITIES The area today defi ned as the docklands in Dublin dates back to the late eighteenth century, when the city’s port was shifted eastwards and downriver with the construction of the new Custom House. From then onwards, an increasing number of residents settled in this new area close to the port along the quays of the river Liffey, which provided plenty of employment opportunities (Gilligan 1989). The erection of churches gave these neighbourhoods a parish structure that served as the basis of specific communal identities. In the area defi ned as the ‘docklands’ by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) in 1997, five communities still exist today. 3

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 57

Figure 3.1 Map of the Dublin docklands area showing the boundaries of the docklands as defined by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Custom House Docks development of 1987, and the boundaries of the communities’ territories as perceived by their residents (Map A. Wonneberger).

Due to its importance and its often ambiguous meaning, the term ‘community’ has to be elucidated in this context. Over recent decades, concepts of community have been the subject of much debate in social anthropology, and yet there is still no precise defi nition of the term (Rapport 1998). As early as 1955, Hillery identified over ninety different definitions, the broadest of which refers to any group united by common interests. In this meaning of the term, a professional group, a village, or a club may be referred to as a community as well as an association or an urban city quarter (Winthrop 1991, 41; Seymour-Smith 1986, 46). Attempts to narrow this defi nition have been numerous, but the details would lead us too far in this context. In brief, over the years anthropologists identified a number of features that characterize community as a specifi c type of social group. Among these features are a relatively small number of people, which enables the members to have face-to-face interaction and thus establish close social ties, enduring over generations. These people live together in a specifi c territory with distinct boundaries; they share the same cultural features, such as religion, norms, values, or economic strategies; and have common interests. Later approaches focused

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their attention on boundaries and identity formation (Barth 1969) or the symbolic dimension of community formation (Cohen 1985). A debate about the role of localities, territories, place, and space was another extension of this concept (Welz 1991; Wellman and Leighton 1979). This new approach challenged the old assumption of a close connection of territory and community and formulated ideas of aspatial communities, groups who were no longer dependent on a fi xed urban place, but constructed their common identity and social ties through common features and interests and were scattered all over a city or beyond. Thus, the city became the setting for social networks, which are formed by people who establish relationships with other people. The decision of who to contact is no longer influenced by one’s residential area or spatial closeness, but exclusively common interests and the actor’s free will. Empirical urban research has since shown that both approaches, territorially based urban communities and aspatial communities, characterize cities and urban life (Welz 1991), and both concepts, as we will see, play an important role in Dublin and its docklands. In Dublin, the term ‘community’ is widely used, ranging from very generalized references to the entire population of Dublin (‘the Dublin community’, as advertised by the Dublin Bus company) to single streets or public housing complexes. The most common usage, however, refers to the residents of city quarters or neighbourhoods, such as ‘Pearse Street community’ or ‘the community of Ringsend’, which are characterized by the anthropological features mentioned earlier, including territorial boundaries. In these theoretical approaches, as well as in the daily use of the term, ‘community’ can refer to three different aspects: 1. a specific social structure; 2. a group of people with these specific features; and 3. a specific territory. This often leads to confusion. The same is true for the term ‘neighbourhood’, which not only connotes a city quarter but also is often used synonymously with ‘community’ to refer to the residents of a specific urban quarter. In order to avoid further confusion, but nevertheless stick to this emic and etic terminology, ‘neighbourhood’ in this chapter will refer to a specific inhabited city quarter, but does not make any assumption about the relationship between the residents. ‘Community’, as the more important term in this context, will refer to: (a) the residents of a specific urban (dockland) quarter who are connected by a close social structure based on friendship, kinship, and spatial closeness; and (b) to this form of social organization. As both notions imply each other—any form of social organization only exists through people and communities only exist with social ties—I will use the term for both but add clarification when needed.

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 59 The members of each Dublin dockland community have known each other over generations. People greet each other in the streets, local pubs serve as regular meeting points, and regular customers take note when strangers enter. Within each community, everyone knows their nextdoor neighbour as well as many other local people to ask for favours or support if needed (Wonneberger 2009). Community festivals, community centres, local newspapers, and—less than in the past but still to a certain extent—the parish church play significant roles in maintaining this social structure. Being a member of a community also means identifying with the group. Since Barth’s seminal volume (1969), anthropologists no longer look at identities as fi xed aspects in the social reality, but rather as constructed along boundaries using specific markers; these markers are often cultural features. Members of the Dublin dockland communities often speak of their ‘culture’ in this context. While their usage of the term remains mostly vague, it can be specified from an anthropological perspective. After a long debate, culture in its broadest common denominator consists of any traits, knowledge, behavioural routines, and habits that are learned, transmitted socially, and shared by all members (see Beer 2003 for a summary of this debate). Applied to the dockland communities, their culture consists of traits such as a specifi c form of economy, values, belief systems, and a close relationship with what they perceive as their urban territory with its local meeting points and landmarks. This becomes particularly obvious along the borders of two adjacent communities, where fights between youth groups take place, or in situations where ‘outsiders’ move in. For example, when Viking Splash Tours, a sightseeing tour with aquatic vehicles, started to use the Grand Canal Basin on their tours, the local children who used to swim in the basin felt intruded upon and disregarded. They started throwing stones at these vehicles and only stopped after the organizers contacted community leaders who advised them to get involved in local community activities. When the ‘duck vehicles’ regularly took part in the annual communal festival, the vandalism stopped. The communities’ cultural markers of identity also include the importance of community as a specific form of social organization and a common sense of history, which is based on the dock activities of the past. All these features are shared and transmitted from generation to generation, and they are used to construct communal boundaries and thus establish communal identities. ‘Others’ vary depending on the situation; they can be the neighbouring community, the planning agents, or the rest of Dublin, as I will analyze later. Of course, such communities as depicted so far are idealized concepts. The reality often looks different, and the Dublin dockland communities are no exceptions. However, it is important to note in this context that this notion of community is perceived as a political goal for the future—and not

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just by dockland residents, but also by Dubliners from other areas. During my consensus survey, interviewees from all over Dublin agreed that preserving a sense of community, in this idealistic meaning, was very important for the future of the entire city. This is also addressed on the administrative level: Dublin City Council, the municipal administration, considers ‘community development’ as one of the most important issues in their planning schemes (Dublin City Council 2005, 2002). For the dockland communities, this concept of community is perceived as a cultural feature, even if it does not exist (or maybe has never existed) in its ideal form. Crime, drugs, unemployment, lack of education, people moving out—all these features are critically addressed and perceived as threats to their communities. However, many positive aspects remain, such as localized friendship, kinship, mutual help, or institutions, and these go back to the economic past of the area. The members of the Dublin dockland communities were economically dependent on the port and related industries until the 1970s. Casual manual work on the docks, in the coal- and timber-yards, factories, foundries, and gas-works provided about fifty thousand residents in this area with relatively regular income. Despite the abundance of work, life was characterized by poverty and overcrowded living conditions, but also by close social networks. These networks were based on kinship ties within the neighbourhoods, which were established by families living in the area over generations; they also depended on friendship, neighbourliness, a high proximity between work and living space, and numerous communal institutions such as the church, community centres, and public houses. Each member was embedded in a close social network within one of the five communities, and this network was often crucial for economic survival, as work on the docks often depended on the creation and maintenance of good connections (Wonneberger 2006). When containerization and new technologies were introduced to Dublin’s port in the late 1960s (Gilligan 1989, 199–200), the economic situation in the port area changed dramatically. Manual forms of work became obsolete; many industries left the port and moved to new premises in the suburbs. The port itself moved further east towards the seafront. Many industrial sites became derelict. The situation was aggravated by Ireland’s general economic situation in the 1980s, when many people emigrated. Unemployment became one of the area’s biggest problems. In some quarters, over 70 percent of heads of households were on the unemployment register (Dublin Corporation 1986, quoted in Moore 2008, 55). Crime rates and drug abuse increased in tandem with the increase in unemployment, and the docklands soon developed the reputation as being one of Dublin’s most notorious ‘no-go areas’. Although many people had to move out due to declining housing availability, one’s community remained the centre of social activities.

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 61 While the economic situation changed fundamentally, social networks remained a crucial feature in all dockland neighbourhoods and are one of the bases for today’s communal activities and organizations. Employment centres, for instance, which have been established by local initiatives since the 1980s, only work successfully because the mediators know their clients personally. Communal networks are used for all sorts of support, from babysitting to lending money or asking for advice. Word of mouth is very important and news travels fast. Due to familiarity and close social networks, inhabitants feel safe living in an ‘urban village’, as the dockland neighbourhoods are often called, and share a feeling of solidarity. Therefore, community can also be seen as a form of social capital, as it provides social security, identity, and a sense of belonging. A functioning community, in the sense of a social structure where people support each other, is also perceived by community activists as a key element in alleviating many social problems in the area (Wonneberger 2009). Such was the situation in the late 1980s, when politicians decided to regenerate the former port area.

REDEVELOPING DOCKLANDS: FROM THE CUSTOM HOUSE DOCKS TO THE DUBLIN DOCKLANDS DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY Redevelopment began in 1987 with the Custom House Docks site, a derelict area of roughly eleven hectares adjacent to the former Custom House. This site was developed as a financial and economic centre, the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC: Figure 3.1). Tax incentives attracted international banks and other financial firms to this newly designed area and it became one of Dublin’s most successful business districts (see, in detail, Moore 2008; McDonald 2000; Malone 1996, 1993). Originally planned as a mixed-use area including a park, a museum, a marina, retail, cinemas, and other leisure facilities, the only plans that had been realized by 1995 were office and residential buildings. Only a few metres away from this new business world there existed one of the poorest and most disadvantaged communities in Dublin, but the residents had not been included in the redevelopment plans. The developers of the IFSC had anticipated social tensions and were looking for solutions to create a ‘safe’ environment for investors and new residents. To this end, they incorporated an old boundary wall, which had surrounded the former coal-yard, into the new design. Clearly separating the new residential and business area in the IFSC from the adjacent long-established North Wall community, this ‘Berlin Wall’ (Figure 3.2), as it became known locally, caused much resentment and debate, not only from the established community, but also from city-planners, social workers, and politicians, who questioned this type of planning in light of the areas’ social problems and earlier attempts to create social integration (Wonneberger 2008).

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Figure 3.2

The IFSC’s ‘Berlin Wall’ (Photograph A. Wonneberger).

The second phase of Dublin dockland regeneration began in 1997, when the DDDA was founded to secure “the social and economic regeneration of the Dublin Docklands Area on a sustainable basis” and “the improvement of the physical environment of the Dublin Docklands Area” (DDDA 1997, 2). This time, the local population was taken into consideration. Their concerns and most urgent social needs are directly included in the master plan and they were represented on the DDDA Council. The DDDA has set up numerous education and training schemes for local residents and they support various communal activities. Their activities concerning social regeneration are debated and gazetted each year at a conference organized by the Authority, to which numerous members of each community are invited (DDDA 1997, 2008). The area defi ned as ‘docklands’ in the DDDA Master Plan stretches over 526 hectares, including most of the former port and related area (Figure 3.1). The development period was projected to run from 1997 to 2012. This is a mixed-use development with residential areas, hotels, office space, parks, sports facilities, shops, and retail outlets; the canals, rivers, and dock basins are earmarked for boating, windsurfi ng, and other water activities (DDDA 1997). According to the Master Plan, the entire area is currently under construction. Cranes dominate the skyline, as a “new waterside quarter” (DDDA slogan) is being built. Along with this redevelopment has come

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 63 a change in image, away from the old dirty working-class area towards a shiny new ‘world-class city’, where ‘business will flourish’, as the DDDA slogans on brochures and hoardings predict. A nomadic metaphysics, in Cresswell’s (2006) formulation, seems to be the underlying theme, where the attachment to the old place becomes less important and mobility, particularly in terms of new lifestyles and work patterns, as we shall see later, begins to dominate. This, however, clearly contradicts the perceptions of the residents of the old established communities, who are concerned about maintaining what they consider traditional cultural features. Instead of mobility and flow, rootedness, a sense of place, and localized communities are seen by the residents as important values to be fought for. As a consequence, tensions have arisen between the communities’ residents and the developers and investors.

COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITY INFLUENCE After decades of physical deterioration, unemployment, and social problems, the residents of the various dockland communities have generally embraced ongoing changes in education, employment, infrastructure, and health, and perceive them as providing future opportunities. However, disappointed that the fi rst phase of the redevelopment disregarded the communities’ interests, the dockland communities began to organize politically. Community action had already begun in the early 1980s, in the face of social problems and political neglect by the local authorities. In order to tackle their most urgent issues, community activists started to set up their own local programs, such as community centres, local job agencies, or child-care facilities, which continue to be very successful. One of the best examples is St. Andrew’s Resource Centre on Pearse Street. This community facility started as a social services centre in 1973 and developed into one of the biggest local employers with more than forty permanent employees and over one hundred staff on job initiative and community employment projects. The Centre offers a variety of facilities and events for all age groups and is accessed by several hundred local residents (St. Andrew’s Resource Centre 2003). When plans for the second phase of dockland regeneration were released, organizations such as this became active in formulating, expressing, and fighting for their interests. The networks they had established with other communities, politicians, and other interest groups were vital during this phase. The first and foremost issue community activists addressed was their level of representation on the board of the planning agency and within the planning process. Whereas the communities had no say at all in the first phase of redevelopment and the profit and benefits all went to businesses rather than the local population, in the second phase the communities insisted on representation so they could pursue their interests in the course of the

64 Astrid Wonneberger redevelopment. As a result of their activity, when the DDDA was set up in 1997, seven delegates of the five dockland communities were appointed to the DDDA Council to represent the interests of the existing communities. Even though there is still much debate about the amount of power these representatives have, the arrangement is generally perceived as a success. “This was kind of a breakthrough in the sense that it meant that the communities would have some kind of say then”, one interviewee recalls. Apart from the issue of local representation, ongoing debates with the development agents centre on better education, employment, and health; infrastructure; traffic; housing; public space; and architecture. While the first five issues require significant levels of change—the previous conditions were intolerable—the final three call for an element of stability and the maintenance of certain traditions, and thus call for a certain level of opposition to the regeneration plans. All of these issues are also cultural, and therefore interesting from an ethnographic perspective. They all illustrate the importance of the concept of community and port-related traditions, but in the following sections I will focus on the final three aspects as they are particularly striking examples of the ongoing debates and an underlying sedentarist approach.

HOUSING A reasonable standard of housing has always been on top of the communities’ agenda. With their close social organization, the communities can only survive if sufficient and adequate housing is available. For this reason, the communities are generally in favour of new residential developments—but only if these new apartments are affordable for local residents. Property prices in Dublin since the Celtic Tiger period have risen astronomically. A three-bedroom apartment in the Gasworks development, for instance, can cost as much as €935,000 (Hook and McDonald 2006), which is not affordable for many families as the average industrial wage in Dublin is about €32,000; in the docklands the average wage is even lower. For this reason, the community representatives on the DDDA Council insisted on guarantees that 20 percent of all new residential developments have to be social or affordable,4 and that dockland residents be given fi rst preference in this scheme. This subsequently became national law in 1999 (McDonald 2000). Since 2002, a number of social and affordable housing schemes have been completed, and many local residents either have been rehoused within their neighbourhood following years of overcrowded living conditions or were able to return from the suburbs. But it is not only the amount of available living space that is important for the communities; it is also the design of the new residential areas. Until recently, apartment living outside municipal housing schemes was rare in Dublin. Privately rented accommodation was expensive and often in atrocious condition, and until 1990, as McDonald (2000, 12) notes, “there was

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 65 not one private flat available for purchase anywhere in the city center . . . because it simply did not rate as a residential location.” Houses in the suburbs were the norm for most middle-class families, and in socially disadvantaged areas rented public housing was typical. This is also true for the docklands. Despite many social problems, high unemployment rates, high levels of crime, and drug abuse, which have shaped the public and media image of ‘the flats’, as these complexes are usually called, life in these public housing schemes is also characterized by a very strong sense of community, just like the entire neighbourhood. In Dublin’s docklands, a large part of people’s social life takes place within the community, where “everybody knows everybody else” and “every second person is related to each other”, as I was told by many interviewees. People see each other regularly on the streets, in the church, the local pub, the corner shop, or other institutions, and visit each other often, even if it is just for a cup of tea or a chat on the balcony. The persistence of community depends upon the availability of public space both within the flat complexes and the wider neighbourhood area, as public space has long been used for communal activities. Church-based processions, regular events in the past, have been replaced in recent times by community festivals and parades; open spaces, streets, the river Liffey, the Grand and Royal Canals, and the dock basins have always been used by children for play. The members of each community claim as their territorial base a specific area with its local meeting points and landmarks. The new apartment complexes that were constructed in the course of the redevelopment are mostly private and generally attract a completely new type of resident. These new residents are typically young (i.e., between twenty and thirty-five years of age) and well educated with some kind of tertiary education. They often work in the financial or IT sector and are often single and highly mobile in that they change their jobs and their place of residence frequently. When planning a family, they usually move out to the suburbs. Many are short-term renters who move out of the area within a year or two. This high degree of mobility changes the social structure in these quarters as they become more anonymous, and it is heavily regretted by community activists that both populations have little or no contact. This is partially due to their different lifestyles, but also—and this is the main argument used by the community leaders and many members of the old communities— due to the architectural design of the new apartment complexes, which are designed with gates rather than open public spaces, an urban feature that had been so important for traditional community culture.

PUBLIC SPACES These gated apartments are considered atypical for the culture of the dockland communities, as they create internal community boundaries and make

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it difficult for people to get to know their neighbours. They create privatized spaces, because not only are the apartments private, but so are the communal spaces around them. While the members of the old communities are used to having direct access to their neighbours’ front doors, the entrances to the gated apartments are completely barred off. Even the local newspapers, an important means of communication, cannot be distributed to the gated complexes as the deliverers have no access to the letter-boxes. “These gated apartments are called the ‘Pigeon Lofts’ because . . . there are only two entrances to the car park and people just fly in and fly out. You never see the people, they are like people flying in and out of a pigeon loft”, one interviewee explained. By separating the two residential groups and hindering established forms of communication, the gates are perceived as an obstacle for community formation. This debate about the pros and cons of gated developments, the necessity of safer urban living on the one hand and negative effects on integration and community formation on the other, actually predates the DDDA and started in the 1980s, when the fi rst gated residential units were built. In the mid-1990s and late 1990s, further pushed by the community representatives on the DDDA Council, the latter argument became more popular with Dublin planners and fi nally led to Dublin City Council adopting new guidelines, which prohibit the construction of gated complexes (Haase 2008). While the fi rst DDDA development at Clarion Quay, opened in 2002, still has gates, the majority of the later complexes along Hanover Quay, Gallery Quay, and the Gasworks are more open, which means pedestrians can walk through the premises and have access to the front doors of the building. The design of the new residential units and the privatization of formerly public spaces nevertheless remain contentious issues. Even if gates are now absent, the new developments are more isolated than the old ones and offer less space for leisure. While in the public housing schemes neighbours could have a chat on the shared balconies and children knock at each others’ doors to go down to the spacious yard and common playground to play, in the private developments, pass codes, private balconies, and an absence of play areas make it difficult for people to meet each other in common areas. The lack of play areas in particular causes many problems. Children use staircases as play areas, as well as green spaces that they are not supposed to play in and private crèche facilities that they climb into, as happened frequently in the fi rst social housing block in the extended IFSC area at Clarion Quay. Again, the DDDA reacted and introduced play areas into subsequent developments, but they are generally small and only accessible to residents of the complex. Privatization of public spaces remains an ongoing criticism, as does the family-unfriendly design of the new apartments, which are not aimed at large and long-term households, as were the old flats, but rather directed towards a transient clientele with a nomadic lifestyle who are flexible enough to leave when they start a family. As a rental agent summarized, “You fi nd it hard to live in those new apartments. There

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 67 is nowhere to store anything. The tenants there would be far more transient. They are living out of their suitcase.” Due to their mobility, the new residents have, in general, very little knowledge about the history of the area and a completely different relation to their physical environment. They use different meeting places than members of the established communities and do not know anything about the remaining old buildings. Typically they do not know their neighbours; their social networks are not based in the area, but stretch all over the city, leading them to spend very little time in the immediate area. In contrast, members of the dockland communities spend most of their time in their locality and identify with the old port-related architecture, which they perceive as part of their heritage. A sense of place and belonging is part of their culture and identity. The different lifestyles of the members of the established communities and the new residents who have moved in the course of the regeneration of the dockland area are an illustrative example of Cresswell’s sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics. While the cultural features of the established communities are based on a certain location, landmarks, open spaces, and places, the new residents have a fairly mobile lifestyle and see themselves as ‘cosmopolitan’, as some of them told me in their interviews.

WORLD-CLASS CITY AND DIRTY OLD TOWN The image of a working-class era in the docklands, the times of thriving docks, the history, and what is considered to be the ‘heritage’ of the area are still considered a crucial part of the residents’ identities. For instance, the importance ascribed to the area’s port-related history fi nds its expression in numerous local ‘heritage’ publications in all dockland communities, which are mostly based on oral histories related by elderly local residents. The North Inner City Folklore Department, St. Andrew’s Heritage Project, and the Sandymount Community Services are well known and much appreciated institutions within the local populations. Rooted in their territory and proud of the history of the area, the local communities are very much concerned with the new architectural design of the physical environment and the creation of new images of the docklands (Wonneberger 2005). In the past, this image consisted of port-related architecture and industrial landmarks, such as the famous gasometer on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, old-fashioned dockers’ pubs, and a generally low-rise skyline. The agents of redevelopment have a completely new image in mind: as the DDDA slogan says, the development of a ‘world-class city quarter’. This intended image change creates further debates. One of the most significant issues, which brought widespread debate in Dublin, was about high-rise buildings. Until the late 1990s, Dublin Corporation, the municipal authority, had very restrictive criteria for new

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high-rise developments and thus managed to retain a low-rise character with buildings rarely exceeding four or five storeys (McDonald 2000). However, in the early 1990s, before the establishment of the DDDA, the fi rst plans for the docklands included high-rise schemes of a scale that was absolutely new to Dublin. Widespread opposition was generated by the plans for a scheme at George’s Quay with buildings over one hundred metres and by the proposed National Conference Centre at Spencer Dock with over three thousand apartments in over eleven buildings, each between nine and seventeen storeys high, nine office buildings rising up to twenty-two storeys, two large hotels, and twenty-one retail outlets. The local residents opposed these schemes mostly because they saw their houses being overshadowed; they were afraid of “claustrophobia” and a “sense of being walled in”, as two recalled in interviews a few years later. Other groups and institutions were concerned about the historic view of Dublin’s architectural heritage, which they felt would be lost if the plans went ahead. Ultimately the plans were rejected by the planning board due to this widespread protest and the planners had to go back to the drawing board (McDonald 2000). Nevertheless, new buildings in the docklands create a taller skyline than ever before and the area has indeed taken on a completely new look. Instead of old brick buildings, there is now new glass and steel; many of the old

Figure 3.3 Old and new buildings on the North Wall Quay (Photograph A. Wonneberger).

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 69 structures were demolished; only a few old protected buildings are left, and they are almost swallowed up by the new developments (Figure 3.3). These new designs are criticized by many residents because they take away a lot of the architectural cultural heritage of the area. The urban cityscape, including the old structures and buildings, is perceived as a cultural marker and part of the community residents’ cultural identities as docklanders. Many collective memories were attached to these buildings, while the new designs are generally described as sterile, faceless, and anonymous. The following interview excerpt is but one of many examples reflecting this attitude: I like the old buildings. I don’t like the new glass buildings. They are very futuristic, and I don’t think they resonate so much with the community, with the past and the heritage. I would have preferred if it was kept, some, not all, but some sense of the history there. Even if it was just the old building on the bottom and something else on the top, just that there is a sense of it. I think you lose the sense of the docks with it. In order to counteract this transformation and reconstitute a more portrelated atmosphere, community initiatives have restored some artifacts. One example is a diving bell that had been lying idle on the quays for some years. The bell was restored as a visible monument to the dock-related history by the Pearse Street community in cooperation with the DDDA, the Dublin Port Company, and Dublin Civic Trust in 2000 (St. Andrew’s Heritage Project 2003). The Pearse Street community’s most recent plans for cooperation with the DDDA centre on bringing in old port cranes from Belfast, because all the ones in Dublin have long since been dismantled, leaving the quays bare of any port-related memorabilia. The debate about architectural heritage and new urban images neatly underlines the importance of the physical environment for group identities and perceived cultural features. Community members insist on maintaining visible reminiscences of their past and culture. For them, old brick buildings and port-related artifacts refl ect an existing sense of place. They hold a sedentarist notion of the cityscape; they prefer an architecture of symbolism, buildings that receive a meaning through their historic purposes, while new modern buildings are considered a rupture with the historical and cultural context. They do not reflect any history and thus do not serve as common markers for a port-related identity. They symbolize shift, movement, and change: nomadic notions of culture. The docklands and their ongoing redevelopment are a contested arena for different interest groups who are trying to establish their ideas of a new city quarter. Notions of change, modernity, and mobility contrast with ideas of stability, rootedness, and heritage. In the end, a combination of both will probably be the result; whether all parties will

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be satisfied and what impact the new design will have on the residents remain to be seen.

CONCLUSION The case study of the debates around the contemporary waterfront regeneration in Dublin reveals different levels of sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics. On the fi rst level, the new styles of architecture are at stake. Based on their economic past, the members of the old-established dock communities have a specific relationship with the industrial heritage of the area, in terms of old buildings and structures. They are considered reflective of their cultural heritage and are full of cultural meanings for the residents, acting as cultural markers of specific localized identities including notions of ‘rootedness’ and static images. The new architecture, on the other hand, does not reflect any historical traits of the area. New structures have no symbolic meanings, no attachment to a cultural past. They represent change and modernity and are also part of the new image of a new world-class city, a developing and dynamic city: movement in time. The second level deals with the architectural design of a specific type of new buildings: the new apartment complexes. Traditional inner-city apartment living was almost exclusively limited to municipal housing schemes designed for family living with large public spaces. Lucky to have such a place, many flats were handed down from generation to generation and thus created or maintained close kin networks within a small urban space. Their design was not only family-friendly but also community-friendly and therefore supported the traditional form of social organization in these dock-related neighbourhoods. The new residential design contrasts these older notions of living and supports short residencies due to the lack of storage, play areas, and meeting points. This new form of apartment living attracts a more transient clientele. These two different groups of residents reflect the third level of sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics. One of the cultural traits of the new dwellers is mobility, in order to see friends in their non-localized social networks, follow a job, and experience the world, at least until starting a family and then moving out to the suburbs. While the old communities are rooted in a specific urban territory, the new residents have a more nomadic lifestyle. Their metaphysics is characterized by movement in space. Their networks and communities are aspatial, not localized in urban spaces, whereas the members of the dockland communities perceive their localized networks as an important cultural feature that is not to be preserved for nostalgic reasons, but because it has always been—and still is—a form of social capital. Being embedded in a community where people know each other is crucial in many respects, be it for fi nding a new job through the local job centre or just providing a sense of belonging. A functioning community is regarded

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 71 as one of the key solutions for many social problems in the area. For this reason, as far as the old-established social structure is concerned, cultural continuity is certainly a goal of the dockland communities within the transformation process, and this can only be achieved if the development of the urban environment also reflects some continuity. In other areas, such as employment and education for instance, change is more than welcome, because it helps to stabilize community and cultural identities. But this can only be achieved if the communities participate in the regeneration; if not, the revitalization might be economically beneficial for some, but not sustainable in the longer term. Dublin’s dockland regeneration is an example of the complex relations between technological, economic, architectural, social, and cultural change. Urban transformation goes hand in hand with the re-evaluation and reconsideration of notions of ‘heritage’, be it in the form of architectural features, urban images, or ‘traditional’ forms of social organization as in the case of the old-established communities. The residents of these long-term neighbourhoods challenge some of the flow-driven ideas of urban planners and developers and emphasize the importance of stable and fi xed elements for the future of the area. Dublin’s waterfront transformation is thus shaped by both local and global forces incorporating fi xities of everyday life as well as flows and movement as visions for the future. NOTES 1. The author would like to thank Dr. Rosemarie Oesselmann, Noel Watson, and the editors of this volume for their many useful comments, insightful discussions, and suggestions, which helped to bring this chapter into fruition. 2. Consensus analysis is an empirical method developed as part of cognitive anthropology by Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986). It is a standardized method to investigate cultural homogeneity, or consensus, among the group to be studied (see, in detail, Schnegg and Lang 2008). I carried out a consensus survey with fi fty interviewees from all dockland communities and other areas in Dublin to compare their cultural knowledge and confi rm the consensus of their belief systems, cultural knowledge, and other features. 3. Some parishes of the North Inner City (NIC) in Dublin also consider themselves as port-related communities, although their territories are not within the DDDA boundaries. This also caused debates with the Authority, who fi nally included them as the ‘hinterland’ in their schemes. For details, see Wonneberger (2008). The inner structure of the five dockland communities is also contested, as three communities consist of more than one parish; there are many inner boundaries within each community and areas that cannot clearly be assigned to a specific community, such as the South Lotts. Nevertheless, as the details have no further influence on the arguments presented in this chapter, and the residents of these five communities perceive themselves as a unit each and are represented as such in the arrangements with the developing agents, I will maintain this distinction. 4. Affordable housing schemes in Dublin assist low- to middle-income earners who cannot afford to purchase housing on the open market. State agencies, such as the DDDA or the County Councils, sell apartments or housing at

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REFERENCES Barth, Frederik, ed. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organisation of culture difference. London: George Allen and Unwin; Bergen-Oslo: Universitets-Forlaget. Beer, Bettina. 2003. Ethnos, ethnie, kultur. In Ethnologie. 5th ed., eds. Hans Fischer and Bettina Beer. Berlin: Reimer. Bernard, H. Russell. 2006. Research methods in anthropology. 4th ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The symbolic construction of community. London and New York: Routledge. Coulter, Colin and Steve Coleman, eds. 2003. The end of Irish history? Critical refl ections on the Celtic Tiger. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. London and New York: Routledge. Dublin City Council. 2002. Dublin: A city of possibilities. What kind of city will we make? DCDB strategy 2002–2012. Dublin: Dublin City Development Board. . 2005. Dublin city development plan 2005–2011. Accessed 14 September 2009. . 2009. Affordable housing (brochure). Accessed 14 September 2009. Dublin Docklands Development Authority. 1997. Master plan. Dublin: Dublin Docklands Delveopment Authority. . 2008. 6th report of the Annual Dublin Docklands Social Regeneration Conference 2008. Dublin: Dublin Docklands Delveopment Authority. Gilligan, H.A. 1989. A history of the Port of Dublin. 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Haase, Trutz. 2008. The changing face of Dublin inner city. A study commissioned by the Dublin Inner City Partnership. Dublin: Dublin Inner City Partnership. Hillery, G. 1955. Defi nitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural Sociology 20(2): 116–131. Hook and McDonald. 2006. Price list August 2006 (copied leaflet). Malone, Patrick. 1993. The difficulty of assessment: A case study of the Custom House Docks, Dublin. In Urban waterside regeneration: Problems and prospects, eds. K.N. White, E.G. Bellinger, A.J. Saul, M. Synes, and K. Hendry. New York: Ellis Horwood. . 1996. Dublin: Motive, image and reality in the Custom House Docks. In City, capital and water, ed. Patrick Malone. London and New York: Routledge. McDonald, Frank. 2000. The construction of Dublin. Kinsale, Ireland: Gandon Editions. Moore, Niamh. 2008. Dublin docklands reinvented. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Rapport, Nigel. 1998. Community. In Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology, 3rd ed., eds. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer. London and New York: Routledge.

Dockland Regeneration, Community, and Social Organization 73 Romney, A.K., S.C. Weller, and W.H. Batchelder. 1986. Culture as consensus: A theory of culture and informant accuracy. American Anthropologist 88:313– 338. Schnegg, Michael and Hartmut Lang. 2008. Die Analyse kultureller Domänen. Methoden der Ethnographie 3. Accessed 14 September 2009. Schubert, Dirk. 2001. Revitalisierung von (brachgefallenen) Hafen- und Uferzonen, Anlässe, Ziele, Ergebnisse sowie Forschungsansätze und -defizite. In Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel: Analysen und Planungen zur Revitalisierung der Waterfront in Hafenstädten, ed. Dirk Schubert. Berlin: Leue. . 2008. Transformation processes on waterfronts in seaport cities: Causes and trends between divergence and convergence. In Port cities as areas of transition: Ethnographic perspectives, eds. Waltraud Kokot, Mijal Gandelsman-Trier, Kathrin Wildner, and Astrid Wonneberger. Bielefeld: Transcript. Seymour-Smith, Charlotte. 1986. Macmillan dictionary of anthropology. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. St. Andrew’s Heritage Project. 2003. Dublin’s diving bell: A history. Dublin: St. Andrew’s Heritage Project. St. Andrew’s Resource Centre. 2003. Annual report 2003. Dublin: St. Andrew’s Heritage Project. Wellman, Barry and Barry Leighton. 1979. Networks, neighborhoods, and communities: Approaches to the study of the community question. Urban Affairs Quarterly 14(3): 363–390. Welz, Gisela. 1991. Sozial interpretierte Räume, räumlich defi nierte Gruppen: Die Abgrenzung von Untersuchungseinheiten in der amerikanischen Stadtforschung. In Ethnologische Stadtforschung: Eine Einführung, eds. Waltraud Kokot and Bettina Bommer. Berlin: Reimer. Winthrop, Robert H. 1991. Dictionary of concepts in cultural anthropology. New York: Greenwood Press. Wonneberger, Astrid. 2005. Vom Schmuddelimage zur Weltstadt: Bilder der Stadt Dublin im Kontext der Hafenranderneuerung. Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte (IMS) 1:18–25. . 2006. ‘Hard times they were but we survived’: Urbane Lebensstrategien in den Dubliner Hafenvierteln in den 1920er bis 1960er Jahren. Ethnoscripts 8(1): 7–21. . 2008. Notions of community, locality and changing space in the Dublin Docklands. In Port cities as areas of transition: Ethnographic perspectives, eds. Waltraud Kokot, Mijal Gandelsman-Trier, Kathrin Wildner, and Astrid Wonneberger. Bielefeld: Transcript. . 2009. Living in a village within the city: Social networks in the Dublin docklands. In Networks, resources and economic action: Ethnographic case studies in honor of Hartmut Lang, eds. Clemens Greiner and Waltraud Kokot. Berlin: Reimer.

4

Waterfront Revitalizations From a Local to a Regional Perspective in London, Barcelona, Rotterdam, and Hamburg Dirk Schubert1

The process of transforming ports and waterfronts has been intimately connected with world-wide economic restructuring, technological change in shipping and cargo handling facilities, and competition among cities in a global hierarchy. During the late 1960s, as economic production systems became organized at a global scale and containerization and other major technological innovations began to take hold, ports moved seawards away from the city centre (Hoyle 1989). And with this move, the close functional and spatial relationship between ports and cities began to break down. More recently, advanced port logistics and trans-shipment of goods in containers have rationalized handling activities and the spatial relocation of functions formerly linked to the harbour (Witthöft 2000; Löbe 1979). With these changes, the interfaces between ports and cities continue to show significant new land-use activities and building stock. I have called these recent tendencies a change “from ships to chips” (Schubert 2001, 131)—that is, a transformation of waterfronts from an era in which the movement of goods and cargo by water was central to one in which globalized information processing economies play an increasingly important role in determining spatial patterns of activities. This chapter focuses on identifying recent trends in waterfront development in four major port cities. Waterfront ‘regeneration’ started in North America about fifty years ago and has become a world-wide phenomenon; here a comparative perspective of four important European seaports is undertaken. Although there is a great diversity of projects, I identify a general shift from small-scale and project-oriented approaches to a regional perspective of waterfront transformation since the turn of the millennium. These changes in port cities are occurring at a rapid pace and almost faster than we can appraise or analyze. They are less the result of planning and design than the expression of social and economic processes at a global scale. At an urban level, discontinuity and inconsistencies are chief characteristics of ‘fractured’ cities with increasingly amorphous, unordered, and illogical accumulations of people, buildings, and the vast infrastructure networks of largely unseen pipes and cables that service them.

Waterfront Revitalizations 75 Geographer David Harvey’s contributions to our understanding of the dynamic processes of urban growth and decline have been extraordinarily widespread and important. His fundamental conceptualization of the politics of those dynamics is situated in the contradictions between capital in its mobile forms and capital in its immobile forms (see the Introduction in this volume; Cox 1998; Harvey 1985, 1982). ‘Fixity and flow’, a term that has been energized by Harvey’s conceptualization, indicates a spatial flow and movement of information, goods, capital, etc., on the one hand, that are in a contested relationship with more static elements such as the urban fabric and the built environment on the other. Port cities with their waterfronts provide a rich source for empirical case studies to explore this theoretical concept. Port cities are urban centres in which it is useful to distinguish between the port itself and the waterfront. Ports are vital economic enterprises, each having its own face, distinct character, and history. They have individual geographical conditions, technical possibilities, development paths, hinterland access, property ownership patterns, and constellations of interest groups (Schubert 2008). The port has specialized land uses; ferry ports, fisheries, shipbuilding, ship repairing, trans-shipment, seaport industries, navy, and military all have specific locational requirements and relate to their urban contexts in different ways. Waterfronts are places where incompatibilities become evident in succession struggles between industrialization, deindustrialization, and post-industrialization. Waterfronts provide spaces to advance processes of transforming cities toward a post-industrial society. They have many points of interaction with and accessibility to other parts of cities, are often hubs of local economies, and are important influences on socio-cultural changes and spatial restructuring processes. The current period of change is marked by spatial and social shifts from industrialization to knowledgebased economies and post-industrial society (Marshall 2001).

CYCLES OF TRANSFORMATION AND (RE)DEVELOPMENT The term ‘revitalization’ of ports and waterfronts has a range of meanings attached to diverse processes and planning directions. Port planners focus on internal port development measures such as the reorganization and relocation of container terminals, but urban planning is now concentrating on changing former port lands and economies to activities such as services, tourism, leisure, and housing. Terms like ‘quay’, ‘waterside’, and ‘embankment’ describe areas, buildings, and facilities formerly associated with ports. Revitalization, however, has no precise definition, but embraces a complex field of changing uses, rejuvenation and regeneration, redesign and remodeling, at the intersection of diverse interests that are connected at the interface of the city and the port. Derelict waterfront sites offer opportunities for new sustainable uses that no longer require sites close to the water. New waterfronts in particular

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mirror globalization processes and have become locations for work, housing, and recreation favoured by the “creative class” (Florida 2005; Peck 2005) in knowledge-based societies. As Landry (2008, xxix) notes, “[o]ften, these milieus were centred on redundant warehouses that had been turned into incubators for new companies”. Hence, the terms ‘revitalization’, ‘change of use’, and ‘development’ are often used synonymously. With the dereliction of port- and water-related industries new uses have been introduced that no longer require sites adjacent to the water. Apart from offices and mixed-use projects, housing was created through either the refurbishment of older buildings or the construction of entirely new buildings. Housing development catered, if possible, to a mix of different market segments. This appears to have a long-term stabilizing effect on other regeneration efforts along the waterfront because it provides a steady number of permanent residents and businesses are not forced to rely on special events that have a great deal of fluctuation depending on the season and numbers of visitors. Many restructured waterfronts were developed as recreational facilities with tourist attractions that draw in large visitor numbers. Over the past few decades of waterfront redevelopment, considerable experience, at a global scale, has been gained in dealing with particular difficulties in revitalization projects (Schubert 2007). Often the central waterfront areas with older and historically designated buildings, which are most attractive for developers and tourists, have been reused or redeveloped again and again. In some port cities, redevelopment has been completed and now other, more peripheral areas are eyed by developers. Often these new sites are larger, may be heavily contaminated, and have architecturally uninteresting buildings and poor public transportation facilities. The cycle of dereliction, neglect, planning, implementation, and revitalization of old harbour areas and the necessary construction of new port infrastructures are all influenced by a complex network of actors struggling to promote their interests. In port cities throughout the world, efforts are being made to adapt to structural changes in cargo handling, shipbuilding, and seaport industries, and the associated loss of employment. Such efforts have fallen under the rubric of revitalization projects, which attempt to exploit such structural changes in an attempt to modernize urban economies. A great variety of factors influence these projects, including the amount of land available, the condition of real estate markets, governance and planning cultures, the stage of the business cycle within which planning and implementation take place, and the institutional configuration of organizations undertaking the development projects (Breen and Rigby 1994, 1996: Bruttomesso 1999). I suggest that it is possible to see a general historical pattern in waterfront development that has the following stages: fi rst, dereliction and relocation of terminals and port uses; second, neglect of derelict areas; third, planning, concepts, and designs for former port areas; fourth, implementation and construction; and fifth, revitalization and enhancement of nearby waterfront areas. Generally, transformations began in the oldest parts of

Waterfront Revitalizations 77 the ports and cities with small projects such as converted warehouses and slowly moved to more peripheral areas that were redeveloped later. Within this general historical pattern, different generations can be distinguished among world-wide waterfront revitalization projects. The ‘fi rst generation’ of waterfront development projects emerged in the mid-1960s in North America cities where problems of derelict, underused port areas fi rst became apparent. These cities include Baltimore, Boston, and San Francisco. A ‘learning by doing’ or ‘project-led’ approach was frequently adopted in these cities. Tourist facilities, hotels, and offices were often the new uses constructed during this phase (Harvey 1990). A second generation of projects began at the start of the 1980s, when dramatic changes took hold as containerization technologies began to dominate shipping. These projects were generally larger in scale and replaced shipping-related land uses with a mix of offices and leisure facilities. This period was also characterized by weak planning and implementation regulation that often resulted in a sameness of sites from Sydney to Toronto. Similar architects, planners, and developers dominated the scene, and developments were repeatedly criticized for resembling a “ceramic curtain” (Israelson 1986, A1) that walled off the waterfront from the city. By the beginning of the 1990s, a third generation had evolved that adopted a different approach. In European seaport cities such as Oslo and Gothenburg, a participatory planning culture was used and the local population was integrated into the planning process. A step-by-step process involving design competitions and master plans was introduced to lead the way in restructuring former port areas. Events like the Olympics or cultural and leisure facilities such as aquariums or museums, such as in Bilbao, helped to promote development. At the beginning of the new millennium, a fourth generation of projects emerged. Private–public partnerships and professional planning management dominated global competition among waterfront revitalization projects. These projects were exploited for new city-marketing strategies that were founded on their unique seaport heritage. During this phase, luxury housing and mixed-used developments became more widespread. Although the boundaries between the four generations overlap, they still provide useful categories for different waterfront revitalization strategies. This chapter does not describe these generations in four important European seaport cities in detail. Although there is a great diversity of implementation, results, planning cultures, and future planning strategies in European seaport cities, similar development trends towards a more regional perspective of waterfront redevelopment have been noted during the last generation. The focus of this chapter is on this shift from smallscale and project-oriented conversions to a regional perspective of waterfront transformation, particularly in the recent period since about 2000. The chronological order in this contribution starts with London, the oldest and largest redevelopment project where the regional perspective has

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Table 4.1

Comparative Information on London, Barcelona, Rotterdam, and Hamburg

City/ Seaport

Containers Inhabitants Inhabitants of Handled (Twenty-Foot Start of of City Region Equivalent (Number) (Number) Project Units) 2008 (circa Year) 2008 2008

London

7,429,200

11,917,000

800,000

1981

Regional

Barcelona

1,578,546

4,233,638

2,610,037

1992

City

598,923

1,864,818

10,790,604

1993

Urban Region

1,777,373

4,266,000

9,889,792

1998

Part of City

Rotterdam Hamburg

Spatial Strategy (Territorial Dimension)

become an important and established aspect of waterfront development, and ends with Hamburg, a city that has adopted the latter generation.

LONDON: FROM DOCKLANDS TO THAMES GATEWAY—MORE BY FORTUNE THAN BY DESIGN? Although the importance of London’s port—unlike those of Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Barcelona—is now relatively insignificant in terms of the urban economy, its redevelopment into an office and residential district is the fi rst large-scale project of its kind in the United Kingdom and in Europe. North American examples like Baltimore and Boston provided general inspiration for the London Docklands, but regeneration in London occurred on a far larger scale (twenty-two square kilometres). In London, the oldest docks closed in the mid-1960s, bringing a dramatic shift from good times to hard times for local people. Within twenty years, the oncelargest port in the world had failed to meet the new challenges of transport technology (Edwards 1992). The relocation of the port resulted in more than eighty thousand jobs being lost in the East End of London between 1971 and 1991 (Foster 1999). But Margaret Thatcher had a vision: “The Docklands—an exceptional place” (in Lee 1992, 7). She and her advisers pursued a policy of free enterprise zones, and the fi rst to be established was in London Docklands. No taxes would be required to be paid for ten years, there were neither labour regulations nor planning restrictions, instead free business would reign for free entrepreneurs. Taking the ‘sledgehammer’ approach, Margaret Thatcher’s “flagship project” at Docklands and Canary Wharf was enforced in the “big bang” (Edwards 1992). The deregulation policies of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) caused a building boom, mainly in the Docklands core

Waterfront Revitalizations 79 zone, the enterprise zone around Canary Wharf (see Brownill, this volume). Urban development corporations had been established by the central government as ‘quangos’ (quasi-non-governmental organizations) to forestall protracted democratic decision-making and participation processes, and to accelerate decisions such as building permissions (Brownill 1993). Development at Docklands was mostly property- and office-led redevelopments, although some luxury housing was also built. The centre at Canary Wharf was built to challenge the financial hub in the City of London, several miles upstream. The project was implemented in the context of a new enterprise culture based on privatization, deregulation, neoliberalism, and marketization of activities. The elected local administrations were replaced by the LDDC. As then Secretary of State Michael Heseltine remarked, “[w]e took their powers away from them because they were making such a mess of it. They are the people who have got it all wrong. They had advisory committees, planning committees, inter-relating committees and even discussion committees—but nothing happened. . . . UDCs do things” (in Thornley 1991, 181; Heseltine 2000). Decision-making was not transparent and budget and decision processes remained secret. The policy of deregulation set into motion a rapid development process in the Docklands, but generated rapid change and a special fragmentation and polarization in the East End. Leverage-based planning was intended to speed up projects, and subsidies and/or tax relief were introduced to bring private capital, and its fi nancial leverage, into the development. Behind the rhetoric of the privatization of planning, a collaboration between developers and government liberalists took place. Canary Wharf was designed as the tallest building in Europe and it was the largest European construction site at that time. New construction methods were used and within a short time the building was ready for occupancy. The free enterprise zone and the policy of the LDDC left London a fragmented city. New office developments and luxury housing were put up next to old blocks of public housing. After a long dry spell, the bankruptcy of the developers Olympia and York (Stewart 1993), and a surplus of office space, it appeared that the crisis had passed and construction work continued. The LDDC presumed that within a period of twenty years almost one hundred thousand jobs would be created. For the ‘old’ citizens of Docklands this dream of new employment turned into a nightmare, as qualifications other than those they held were in demand (Foster 1999, 288). ‘New’ inequalities replaced ‘old’ ones. The long-term impact of the redevelopment of Docklands cannot (yet) be evaluated. The improvements in London’s East End and the effects of the Canary Wharf mega-project are Janus-faced (Brindley et al. 1996). New jobs were brought into the area, but not for the local people, leading to segregation and contradictions between old and new (Foster 1999). The number of inhabitants has nearly doubled between 1980 and 2004 (Greater London Authority 2004) and the social structure has become more diverse. Since then, the Docklands project has been incorporated in the Thames

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Gateway strategy, covering a much larger area that extends from the capital to the Channel. London probably represents the most spectacular transformation of a former port in Europe. A number of recent regeneration projects along the Thames are modeled on the concept of an ‘urban renaissance’. The redevelopment of Docklands has now been incorporated in the plans for the Olympics and the regional plans for the Thames Gateway, which envisions the entire corridor reaching as far as the Thames estuary to be a dynamic future development zone. Redevelopment at Docklands progressed from the west (town centre) to the east (periphery). What had started thirty years ago as an incremental approach, and was initially considered more of a ‘trial and error’ experiment, has since been integrated into urban development strategies by political changes and general planning policies, such as the London Plan (Figure 4.1). Small-scale fragmentation still bears witness to insufficiently coherent master-planning by the LDDC. Today, Canary Wharf has turned into a regional centre for London, with more new office buildings proposed or under construction. More than a decade ago, in 1998, the LDDC closed its doors. Meanwhile, a paradigm shift has taken place in the United Kingdom and in London, with a ‘return to planning’. The planning and redevelopment of London’s former port into the Docklands was and still is part of a rapid succession of political inconsistencies and associated changes in styles of planning and planning cultures. What had begun as top-down planning was replaced by a partnership approach and is now included in a regional

Figure 4.1 London, Docklands and Thames Gateway (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

Waterfront Revitalizations 81 sustainable strategy for social inclusion and proactive planning. One decisive factor for future development is the construction of transport infrastructure. Redefi ning and re-evaluating the image of the fi lthy harbour as a modern sub-centre of London by employing the appropriate marketing strategies has significantly altered the set of criteria in the long term. This ambivalence was summed up by Michael Hebbert (1998, 192): the outcome is “more by fortune than by design”. With New Labour coming to power in 1997, the establishment in 2000 of the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the rapidly devised London Plan have set off an astonishing paradigm shift (Travers 2001; Pimlott and Rao 2002). The implied strategic objectives for development are now aimed at both the growth of the economy (‘smart growth’) and the growth of London’s population, while straddling the primary goals of economic prosperity and improving local living conditions. The Blue Ribbon Network is a policy element of the London Plan promoting a variety of new riverside uses along the Thames, such as water-borne transport and tourism as well as new mixed communities (Davidson 2009). Existing sub-centres are intended to be expanded along the principles of decentralized concentration to counteract suburban sprawl. The London Plan, and with it the redesign of the Thames estuary, are to be integrated into regional planning, the regional development corridor Thames Gateway, and the southeast region, which comprises a circle of about eighty kilometres around London extending up to the mouth of the River Thames (Budd 2006). Thames Gateway claims to be Europe’s largest contemporary regional transformation program. The Thames estuary was particularly hard hit by deindustrialization, and more than four thousand hectares of brownfield sites are now awaiting new uses (Haughton, Rowe, and Hunter 1997). Approximately 1.6 million people live in this region. London’s growth is to be directed towards the estuary, where next the marshes and agricultural land, old industrial brownfields, will be redeveloped for housing (Keith 2009). Regional planning, which had become obsolete under the Conservative government, was reactivated in the mid-1990s with the introduction of the Regional Planning Guidance (RPG). The Thames Gateway London Partnership (TGLP), the East of England Development Agency (EEDA), and the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) have formed strategic partnerships to develop a long-term, twenty- to thirty-year vision for the Thames corridor; however, these agencies do not hold the necessary implementation powers. Estimates anticipate 100,000 jobs and 110,000 new homes in the area. Nature conservationists who value the Thames marshes as an ecosystem worthy of protection fear the impact of urban sprawl and excessive residential development. Within this urban regional development concept, Canary Wharf is only one important sub-centre among many in a polycentric structure comprising a patchwork of complexity and uniqueness. A lack of strategic urban regional planning policies under Conservative reign and the resulting fragmentation (Newman and Thornley 1997) in the absence of

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one responsible authority for the whole of London has left a hotchpotch of projects. The objective of current plans is to incorporate the entire region of the Thames estuary within one coherent plan and integrate sectoral plans into sustainable perspectives. What had started with the conversion of empty and derelict warehouses along the Thames east and south of the city of London by students and artists at the end of the 1960s went further with the Port of London Authority selling dock areas to private developers who converted the structures into spacious and expensive lofts and offices. The LDDC promoted the mega-structure at Canary Wharf, which during the mid-1980s was isolated and lacked adequate environment and traffic infrastructure. During the decade before the current fi nancial crisis a booming economy created a large demand for offices and housing, which has resulted in the formerly isolated and fragmented structures growing together, allowing them to be integrated into regionally oriented and more sustainable developments.

BARCELONA Catalonia’s capital is the second largest city in Spain, with a population of 1.5 million and a region of around 4.2 million—similar to Hamburg. But the port handles only approximately one-quarter of the containers of the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. In the mid-1980s, Barcelona experienced a remarkable boom. Without benefiting from the ‘capital city bonus’, Barcelona transformed from an industrial town into one of the most important cities for the service sector in the western Mediterranean region and one of the major destinations for city tourism. The city has rediscovered its maritime side after building numerous new parks and reclaiming its beaches, and now offers an exceptionally high quality of life for a large city (Meyer zum Alten Borgloh 2005). In 1986, Barcelona won the bid for the 1992 Olympic Games, which acted as a catalyst for urban transformation and simultaneously provided a stage for self-representation. This gave the city a contemporary image that helped to redefi ne its position on the map of increasing competition between cities. A new metropolitan self-conception emerged with the urban planning of Barcelona (Meyer 1999). The concept of a compact and mixed city (predominantly infill) was combined with large-scale urban development components. As in many other seaport cities, restructuring measures in Barcelona started in the oldest district close to the urban centre. Between the old town and the oldest part of the harbour, the fourteen-lane Passeig de Colom formed a large barrier. After port operations and trans-shipment had been relocated away from the piers and jetties adjacent to the city centre, the opportunity arose in the context of plans for the Olympics to convert the Moll de la Fusta, a heavily traffi cked route, into a promenade. The proposals envisaged the segregation of traffi c into a lower

Waterfront Revitalizations 83 level for through traffic for long-distance transport with multi-storey parking decks and bus and taxi lanes, and an upper level reserved for local traffic. An elevated viewing terrace with kiosks and a promenade formed the heart of the new scheme. The new Moll de la Fusta became a pedestrian area covering the traffic lanes and car park. A system of bridges and steps provided pedestrian links from the old town to the port. The development was the fi rst and most spectacular project of Barcelona’s opening towards the sea, which has since been followed by other projects in addition to the complete redevelopment of the old harbour Port Vell, which has included an aquarium, Rambla de Mar, IMAX-cinema, Palau del Mar, and the leisure centre Maremagnum with its myriad restaurants. This ‘island’ is reached via a footbridge in the south and has vehicular access through an underground car park in the north. The redevelopment of Port Vell sacrificed the area’s former harbour character in favour of consumerism, attracting predominantly international visitors. This ‘fun city’ was modeled on similar festival market places in the U.S. A busy promenade now leads from Placa Catalunya along the Ramblas to Port Vell. The construction of the World Trade Center, an office complex in the southern section of Port Vell, and a modern cruise and ferry terminal completed the reconstruction of the inner-city section of the harbour. The sometimes controversial, urban design–dominated debate surrounding Port Vell and single buildings near the city centre pushed other important regional redevelopments into the background (Busquets 2005). Commercial zones and cargo handling were relocated south, away from the centre, and together with the trade fair, wholesale markets, and the airport are now part of a logistics centre in the estuary of the River Llobregat. With good rail and road links between the port and airport, the intermodal trans-shipment hub for cars, oil, chemical products, and containers could not be better positioned. Redevelopment continued at the northern beachfront. Barceloneta, to the north of Port Vell, was included in the improvements. This is a densely built-up area of former fi shermen’s and dockers’ housing that was for a long time associated with crime and prostitution. The (partly) illegal shacks (chirinquitos) and fi sh stalls were replaced during the reorganization of the beach zone (Calbet 2006). The reasonably priced fi sh shops were driven out by a new ‘gentrified’ gastronomy. The marina at the Olympic Port further to the north is used to capacity, but the shops and restaurants around the harbour are not very busy. Access to Poblenou, located further inland, is not easy and links between the beach and residential and commercial areas are difficult due to heavy traffic on the coastal road. The redevelopment of the waterfront is paradigmatic of urban development policy in Barcelona. The perspective of ‘cleansing’ and ‘sanitizing’ combined with new attractive public spaces (‘positive metastases’) and so-called ‘acupunctures’ soon became a model for other European cities

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(Wüstenrot Stiftung 2008). The transformation is based on small-scale interventions and infi ll integrated into a long-term urban and regional development strategy. The focus has now shifted to brownfield sites in the ‘second row’. The Poblenou district (once called the Catalan Manchester) has become the location of high-tech enterprises. Its neglected and/or sub-optimally used areas and buildings have now been transformed into an innovation centre. The large site is subdivided into several blocks that extend from the inner city up to the northeastern districts. It is earmarked for redevelopment and improvements comprising single blocks and block clusters between the Rambla Prim in the north and Gran Via de les Corts Catalan in the west, the street Marita in the south and the sea in the east; the area is bisected by the Avinguda Diagonal. The alignment of the ring road is intended to reduce through traffic in Poblenou and reveal new development potentials. The privileged location opens special opportunities for redevelopment; from all parts of Poblenou the beach and the sea are within walking distance. The River Besos on the northern periphery of the city was renaturalized. The transformation of Barcelona’s waterfront ends exactly at the city boundary, where another large-scale project, the Forum 2004, has been completed. The large diagonal alignment (Diagonal Mar) through the chequer-board pattern of the Cerda Plan from 1859 has now been ‘fi nalized’ at the seafront and the Besos estuary. The new Forum Universel de les Cultures sub-centre, comprised of another marina, an amusement park, residential and office buildings, and hotels, forms the end point. In contrast to Port Vell, and perhaps because of its peripheral location, the development is less commercial and more culture-oriented. A five-kilometre-long promenade extends from Port Vell via the Olympic Port to the Forum Universel, drawing the city towards the sea. Water quality has significantly improved and Barcelona now advertises assets not commonly found in large cities— sun, sandy beaches, and the sea. The strategic decision to relocate port facilities and logistics infrastructure together, along the River Llobregat next to the airport south of the city centre, established new opportunities for the northern coastline with five kilometres of attractive urban beaches and several marinas (Figure 4.2). The structural change to service industries and knowledge-based economies forms the economic background of the urban redevelopment. Barcelona has strong historical design roots to build upon, from Ildefons Cerda to Antonio Gaudi. Being unique and distinctive was always a part of the Catalan identity in Spain (Landry 2006). With a string of new projects Barcelona has repositioned itself as an international location for post-industrial urban renewal (“city not suburb”) in the competition between cities (Marshall 2004, 19). The fostering of structural economic change through urban development policies sets an example for other regions and metropolitan areas. It attracts large-scale investment and is integrated in long-term innovative urban development policies.

Waterfront Revitalizations 85

Figure 4.2 Barcelona, Port Vell, Port Olympic, and Forum Universel de les Cultures (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

The regional and spatial redevelopment of Barcelona is part of a specific design culture that has architectural and design ambitions. The combination of urban design together with large events became a successful strategy for city marketing. Based on new management structures and a new urban regime that embraces a broad elite of social groupings, a private-sector-led style has emerged in urban governance. Commercial demeanor, economic approaches, and professional urban marketing of the “entrepreneurial city” (Harvey 1990) have produced a ‘Barcelona model’ in which Barcelona has gained location advantages in the exacerbated competition between cities. As the capital of Catalonia, Barcelona brings together diverging interests und unites them in larger regional goals. The ‘city between two rivers’ includes the whole urban waterfront. Smaller cities and villages north and south of Barcelona, altogether thirty-six municipalities with attractive beaches, marinas, and tourism facilities, are included in the Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona (PEMB) 2004 (Ajuntament de Barcelona 2004), which is intended to anticipate future changes and develop a strategic and sustainable perspective for the region with its coastline and amenities. ROTTERDAM—‘EUROPE’S PORT’ Rotterdam is Europe’s leading port. The city has a population of approximately six hundred thousand in a regional catchment area of about 1.2 million people. As the Netherlands is a relatively small nation with excellent

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transport connections, Rotterdam is easily accessible from all parts of the country. The city’s hinterland, of vital importance to the port, is matchless: 160 million people live within a radius of five hundred kilometres, comprised of the most important industrial centres of Europe, such as the German Ruhr area and the north Belgian economic region. The city was hard hit by the recession in the 1970s and, as a result, modernization policies were introduced under the rubric of a ‘New Rotterdam’, which, in addition to the traditional port activities, chemical industries, and refi neries, focused on building an economic cluster of logistics services. As in other seaport cities, the oldest sites in the inner-city harbour were the fi rst to fall derelict. The redevelopment of the Inner Harbour of Baltimore, Rotterdam’s twin city, with a festival market and tourist facilities, was the model for regeneration north of the River Maas. Maritime tourist attractions, the so-called ‘museum triangle’, offices, and housing for the upper-market segment were constructed. The intention of the project was to complete the city centre: “The idea is that the city centre should become a balanced mixture of residential, commercial, industrial, cultural and recreational functions” (Lettinga 1992). The problems that Rotterdam had to confront were mainly a lack of tourist attractions and the city’s negative image. By the late 1960s, it was already evident that Kop van Zuid, a historically important port area located south of the River Maas, was becoming obsolete. The port developed rapidly towards the sea and left behind derelict and sub-optimally used sites. The progress of the subsequent planning process can be structured in four phases: preparatory initiatives by the city; binding agreements; design phase; and implementation phase. A special organizational structure was set up for the management of the whole Kop van Zuid project. The Erasmus Bridge, leading from the heart of Rotterdam to the Kop van Zuid area, was completed in 1996. It was not only a project that improved the city’s transport infrastructure; it also provided a landmark and icon for the new district. Wilhelmina Pier is at the heart of the new district. The master plan, designed by Norman Foster in 1992, envisaged a skyline of skyscrapers, a ‘little Manhattan’ that was intended to bring a piece of New York to Rotterdam. The only structure reminiscent of the past is the former administration building of the Holland-America-Line (HAL), currently surrounded by a cluster of high-rise buildings. In the Entrepot area, immediately to the east of the old ‘five continents’ warehouses, some cranes have been retained and the dock now serves as a marina. New lofts and residential dwellings have been constructed as part of the project’s target to improve local living conditions south of the Maas. According to the plan, high-income earners, mainly older citizens whose children have moved out and who want to move back to the city centre, were targeted and appropriate housing provided to counteract suburbanization. New offices have been built to extend the

Waterfront Revitalizations 87 range of available accommodation and to establish new office locations on the waterfront. The construction of Kop van Zuid was scheduled to take fifteen years. Special focus was placed on the early completion of infrastructure measures because the south of Rotterdam had been disadvantaged in this respect. The Erasmus Bridge, a metro station, and the tram line have provided excellent transport connections. The choice of internationally known architects and renowned developers are intended to further promote the exclusive image of Kop van Zuid. The step-by-step redevelopment of older harbour sites was carried out in conjunction with the construction of new port terminals in the Maas estuary (Figure 4.3). In 2009, the construction of Maasvlakte 2 began. The project is partly fi nanced by private investors, but larger parts are fi nanced by the central government, which has jurisdiction over the project. The new port and industrial areas comprise approximately one thousand hectares, including waterfront locations with twenty-metre water depths for seagoing vessels abutting the existing Maasvlakte in the southwest. Land reclamation measures have extended the area of the port by 20 percent. Five ministries, the province of South Holland, Rotterdam City, and the municipality are all involved in the 730-hectare ‘Rotterdam Mainport Development Project’. The Port of Rotterdam manages construction work, the Rotterdam municipality oversees integration into the existing port and industrial areas, and the province is responsible for mitigation measures.

Figure 4.3 Rotterdam, Kop van Zuid, Stadshaven, and Maasvlakte 2 (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

88 Dirk Schubert Before the completion of the Kop van Zuid project, the next steps for redevelopment had already been prepared. The Stadshaven is a former harbour area to the west of Delfshaven, to the north of the Maas, and south of the Rijnhaven and Maashaven. The site includes the Merwehaven, Vierhavens, Waalhavens, and Eemhaven, in a total area of approximately fifteen hundred hectares. In 2005, the area was home to 850 companies with around twenty thousand employees and two thousand inhabitants (mainly in Heijplaat garden city). The potential of and planning requirements for the redevelopment of this harbour area were recognized early. This meant that existing fi rms were offered relocation sites and the full potential of the future urban developments was simultaneously exploited. For enterprises that depended on waterfront locations, ways to safeguard this requirement were worked out or relocation alternatives found. Maasvlakte 2 is a large, new, artificially raised area of land under construction at the mouth of the River Maas. Trans-shipment companies looking for expansion sites with access to water depths for seagoing vessels were offered new locations about thirty kilometres from their present location. Companies that wanted to expand or modernize their enterprises in the area of Stadshaven—whose business often relied on this location—were grouped together in zones, where possible. The intention was to create a spatial division of labour: small ships, feeders (short-sea shipping), and commerce with urban connections would remain at Stadshaven, whereas larger ships and international shipping companies as well as port and terminal operators would be located at Maasvlakte 2. Over the next several decades, this reorganization is intended to create the potential for roughly ten thousand jobs as well as ten to fi fteen thousand residential units, in addition to providing parks and infrastructure projects in the area. To oversee long-term planning, the Rotterdam City Ports Development Corporation (RCDC) was established in 2004, incorporating both the City of Rotterdam and the Rotterdam Port. The task of RCDC is “to direct and realise the transformation of CityPorts into a sustainable combination of port functions, city functions and living functions” in conjunction with the aim “to interrelate the actors, not only the port and city, but also private companies, knowledge institutes and inhabitants”, which is formulated in the Development Strategy Consultation Document of Stadshaven Rotterdam (in Van Gils and Daamen 2006, 6). The RCDC is intended to be the driver of continuing redevelopment and to coordinate short-, medium-, and long-term perspectives. In the meantime, the Kop van Zuid project has encountered diffi culties. The Netherlands’ spatial planning ministry intervened to evaluate whether the project should be put on the list of key national projects. This, however, jeopardized the construction of Maasvlakte 2. Additionally, the concurrent privatization of the Rotterdam Municipal Port

Waterfront Revitalizations 89 Company (RMPC) into the Port of Rotterdam Authority (Ltd.) (PRA) created a new set of interests. The delay of the construction of Maasvlakte 2 necessitated a reorganization of priorities. A compromise, the North-South Deal of 2006, envisaged the area north of the Maas to be redeveloped as intended, while in the southern areas—except for the redevelopment of the RDM site, which had already started—port-related uses would be strengthened and secured (Van Gils and Daamen 2006). This development strategy is embedded in the port development plan Port Vision 2020, the Plan Rotterdam Region 2020, and the national spatial planning policies (RR2020). Rotterdam is looking to make a name for itself as a modern open metropolis. Urban redevelopment projects have been cleverly integrated into the city’s marketing strategy, which is evident in the titles of publications such as “Rotterdam, The Dynamic City”, “Rotterdam, City in Motion”, “Rotterdam, A City That Will Never be Finished”, or “Gateway to Europe” (Maandag 2001). The redesign of the interface between water and land at the harbour is of special significance. The objective is to merge maritime history, the present, and the future into a new synthesis. The perception of the Maas River as a barrier is also expected to diminish in the minds of the citizens, allowing the future city centre to develop on both sides of the river. The ‘City Vision 2030’ plan places the strategic focus of urban development on so-called ‘Very Important Projects’ sites. Redevelopment of the former port areas in Rotterdam began with remarkable housing projects and restaurants north of the Maas. The process continued with large-scale redevelopment and high-rise architecture, which have now moved the Maas into the centre of the city. The logical extension is to concurrently discontinue and change the use at Stadshaven while expanding the port at Maasvlakte 2. These plans are part of an urban regional and national strategy that prioritizes or even subsidizes such large-scale projects. The projects in Rotterdam are embedded in an anticipatory long-term spatial planning strategy that seeks to integrate urban and port development policies. Sectoral and horizontal levels of policy and administration are included in the plans.

HAMBURG—FROM “STRING OF PEARLS” TO “LEAP ACROSS THE ELBE” Hamburg is the site of Europe’s second largest port and has a population that is similar to that of the Barcelona region and about one-third of the London region. Hamburg is a tidal seaport city on the estuary of the River Elbe, one hundred kilometres upstream from the North Sea. Its specific topography is shaped by the confluence of the smaller River Alster and its tributaries into the Elbe. The city is characterized by the centrally located Lake Alster and the port and ocean liners on the Elbe. Germany has a

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rather short coastline and its few ports, particularly that of Hamburg, serve a gateway function to the country’s large hinterland. After the end of the Cold War, Hamburg regained its central position as the most eastern port on the North Sea and as a gateway to the Baltic Sea. Most of the port is owned by the city of Hamburg and is governed by the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA). The port is perceived as part of the urban infrastructure, and capital investments in quays and harbour basins and the maintenance and dredging of the shipping channel as important transactions are accounted for in the city’s budget. The waterfront along the northern shore of the Elbe, with splendid views of the shipyards and ocean liners, plays a special role in Hamburg. As in other seaport cities, facilities and infrastructures from the mid-nineteenth century near the city centre became vacant or underused in the 1980s, and the port moved seawards where new container terminals were built. When the waterfront’s port-related activities declined, public attention became increasingly focused on new uses. In the early 1980s, the northern shore of the Elbe comprised a heterogeneous mix of land uses with buildings dating from the mid-nineteenth century through to the post-war period. The idea of upgrading this waterfront area created high expectations. New uses had to be found, identification points created, and attractions for citizens, visitors, and tourists established. Revitalizing measures on the waterfront were expected to have a positive impact on the city. The best locations were presented to companies and investors looking for new sites. A catchy name was found for the site between Neumühlen and the Speicherstadt: ‘String of Pearls’. It was assumed that applying a coherent strategy for the whole area would be difficult, but that a string of spectacular projects based on a market-led approach would generate sufficient interest to increase land values in order to upgrade the area. Since then, a number of new buildings and conversions of older warehouses have significantly gentrified the area along the northern Elbe bank. The long periods of time that have passed between the dereliction of riverfront sites to the required survey, design, and implementation work have different causes specific to each project (Schubert and Harms 1993). The implementation process for these projects was not governed by planning requirements but by the availability of sites and the interest of developers as well as investment considerations that originated in different periods. The ‘String of Pearls’ slogan suggests that the concept was based on informed plans; however, it was not coined until the project was already underway. HafenCity differs from the ‘String of Pearls’ in that it is the most important urban redevelopment project in Hamburg—the most significant reclamation of the (outer) city centre for housing in Germany—and one of the largest projects of its kind in Europe. The HafenCity re-establishes the connection between the River Elbe and the city centre, giving Hamburg a new direction in which growth can occur: down to and along

Waterfront Revitalizations 91 the river. HafenCity extends from the Speicherstadt, the Warehouse District, to the Elbbrücken, the bridges across the river. For the fi rst time, a large area is being taken from the port and put to other uses. The existing site covers approximately 155 hectares of both old and new operational port facilities. It is surrounded by several neglected housing estates, the wholesale market, industry, port facilities, and railway lines. Hamburg has adopted a plan-led, mixed-use approach for HafenCity. Following a competition for a master plan, specific districts were designed with a focus on offices, housing, shopping, and recreation. In a way, HafenCity is a latecomer project, where planners tried to avoid the mistakes of other waterfront revitalization projects, such as London Docklands. Approximately fi fty-five hundred apartments for ten to twelve thousand inhabitants were planned (Bodemann 2007, 102), with projections for required social infrastructure, such as schools and community centres, based on these figures. The area is within the Elbe flood-plain, making built and organizational solutions for the protection of people and buildings indispensable. The master plan specifies the phased implementation of developments in sub-districts. It lays down the principal development sequence from west to east, avoiding uncontrolled construction activity throughout the development area. A zoning plan for HafenCity’s fi rst phase was drawn up in 2000 and land sales started in 2001. A development agency was created in 2002 and the fi rst buildings completed by 2004. The newly founded GHS (Gesellschaft für Hafen- und Stadtentwicklung GmbH, later HafenCity GmbH) is responsible for the area and the implementation of its projects. This typical quango was set up in order to hasten development, and it soon owned most of the land. Hamburg’s state government fosters opportunities for growth in Hamburg and its metropolitan region (‘Metropolis Hamburg—a Growing City’), with HafenCity as its fl agship project. In 2006, plans for the future centre of HafenCity (Überseequartier) were fi nalized. Construction of the characteristic mixed-use development began in 2007, starting with a new metro line. In 2004, a temporary cruise terminal received its fi rst passengers at Hamburg. In 2008, the Maritime Museum was opened in warehouse district Speicher B. Most spectacular is the concert hall project (Elbphilharmonie) on top of Speicher A. The landmark project will be completed by 2011, but has already attracted a good deal of international attention. A new strategy was started with a more regional perspective: ‘Leap across the Elbe’. Wilhelmsburg, an island in the Elbe, is the centre of a large-scale urban redevelopment strategy for improving housing and living conditions within the area (Figure 4.4). The International Building Exhibition (IBA) and International Garden Show (IGS) will be held at Wilhelmsburg in 2013, which are both intended to speed up regeneration.

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Figure 4.4 Hamburg: “String of Pearls”, HafenCity, and “Leap across the Elbe” (Map D. Schubert, based on GfK RegiogGraph Analyse Software, 2009).

Another development axis and urban connection is planned from the city centre via HafenCity across the Elbe to Wilhelmsburg and Harburg Riverport. Wilhelmsburg will become the focus of iconic urban design projects and, rather than continuing to bear the burden of urban development, the area will be enhanced with new sites between the rivers Norderelbe and Süderelbe. Between these poles and bridge-heads, Wilhelmsburg Mitte is expected to develop into a new centre. But most importantly, the Reiherstieg, canals, and the watercourses in Wilhelmsburg are expected to become its new ‘life veins’. In the context of the politically key concept ‘Metropolis Hamburg— Growing City’, the plan to ‘Leap across the Elbe’ takes on a central role. For more than sixty years, the proposition of Hamburg’s chief planner, Fritz Schumacher, had been followed; to allocate sites for housing on the higher grounds of the geest and port-related or industrial uses on lowerground marshland. This paradigm had defi ned Wilhelmsburg as a place for port extensions and industrialization prior to the Greater Hamburg Act of 1937 (Groß-Hamburg-Gesetz 1937). The ‘Leap across the Elbe’, however, has complemented the traditional east–west urban development axis along the Elbe with a new north–south axis. Stretches along Reiherstieg and the southern banks of the Norderelbe are still mainly occupied by port-related and industrial uses, while the eastern side has a range of different residential neighbourhoods. Flood control structures and noisy transport arteries crossing Wilhelmsburg lend it the character of a transit space. Confl icts between port uses, new terminals,

Waterfront Revitalizations 93 the relocation of the dock railway, the cross-harbour link (Hafenquerspange), and new residential areas are inevitable. It is assumed that the Leap across the Elbe is a task that will span one century, occupying at least two generations. Plans for the transformation of derelict waterfront sites in Hamburg started with a project- and architecture-led incremental approach along the northern river-bank. Confl icts arising between urban and port development have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis by authorities and stakeholders. Rapid implementation of building projects has been the prime goal. HafenCity implied a jump in scale and a more complex implementation strategy, formulated with a single developer and embedded in urban perspectives of inner-city development. The implementation phase was predicted to last about twenty years. The Leap across the Elbe, on the other hand, reorganized urban perspectives for the entire city. The geographical centre of Hamburg will be moved to a new location by means of a diverse range of projects and plans that are part of a long-term strategy. Initially, the existing building stock will be selectively enhanced and distinct innovative projects incorporated into an overall urban design concept that will restructure the interface between port and city.

CONCLUSION When discussions began more than thirty years ago about the redevelopment of derelict and sub-optimally used harbour sites, it was assumed that this would be a specific and unique planning task. Using experiences from Boston and Baltimore, the new post-industrial waterfront was embedded in plans to reinvent urban images. The waterfront became the particular place where the transformation from the fordist industrial city to the post-industrial and science-based city could be accomplished—that is, the place where a shift ‘from ships to chips’ could occur. Baltimore’s Harborplace, where developer James Rouse launched the idea of ‘festival marketplaces’ in 1979, was seen as a model (Keith 2005) for the “global prototype of waterfront regeneration” (Ward 2002, 342). In the 1980s, European inexperience with waterfront redevelopment, unclear designation of responsibility, negative urban images, and the desire for new land uses allowed so-called ‘pioneers’ to exploit development niches for their own purposes. This was soon followed by the redevelopment of individual warehouses and the conversion of industrial heritage sites into lofts and expensive private apartments. It soon became clear that standardized regeneration models were not delivering the best local solutions. The partly monofunctional and small-scale approach to redevelopment of central port and derelict waterfront sites became integrated into large-scale strategic perspectives. Waterfront sites have become the sites for important components in larger comprehensive urban and regional concepts. The examples discussed in this chapter illustrate this

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point. Although waterfronts in Europe are important elements for urban redevelopment and provide unique images for urban marketing, they are now often integrated into sustainable medium-term and long-term regeneration efforts, together with other brownfields, transportation, and landscape planning projects. The distribution of resources and power between terminal operators and logistics enterprises as ‘global players’ and the cities and ports as ‘local actors’ has become more and more uneven. While the attention of large logistics companies is increasingly concentrated on investment returns and global optimization strategies, seaport cities must consider local medium- to long-term perspectives for the development of their ports and urban areas. Today, the flow of goods is managed from business locations far from the ports. Important terminal operators such as the Port of Singapore (PSA) or Dubai Ports World act globally with a focus on horizontal and vertical integration, offering their customers bespoke logistics services. The role of global terminal operators has signifi cantly increased in the past several years (Juhel 2001), which has led to more short-sea transport being handled in terminals that are also owned by the shipping companies. The postulate to stop thinking in terms of ‘city or port’, but rather of ‘city and port’, incorporating aspects of sectoral and comprehensive regional planning, collides with a harsh reality. Merging the terms competition and cooperation into ‘co-option’, an artificial expression that implies overcoming contestation and confl ict, signifies a joint approach that is, however, largely wishful thinking. Romantic and nostalgic views will be left behind as the planning of cities and ports increasingly follows different development parameters. Future development in coastal regions and seaport cities is thus dependent on the interaction and development of the global economy, transport and shipbuilding, nature and the environment, as well as climate change and the interests of citizens. The confl icts of interest in coastal regions are similar all over the world—amplified by global development trends in the field of logistics—and are expected by many experts to increase rather than lessen in the future. Architects’ visions and the covetousness of the real estate industry and urban developers, encouraged by the media to convert harbour and waterfront sites into promenades and attractive housing, offices, and cultural facilities, clash with the requirements of port logistics and economies (Gordon 1998). The largely automated terminal operation and the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code have made ports into high-security zones, strictly controlled and with limited access. This in turn implies the reversal of centuries of development: cities need their ports, but modern container ports no longer need cities, their outdated structure having become a hindrance to future development. The perception of port cities as one organizational and spatial unit consisting of city and port is replaced through decoupling and spatial specialization.

Waterfront Revitalizations 95 The fl agship projects described in this chapter are the mega-projects of Europe. They were, and still are, an integral part of their respective national planning cultures, urban regional housing and office markets, and globally established real estate and project management structures. At the same time they document the changing perspective of European urban development from monocentric to polycentric or regional cities (Salet 2008). Although ambivalence, fragmentation, and social polarization continue to be significant on a small scale, they are embedded in larger spatial contexts. This new strategic orientation can be identified by the status attached to the projects: they are no longer locally led, but rather region-led or government-led. Spatial planning has thus increased in significance. Although city marketing is primarily concerned with landmark projects by ‘star’ architects, they are now nothing more than important components within the whole city. The implementation of integrated and sustainable regional and spatial planning policies is linked to different political traditions and planning cultures in Europe. The countries that have anticipated increasing competition between seaport cities and, in response, adopted forwardlooking regional strategies and new governance structures involving the relevant private and public stakeholders will succeed in the long term.

NOTES 1. The author would like to thank Frank Rogge for assistance with the maps.

REFERENCES Ajuntament de Barcelona. 2004. Pla estratègic metropolità de Barcelona. Barcelona: Els monogràfics. Bodemann, Uwe. 2007. HafenCity Hamburg—Anlass, Masterplan, Chancen. In Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel: Analysen und Planungen zur Revitalisierung der Waterfront in Hafenstädten (2nd ed.), ed. Dirk Schubert. Berlin: Leue. Breen, Ann and Dick Rigby. 1994. Waterfronts: Cities reclaim their edge. New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC: McGraw-Hill. . 1996. The new waterfront: A worldwide urban success story. London: Thames and Hudson. Brindley, Tim, Yvonne Rydin, and Gerry Stoker. 1996. Remaking planning: The politics of urban change. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Brownill, Sue. 1993. Developing London’s docklands: Another great planning disaster? London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Bruttomesso, Rinio. 1999. The maturity of the waterfront: What outcomes and prospects, after thirty years of projects and work? Venice: Marsilio. Budd, Leslie. 2006. London: From city-state to city-region? In The rise of the English regions?, eds. Irine Hardell, Paul Benneworth, Mark Baker, and Leslie Budd. London and New York: Routledge. Busquets, Joan. 2005. Barcelona: The urban evolution of a compact city. Rovereto: Nicolodi.

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Calbet, I.E.L. 2006. Avantgarde des Stadtumbaus? Neueste Projekte aus Barcelona. Die Alte Stadt 33(4): 364–379. Cox, Kevin. 1998. Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for local politics. Political Geography 17(1): 1–23. Davidson, Mark. 2009. London’s Blue Ribbon Network: Riverside renaissance along the Thames. In Regenerating London: Governance, sustainability and community in a global city, eds. Rob Imrie, Loretta Lees, and Mike Raco. London: Routledge. Edwards, Brian. 1992. London Docklands: Urban design in an age of deregulation. Oxford: Butterworth Architecture. Florida, Richard. 2005. Cities and the creative class. New York: Routledge. Foster, Janet. 1999. Docklands: Cultures in confl ict, worlds in collision. London: UCL Press. Gordon, David. 1998. Different views from the water’s edge. Town Planning Review 69(1): 91–97. Greater London Authority. 2004. London Thames gateway development and investment framework. London: GLA. Harvey. David. 1982. The limits to capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1985. The urbanization of capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1990. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Haughton, Graham, Ian Rowe, and Colin Hunter. 1997. The Thames gateway and re-emergence of regional strategic planning. Town Planning Review 68(4): 407–422. Hebbert, Michael. 1998. London: More by fortune than by design. Chichester, New York, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, and Toronto: John Wiley and Sons. Heseltine, Michael. 2000. Life in the jungle: My autobiography. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hoyle, Brian S. 1989. The port–city interface: Trends, problems and examples. Geoforum 4:429–435. Israelson, D. 1986. Harbourfront park lost in the development highrise, critics say. Toronto Star, 15 December, A1. Juhel, Mark H. 2001. Globalisation, privatisation and restructuring of ports. International Journal of Maritime Economics 3:139–174. Keith, Michael. 2009. Figuring city change: Understanding urban regeneration and Britain’s Thames Gateway. In Regenerating London: Governance, sustainability and community in a global city, eds. Rob Imrie, Loretta Lees, and Mike Raco. London: Routledge. Keith, Robert C. 2005. Baltimore harbor: A pictorial history. 3rd ed. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Landry, Charles. 2006. The art of city making. London: Earthscan. Lee, R. 1992. London Docklands: The ‘exceptional place’? An economic geography of inter-urban competition. In London Docklands: The challenge of development, ed. Philip Ogden. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lettinga, G. F. 1992. The development of Waterstad, Rotterdam’s waterfront area. Lecture. Löbe, K. 1979. Metropolen der Meere. Entwicklung und Bedeutung großer Seehäfen. Düsseldorf and Vienna: Econ Verlag. Maandag, B. 2001. Rotterdam hoogbowstadt. Rotterdam: Dienst Stedebouw + Volkshuisvesting. Marshall, Richard, ed. 2001. Waterfronts in post-industrial cities. London and New York: Spon.

Waterfront Revitalizations 97 Marshall, Tim, ed. 2004. Transforming Barcelona. London: Routledge. Meyer, Han. 1999. City and port: Transformation of port cities. London, Barcelona, New York, and Rotterdam: International Books. Meyer zum Alten Borgloh, C. 2005. Renaissance der Stadtentwicklungsplanung? Die strategische Entwicklungsplanung untersucht in den europäischen Dienstleistungsmetropolen Barcelona und Frankfurt/Main. Dortmund: Institut für Raumplanung. Newman, Peter and Andy Thornley. 1997. Fragmentation and centralisation in the governance of London: Influencing the urban policy and planning agenda. Urban Studies 34:967–988. Peck, Jamie. 2005. Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4): 740–770. Pimlott, Ben and Nirmala Rao. 2002. Governing London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salet, Willem. 2008. Rethinking urban projects: Experiences in Europe. Urban Studies 45(11): 2343–2363. Schubert, Dirk. 2001. Festival Market Places als Revitalisierungsstrategie für brach gefallene Hafen- und Uferzonen in den USA. Die alte Stadt: Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Stadtgeschichte, Stadtsoziologie und Denkmalpfl ege 2:130–154. . 2007. Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel, Analysen und Planungen zur Revitalisierung der Waterfront in Hafenstädten. 3rd ed. Berlin: Leue. . 2008. Transformation processes on waterfronts in seaport cities: Causes and trends between divergence and convergence. In Port cities as areas of transition: Ethnographic perspectives, eds. Waltraud Kokot, Mijal Gandelsman-Trier, Kathrin Wildner, and Astrid Wonneberger. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schubert, Dirk and Hans Harms. 1993. Wohnen am Hafen. Leben und Arbeiten an der Wasserkante; Stadtgeschichte. Gegenwart. Zukunft. Das Beispiel Hamburg. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag. Stewart, William. 1993. Too big to fail: The amazing account of the Reichmann family fortunes. Olympia & York: The story behind the headlines. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc. Thornley, Andy. 1991. Urban planning under Thatcherism. Oxford: Routledge. Travers, Tony. 2001. The years of borough government: 1968 to 2000. London Journal 26(1): 69–80. Van Gils, Marcel and Tom Daamen. 2006. Complexity in decision-making in ‘cityports’: A management illustration. Paper delivered at the Tenth International Conference of Cities and Ports, International Association of Cities and Ports. Sydney, Australia. Ward, S.V. 2002. Planning the twentieth-century city: The advanced capitalist world. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Witthöft, H.J. 2000. Container: eine Kiste macht Revolution. Hamburg: Koehler. Wüstenrot Stiftung, H.G. 2008. Johann Jessen, Ute Margarete Meyer, Joachim Schneider, stadtmachen.eu. Urbanität und Planungskultur in Europa. Stuttgart: Karl Krämer.

Part II

Global and Local Dynamics on the Waterfront

5

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility Lessons from Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct Debate Kevin Ramsey1

Urban waterfronts are key sites in struggles over economic and cultural transformation in cities. As urban leaders search for ways to increase their city’s competitiveness for increasingly mobile jobs, skilled workers, and capital investment in a globalizing economy, formerly industrial or maritime-oriented waterfronts are assigned new economic value as spectacular opportunities for spurring urban renewal (Bunce and Desfor 2007; Hagerman 2007). However, despite the striking homogeneity of downtown waterfront revitalization schemes (such as the tourist- and retail-oriented ‘festival markets’ first developed in Boston and Baltimore and then exported to cities around the world), waterfronts are not blank slates waiting for inspired new urban designs. Rather, they are the product of historic fixities and flows that connect the city to globalizing networks of capital, goods, people, and ideas. As such, waterfront revitalization is more than simply a matter of rezoning parcels, building new public attractions, and enticing developers. Rather, efforts to redevelop these waterfront spaces must always negotiate the patterns of urban social and economic life that have developed around the legacy of infrastructure that already connects and traverses waterfront spaces. Consequently, the politics of waterfront transformation do not merely concern how and by whom waterfront land is used. Rather, waterfront transformations reconfigure urban space in ways that often require surrounding residents and businesses to adopt new patterns of social and economic activity while letting go of old ones. This point is abundantly clear when it comes to transportation systems. Historically urban waterfronts were valued largely for the mobilities that they enabled (Klingle 2007). For example, protected harbours allow boats to safely dock for loading and unloading cargo, crew, and passengers. Flat shorelines and land alongside rivers serve as excellent railway corridors. Bridges are constructed to traverse waterways and thereby facilitate easy land-based travel. Cities grow up around these fixities and flows, and the patterns of (im)mobility urban waterfronts provide become materially, institutionally, and culturally entrenched. Infrastructure occupies space and must be continually maintained. Systems of government such as port authorities and transportation agencies regulate these flows and facilitate their predictability. People attach meaning and cultural significance to the mobilities provided by waterfronts, and can even regard these mobilities as inherent rights (Cresswell 2006).

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Revitalizing urban waterfronts necessarily requires transforming the kinds of mobilities that can take place on them. Indeed, restructuring mobilities can be thought of as the core act of urban waterfront redevelopment. For instance, industrial waterfronts are configured to efficiently move freight. The infrastructure necessary for doing this does not necessarily support walking, cycling, or personal automobile travel very well, if at all. Therefore, redevelopment that introduces new land uses to the waterfront, such as housing, retail, and tourist attractions, requires adapting infrastructure to support activities associated with these land uses: ambling pedestrians, sidewalk cafés, street performers, tour buses, sightseeing cruises, police surveillance, jogging, etc. The changes necessary to support these activities, such as wider sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and bike lanes, impact the historic flows of people, goods, and vehicles through that waterfront space and to locations further afield. Therefore, the conflicts that emerge during waterfront redevelopment are not merely those between incompatible land uses, but rather between incompatible mobilities as well. A predominant theme in the literature on urban politics is conflict over places, their development, and the kinds of urban life they support (McCann 2002; Cox and McCarthy 1982). In recent years, scholars have called for explicit attention to the urban politics of mobility (Henderson 2004; Vigar 2002; Sheller and Urry 2000). This term refers to conflicts over the organization of urban space and the kinds of personal mobility that this organization should facilitate—such as walking, sitting, congregating, driving a car, moving freight, riding a bike, or taking public transit. Examining the politics of mobility is particularly relevant to the analysis of urban waterfront transformation. This is the case not simply because waterfronts have historically supported conflicting modes of transportation, but because debates over waterfront redevelopment often serve as flashpoints in broader disputes over urban economic and cultural transformation. In such debates, mobilities take on special meaning that cannot be disentangled from broader struggles regarding the proper role of the city in supporting existing lifestyles and cultivating new ones. Such politics are central to a debate in Seattle over the fate of an aging elevated waterfront highway known locally as the Alaskan Way Viaduct (the Viaduct). Damaged by an earthquake in 2001, the Viaduct was still in use in late 2009. The future of the Viaduct and waterfront has been the centre of an eight-year battle involving state and local elected officials, downtown retailers and property owners, nearby industrial businesses, environmentalists, and neighbourhood activists. Each party has advocated a different vision not only for the waterfront space itself, but for the kinds of mobility that should, or should not, be facilitated through that space. In investigating these politics of mobility, I employ Hajer’s (1995) concept of a “discourse coalition” to examine an informal alignment of environmental activists seeking the removal of the Viaduct, and advocates for downtown economic growth seeking a new tunneled highway. The discourse coalition concept is useful for analyzing the informal discursive alliance linking these two distinct and somewhat opposed

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 103 campaigns. A key element of their shared discourse is the notion that a Viaduct-free waterfront is a socially progressive, ‘win-win’ scenario that provides a space for all Seattleites and helps the city achieve collective social, economic, and environmental goals. I seek to demonstrate how this discourse coalition structured the public debate over how to replace the Viaduct in a way that marginalizes questions regarding the distributive impacts, costs, and benefits of waterfront transformation. This point is illustrated by an examination of a third campaign seeking to draw attention to the ‘class warfare’ inflicted by supporters of waterfront revitalization upon poor neighbourhoods, working-class residents, and industrial businesses. Despite the apparent overwhelming success of a campaign against a tunneled highway in shaping the outcome of a public advisory election on the matter, the storyline of class warfare was effectively eliminated from the narrative that emerged in the election’s aftermath. These findings are significant because they illuminate how environmental campaigns can be aligned with dominant economic agendas in the context of urban waterfront transformation. They also illustrate how debates over urban mobility can produce antagonisms that construct barriers to creative alliances between environmentalists and those seeking social justice in the city. This chapter begins by briefly introducing and contextualizing Seattle’s Viaduct debate, which is followed by a discussion of my conceptual approach and research methods. I then turn to an analysis of three storylines mobilized in the Alaskan Way Viaduct debate. Two of these storylines served to unite the discourse coalition between environmentalists and downtown economic growth advocates calling for waterfront ‘revitalization’, while the third storyline united activists concerned about the distributive costs and benefits of this vision for revitalization. I then discuss the implications of this discourse coalition for the prospects of a progressive urban politics of mobility. I conclude by describing how these fi ndings illuminate our understandings of the politics of urban waterfront transformation.

BACKGROUND: SEATTLE’S ALASKAN WAY VIADUCT DEBATE Built in 1951, the Alaskan Way Viaduct is a two-level elevated highway that runs for 3.4 kilometres along Seattle’s downtown waterfront (Figure 5.1). Over 110,000 vehicles travel the Viaduct each day—about 25 percent of the city’s north–south vehicular traffic. After an earthquake damaged the Viaduct in 2001, engineers declared that although it was safe enough to drive on, it was at significant risk of failure in the event of another earthquake. Official statements and media stories after the earthquake indicated broad consensus on the need to quickly replace the capacity of this ‘vital’ transportation corridor (Figure 5.2). Two ‘official’ options for replacing the Viaduct soon emerged: tunneling the highway underground or building an even larger stacked elevated highway. Later, an activist campaign promoted a third ‘surface/transit’ option. Table 5.1 compares these three alternatives.

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Table 5.1

Three Options Proposed for Replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct as of January 2007—All Options Include the Removal of the Current Viaduct and Development of New Bike Lanes and a Streetcar Line Tunnel

Elevated Highway

Surface/Transit

A larger six-lane A four-lane waterfront Description A four-lane cutboulevard that is connected and-cover tunnel, stacked elevated to the downtown street six-lane waterfront highway, parking boulevard, pedes- beneath highway, grid, expanded transit trian promenade, and four-lane sur- service, waterfront face street. promenade, shoreline and expanded ecological restoration. transit service. Cost

Estimated capacity

$3.4 billion

$2.8 billion

No cost estimate due to lack of study by state and local transportation agencies.

137,000

147,000

No capacity estimate. Activists claim that many discretionary car trips shift to transit, find new destinations, or ‘disappear’.

Source: The Seattle Channel (2009); FHA, WSDOT, and City of Seattle (2006); PWC (2006).

Figure 5.1 Alaskan Way Viaduct with downtown waterfront, sports stadiums, and Duwamish Industrial Area in the background (Photograph K. Ramsey).

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 105

Figure 5.2 Map of Alaskan Way Viaduct displayed with selected neighbourhoods, industrial areas, and port operations (Map K. Ramsey).

Within a few months the mayor began promoting a waterfront tunnel, touting the “golden opportunity” to create an “open, people-friendly waterfront, with housing and public green space in the heart of our city, and a faster, better transportation corridor running underground” (McGann 2001, B1). This vision was soon advocated by downtown business associations, nearby property owners, the Seattle City Council, and

106 Kevin Ramsey ‘arts and culture’ advocates. A key justifi cation for this vision was the economic development potential inherent in removing the elevated highway, in the form of increased waterfront property values, new property development, and increasing tax revenues for the city (Pascall 2006). This logic of spurring economic activity through the targeted provision of spectacular parks and civic infrastructure is in accord with a distinctly neoliberal economic development strategy observed in many Western cities (see, for example, Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002). The tunnel faced opposition from key players in the Washington state government who controlled much of the public money allocated for the project. In the face of declining federal transportation funding and the consequent devolution of fi nancial responsibility to state and local governments, the governor and state legislature supported a cheaper and faster solution: rebuilding a larger elevated highway on the waterfront. Supporting this position was a loose coalition of diverse actors united by a strong opposition to the city’s waterfront revitalization vision, including manufacturing, industrial, and maritime businesses, advocates for lowincome residents, and activists in neighbourhoods most dependent upon the highway for rapid automobile travel to and through downtown. While elected officials debated whether to build a tunnel or a larger elevated highway, a small grassroots movement emerged in opposition to any highway on the waterfront. These activists called for a ‘surface/ transit’ option that would replace the Viaduct with a four-lane boulevard and make improvements to the transit system and street grid. Such changes, they argued, would help bring about environmentally friendly transformations in the travel and lifestyle habits of Seattle residents. Initially labeled ‘idealistic’ by the mainstream media, this campaign steadily gained attention and support as the tunnel versus elevated debate dragged on. After more than six years of debate, the state legislature and governor threatened to move forward with building an elevated highway unless the issue was brought before Seattle voters. Therefore a non-binding public referendum was held in March 2007. With the tunnel option losing favour in the polls, the vast majority of donations from groups who had supported the tunnel flowed instead to a campaign against the elevated highway. The result of the election was decisive: 70 percent voted against the tunnel and 57 percent voted against the elevated highway. Local elected officials used these results to declare that an elevated highway was no longer politically viable in Seattle. As the mayor concluded on election night: “Voters said we do not want another freeway along our waterfront. They want us to fi nd a better answer” (Brunner, Garber, and Lindblom 2007, A1). Whether accurate or not, this claim was emblematic of a significant shift in discourse and politics that had already begun to take place.

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 107 EXAMINING THE POLITICS OF MOBILITY THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE My analysis of the Viaduct debate concerns the ways in which political actors employ language to make sense of and give meaning to the problems and opportunities posed by the damaged Viaduct. Replacing a major urban highway is fraught with social, economic, environmental, and political complexities. To make this kind of problem more manageable and understandable, political actors often develop and appeal to a familiar ‘storyline’ that connects disparate concerns to one common narrative (Vigar 2002; Hajer 1995). In doing so they help overcome political fragmentation by collapsing gaps, ambiguities, and conflicts associated with peoples’ understandings of a given socio-environmental problem in favour of a single trope or representation. For example, the environmentalist motto ‘think global, act local’ can be understood as a storyline that urges individuals to consider and take responsibility for the global consequences of their actions. This storyline elides attention to broader political-economic structures mediating those global consequences, in favour of a simple and uncontroversial narrative that people of many political persuasions can accept. The term ‘discourse coalition’ is used to describe a group of people and/ or organizations that appeal to a common set of storylines in the context of a policy debate (Hajer 1995). Members of a discourse coalition do not necessarily coordinate their activities, align themselves politically, or even know each other. What connects them is the fact that they draw upon a similar or cohesive set of narratives. In this case, the relevant storylines defi ne the problems and opportunities posed by the crumbling Viaduct. The emergence of a new storyline may lead to new and unexpected coalitions between previously unaligned actors. Through their collective reproduction of one or more dominant storylines, the members of a discourse coalition can work (often unconsciously) to produce ‘discourse structuration’, a condition in which “the credibility of actors in a given domain requires them to draw on the ideas, concepts, and categories of a given discourse” (Hajer 1995, 60).

STORYLINES IN SEATTLE’S ALASKAN WAY VIADUCT DEBATE To identify storylines in the Viaduct debate, I examined local media coverage, state and local government documents, materials produced by local activists, and public meeting statements from the period 2004 to 2007. This data was supplemented by interviews and observational research conducted during the same period (Ramsey 2009). The following three sections introduce each storyline identified in this analysis. For simplicity, I label each storyline and refer to them by name. Class Warfare is a storyline that presents any effort to use the Viaduct

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project to spur waterfront revitalization as an explicit attack on Seattle’s working-class residents and heritage. The two other storylines, An Open Waterfront for All and Social Progress, were identified in both the tunnel and surface/transit campaigns, as well as in the statements of many local elected officials. I argue that these latter two storylines are evidence of a discourse coalition that aligned surface/transit activists, environmentalists, many local political leaders, the downtown business association, and other advocates of waterfront revitalization. As I will demonstrate, this coalition also produced a discursive structuration that marginalizes the distributive and antagonistic political claims present in the fi rst storyline, Class Warfare.

Storyline #1: Class Warfare Class Warfare was a storyline mobilized and reproduced in the statements and rhetoric of disparate actors concerned with maintaining Seattle’s industrial and manufacturing economy, affordability for poor and workingclass residents, and rapid automobile and freight transportation through downtown. Also uniting these disparate actors was opposition to the city’s waterfront revitalization vision. This storyline articulated a number of distributive political questions about urban redevelopment schemes, such as who benefits, who pays the costs, and how life in the rest of the city is impacted. Rather than simply drawing attention to these distributive matters, Class Warfare articulated a narrative about the coordinated assault on working-class Seattleites by those who wish to reserve the city as a playground for the wealthy. Thus the politics of the Viaduct replacement was antagonistic at its core. The major practical concern articulated by advocates for industrial businesses and freight haulers was the impact of a tunnel, and its construction, on the mobility of freight between the marine and industrial districts just north and south of downtown and on the mobility of freight in and out of the Port of Seattle’s waterfront sites (see Figure 5.2). For example, tunnel access restrictions against trucks carrying hazardous materials would have a direct impact on those selling boat fuel to fishing operations in the Ballard Interbay industrial area. Trucks must transport fuel to the Ballard area from a fi xed fueling facility on Harbor Island to the south of downtown (MIG 2007). However, these concerns ran deeper than such practical matters. In the words of the president of the North Seattle Industrial Association, “The mayor and the state are slowly strangling our freight routes . . . There’s a cultural war going on here between the knowledge workers and the bluecollar workers, and the knowledge workers don’t want the blue-collar workers around” (Wilhelm 2006). This quote effectively encapsulates one of the key political tensions described earlier. Here the utilitarian elevated Viaduct becomes a symbol of Seattle’s working-class industrial heritage.

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 109 Consequently, calls to remove or bury the highway were perceived as efforts to erase that heritage in favour of urban lifestyle amenities designed, in part, to attract ‘knowledge workers’ for the new ‘creative’ sector. Seattle’s industrial economy and heritage were constructed within Class Warfare as incompatible with any effort to make downtown more ‘livable’. More pointedly, a neighbourhood leader of the No Tunnel Alliance simply called the tunnel campaign “class warfare” (Radil 2007). When asked by a reporter about the waterfront park promised by both tunnel and surface/transit supporters, the same activist replied, “Guess who that park is for? It’s for the downtown residents, the multimillionaire condo owners. And they’re going to take away a way how people get to work and move through the state” (Radil 2007). This reference to class politics can also be found in the frequent reports on the debate by a widely read columnist in one of Seattle’s daily newspapers, Joel Connelly. In one column, Connelly considered the likely series of events that would follow if the governor were to decide to move forward with the rebuilt, elevated highway option: • Class War: The Seattle arts community and advocates of a no-highway option move to stop the rebuild. Environmental laws are combed. A legal challenge is prepared. A movement grows out of the grass roots of Belltown condos. Bottles of red wine are uncorked and platters of cheese deployed to raise money for legal fees. And, in a tradition that goes back to Interstate 90, a judge’s injunction stops the rebuild in its tracks. (Connelly 2006, B1) This was likely a reference to Allied Arts, a tunnel-supporting organization with the mission to “enhance the cultural livability of Seattle and to create a social network of people who care about the Arts, Urban Design, and Historic Preservation” (Allied Arts 2008). The group regularly hosts ‘beer and culture’ discussions and fundraising events that are described as “elegant, yet informal, gatherings where decision makers, opinion leaders and Allied Arts members tackle challenging urban design issues and spawn inspiring ideas” (Gates, n.d.). Describing this movement as emerging from the “grass roots of Belltown condos” implies they represent a particular demographic—an elite economic class that is out of touch with the plight of working people in Seattle. The message that arose from such statements was that any plan to remove the Viaduct amounts to a conspiracy by those in positions of social and economic power to use taxpayer-funded subsidies to turn downtown into a playground for the rich while making the city even more unlivable for poor and working-class residents. Within this discourse, the Viaduct debate was represented as a zero-sum game. A win for downtown elites, developers, and property owners equaled a corresponding loss for Seattle’s outer

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neighbourhoods and poor and working-class residents. This was illustrated in a column by leaders of the Seattle Displacement Coalition: That $3 billion extra in cost for the tunnel over the price of a retrofit is a lot to spend just to open up the view for privileged condo owners and corporate offices, with a nice sidewalk and bikeway running along the waterfront for the rest of us now and again to enjoy. We would rather see that $3 billion go for sidewalks in every neighborhood that now have none, lace the city with separate bikeways, build a truly effective bus system (a prerequisite to ever getting significant numbers out of their cars), fi x the maintenance backlog on aging roads and bridges, and create parks and open space with vistas currently in short supply in low-income neighborhoods. (Colter and Fox 2007) Here advocates for Seattle’s poor called attention to the irony and social injustice of investing so much money on a downtown waterfront promenade when a large portion of Seattle does not have sufficient infrastructure to support everyday activities. In essence, Class Warfare amounted to an explicit rebuttal of the downtown neoliberal urban economic development agenda that calls for public investments that directly facilitate targeted economic growth in the form of increased property values along the waterfront and the creation of urban spaces that privilege the needs of tourists and the desired ‘creative class’ over those of outer city neighbourhoods. Instead, Class Warfare asserted a notion of social and economic justice that stands in opposition to any plan that benefits downtown, on the grounds that the rest of Seattle can only lose in the bargain—not only through a loss of mobility, but also through increased taxes to pay for the perceived-to-be-inevitable cost overruns of a tunnel option. It is important to reiterate how strongly Class Warfare was structured by the discourse of ‘automobility’ (Sheller and Urry 2000). In Seattle, the ability to transport oneself in a car is often presented as the great social equalizer (instead of, for example, having a great transit system). Within this storyline, the Viaduct roadway is one of the few places where the ‘common man’ can enjoy the waterfront views usually reserved for wealthy office workers and condo owners (MIG 2007). As council member Licata put it in a 2007 article of the Seattle Times: “I also believe that many Seattle residents use the [Viaduct] and enjoy the view of the Puget Sound from it. With a tunnel, they will be looking at walls and paying for the experience”. Furthermore, Class Warfare asserted that reducing capacity does most harm to those who live outside of the central city, because they are the ones most dependent on their cars for mobility. Essentially, the storyline used in this campaign tapped into socially conservative attitudes towards urban change and linked them to a broader call for an urban policy that is not focused on producing profits for downtown property owner and developers.

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 111 Ironically, while the campaign to rebuild the Viaduct reliably reproduced the Class Warfare storyline, it was conspicuously lacking in explicit support from advocates for Seattle’s poor. The leaders of the Seattle Displacement Coalition played only a minor role in the campaign and moved on to other causes after the election (Fox 2008). Although no other such groups took part or spoke out in the Viaduct debate, and despite the lack of nuance and the occasional instrumentality of their articulation, the concerns expressed in Class Warfare about the distribution of social and economic costs and benefits were nonetheless real and legitimate. I now turn to two storylines that emerged from the tunnel and surface/transit campaigns.

Storyline #2: An Open Waterfront for All The notion of ‘openness’ was a constant refrain in both the tunnel and surface/transit campaigns throughout the debate. In this storyline, the Viaduct amounts to a ‘wall’ separating the city from the waterfront, the natural environment, and even the global economy. Thus, tearing down the Viaduct presents an historic opportunity to ‘reconnect’ the city with these things, by creating a space that is ‘open’ to everyone. Mayor Nickels described this metaphor vividly: “Seattle is a city that values water, mountains, salmon and light. It would be a tragic mistake to build a bigger wall of concrete that cuts our city off from the very things that make this such a special place to live” (McOmber 2006). As this quote indicates, this storyline focused explicitly on the waterfront as a space to facilitate particular kinds of new mobilities; mobilities that are perceived to be undermined by a highway that promotes rapid automobile travel. Mayor Nickels, Allied Arts, and others regularly described this vision for the tunnel option as creating ‘a waterfront for all’. Indeed, Nickels claimed that this theme emerged in public comments and meetings about the Viaduct: “People realize that the waterfront is a public asset—a destination for residents of Seattle and the region. Public waterfront is precious, and we should do everything we can to make it cleaner, less noisy, less harmful to our environment, and make it more accessible and more enjoyable for all” (Nickels 2004). Nickels maintained that the waterfront is no longer “Seattle’s industrial ‘back door’ . . . [rather] our central city is now becoming a place to live, as well as work” (ibid.). He therefore asked residents to reimagine the waterfront as “a new welcome mat for Seattle’s front door . . . a place for people to wander, meet friends and family, and enjoy the views of the city and Puget Sound” (ibid.). As a surface/transit campaign website put it, the waterfront should be “a real place for everyone, not just drivers, or tourists, or waterfront condo owners” (PWC 2008). The waterfront, this storyline seemed to imply, is something all Seattle residents are responsible for protecting. In other words, it should not be squandered by building a new elevated highway. By appealing to Seattle’s reputation as an environmentally progressive city, An Open Waterfront

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for All invited residents to reimagine their own relationship to the waterfront. Given that the vast majority of people in the region only use the Viaduct and waterfront as a quick bypass route through downtown, possibly enjoying a stunning view from the car window along the way, this storyline worked to make people rethink the ‘opportunity’ presented by the crumbling Viaduct, and therefore also changed the stakes. Rather than simply validating current behaviours and understandings of mobility as Class Warfare does, An Open Waterfront for All instead asked residents to imagine what they are missing and how the future could look different. The leader of the King County local government—a significant figure in the Viaduct debate due to his authority over Seattle’s public bus service—also drew upon the notion of openness and inclusivity to describe Seattle’s need to be competitive in a global economy. At a public forum, he contended that building a new elevated Viaduct says “we’re walled in, in a global world”. Instead, he argued, Seattle must remove the highway to “open the city”, an act that will help it be “competitive in the twenty-fi rst century” (Sims 2007). This metaphorical engagement with the concept of an open waterfront resonates with the neoliberal view of urban economic development articulated by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) and others. A DSA-commissioned economic analysis reported that removing the Viaduct “will act as a catalyst for signifi cant new development, creating an economic development ‘magnet event’ yielding between $1 and $2 billion [U.S. dollars] of new taxable property value for the City of Seattle” (Pascall 2006, 1). In other words, removing the Viaduct would open the waterfront to mobile capital investment, spurring development. Both the DSA and the mayor argued this would result in a vital economy and increased tax revenues for the city, which could benefit all Seattle residents. Unlike the zero-sum game represented in Class Warfare, boosters for both the tunnel and surface/transit options mobilizing An Open Waterfront for All asserted that everyone can benefit from these economic gains. Other cities that have removed waterfront highways have realized tremendous gains in increased economic development around the newly reclaimed public land. Increased desirability of land adjacent to a downtown park means increased property values, increased tax revenue for the city, and ultimately, increased density. Sure, some downtown developers are going to benefit fi nancially from this. But all of us benefit too, by having a great park on our downtown shore. (Moon 2006) An Open Waterfront for All undercut Class Warfare on a number of levels. First, it asserted that all Seattleites gain from an open waterfront without an elevated highway. While some developers and property owners may gain

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 113 more than others, the tax revenues and revitalized waterfront make it a worthwhile investment for everyone. Absent from this narrative was an acknowledgment that there may be social costs associated with the tunnel or surface/transit options, or that those costs may be borne disproportionately by different groups. Rather, An Open Waterfront for All normalized one particular vision of the public good. It asserted that downtown is a place to “live, work and play” (City of Seattle 2008) and articulated a plan that caters to those who use downtown in this way over the needs of those who rely on the Viaduct as a route through downtown to other destinations. In addition, An Open Waterfront for All did not acknowledge that there may be other more pressing needs to which billions of dollars in public funds may be applied instead of a tunneled highway and a revitalized waterfront. In a storyline where everybody wins, the notions of a zero-sum game, and distributive politics more generally, do not make sense. As a result, the kinds of concerns articulated by Class Warfare were necessarily marginalized whenever An Open Waterfront for All was acknowledged in the debate. There is some evidence that An Open Waterfront for All reached the point of discourse structuration (Hajer 1995), such that the credibility of actors came to depend upon their appeals to this discourse. Frank Chopp, Speaker of the Washington State House of Representatives and an outspoken opponent of the tunnel option, promoted the idea of a roofed and elevated Viaduct, topped with a pedestrian park for those downtown to enjoy (Gilmore 2008; Westneat 2007). Additionally, Chopp, Seattle city council member Licata, and the leader of the No Tunnel Alliance all regularly promoted the idea that a new elevated Viaduct would be less noisy and more attractively designed than the current one—implicitly acknowledging the notion that the project should make the waterfront a more pleasant place for pedestrians. Licata stated his position this way: I understand the desire of the other Councilmembers to have an “open waterfront” with more public open space. And I certainly support such a goal . . . The claim is that the current viaduct stops people from visiting the waterfront, when in fact each year over twenty million people visit it. The viaduct is noisy, but audio experts have testified that the noise can be cut in half. The viaduct does cast shadows, and so does every building over seven stories—we live in a metropolis, not a village. Finally the five environmental goals identified in the Central Waterfront Plan can be accomplished with a rebuild of the viaduct; it does not have to be removed. (Licata 2006) Here Licata tried to defend the elevated highway option based on criteria articulated in An Open Waterfront for All. These appeals to An Open Waterfront for All by elevated highway supporters help to reproduce and reinforce the dominance of the storyline.

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Storyline #3: Social Progress Commenting on the impending public referendum regarding the tunnel and elevated options, Walter Schacht, president of the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects, called a new elevated Viaduct a “1950s solution to a 21st-century problem” (Young 2007, B1). This theme of teleological progress was echoed repeatedly by both tunnel and streets/transit supporters. For example, when campaigning for the tunnel at a public forum leading up to the election, Mayor Nickels described building an elevated Viaduct as a decision that may have made sense “fifty years ago”. Today, he argued, it does not, and Seattleites will have to “apologize to the next three generations” if it is rebuilt (Nickels 2007). In each of these examples, an elevated highway on the waterfront is presented as a major step backwards for a city that aspires to be a leading example of progressive urbanism. The progress described in such statements is not merely technological. Rather, these statements reference an antiquated way of thinking that proponents claim must be surpassed if Seattle is to thrive in a competitive new world of economic globalization and looming climate crisis. These themes became particularly apparent in responses to the results of the referendum in which both tunnel and elevated options were rejected by voters. For instance, Mayor Nickels assessed the results as a clear statement that voters “do not want a freeway on our waterfront [either] above ground or below . . . This is the 21st century. We must put aside our 1950s mindset” (Barnett 2007, 17). A feature article in one of Seattle’s weekly newspapers simply exclaimed, “The era of big freeways is over” (ibid.). Social Progress implicitly represented Seattle as a city in transition from the working-class manufacturing centre of the 1950s to an outward-looking global trade and technology centre in the twenty-fi rst century. For example, Governor Gregoire made repeated reference to Seattle’s status as an “international city” in her statements regarding the Washington State Department of Transportation’s post-election agreement to consider a surface/ transit option for replacing the Viaduct (Lindblom 2007). Here a notion of social progress was mobilized to justify a series of potential reconfigurations to downtown that could have significant impacts on how the city is accessed and used by automobile drivers. Introducing the broader systemic changes to Seattle’s transportation system that she believes will be necessary to make a highway-free waterfront work, Gregoire stated: We really are fundamentally not efficient and effective now. Our offramps from I-5 are not efficient to the flow of traffic. What international city do we know of that would have two-way traffic in downtown? What international city do we know of that would have street parking in the middle of downtown? . . . We have not stepped back, collectively . . . and said, “How can we make this a user-friendly, international city?” (McGann 2008, A1)

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 115 While surface/transit supporters had long asserted that Seattle residents are capable of adapting to such changes in the configuration of the transportation system, here the governor implied that thriving as an international city in the twenty-fi rst century requires residents to accept and adapt to changes in the downtown transportation network. In other words, social progress necessitates residents’ acceptance of and adaptation to changes like the removal of downtown street parking. Social Progress maintains that being an international city requires taking responsibility for international problems. As the Viaduct debate continued, climate change became an increasingly high-profi le issue in both Seattle and Washington State politics. Advocates for a streets/transit option regularly invoked climate change in a way that explicitly resonated with Social Progress. For instance, in a Seattle Times editorial, Seattle city council member Peter Steinbrueck insisted: The viaduct replacement can result in a 21st-century transportation solution that not only improves mobility, but enhances Seattle’s land use, helps in the battle against climate change and strengthens our local economy. To realize these ambitious goals, we must let go of our outmoded 20th-century concept that good transportation planning is only about building freeways and moving cars. (Steinbrueck 2006) In this example as in many others, a key element of Social Progress is taking collective responsibility for global environmental problems when making decisions about the Viaduct replacement. In this distinctly modernist storyline, progress is always good and necessary. The only alternatives to progress are regression or stagnation. Therefore, as a city Seattle must learn to accept and adapt to the changes that are necessary to usher in this progress. What Social Progress did not acknowledge is that all people are not equal in their ability to adapt their lifestyles in the required fashion. The options available to urban residents are shaped not only by the built environment, but also by broader social, political, and economic processes—for example, one cannot live closer to one’s job or to a transit hub if the housing there is not affordable. Social Progress structured a policy debate in which spatial processes, such as markets for housing, jobs, and child-care, were generally ignored. When acknowledged at all, these processes were constructed as aspects of life that will also have to adapt to the reconfigured city. This free market logic does not acknowledge that ‘adaptation’ does not always render affordable options. Furthermore, the obverse to the notion of an ‘international’ (or, more commonly, ‘global’) city was the frequent reference to Seattle’s heritage as a working-class city found within Class Warfare. For many, the Viaduct is a key symbol of this heritage, and this heritage is perceived to be under threat from exactly the kinds of changes valorized by environmentalists and those wishing to transform Seattle into an international business and

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tourist destination (Connelly 2007; Berger 2004). Social Progress, however, represented such notions as outdated and represents those who espouse them as ‘backward’. What was not acknowledged in this storyline is the tension between the desire for revitalization and efforts to preserve current industrial, maritime, and port economies that were built around the existing transportation system and existing patterns of physical development. An Open Waterfront for All and Social Progress provided discursive links within the Viaduct debate between the tunnel and surface/transit campaigns. The arguments and justifications mobilized by actors in each campaign conformed almost exclusively to one or both of these storylines. Even though the two campaigns argued among themselves, their rhetoric served to reproduce the common themes of inclusivity, environmental responsibility, social progressiveness, and adaptability to change that characterized the two storylines. Such close adherence to these storylines by such a broad spectrum of political actors helped to maintain the dominance of these narratives in local media coverage. The preceding analysis indicates that the dominance of these two storylines, and in particular An Open Waterfront for All, contributed to discourse structuration within the Viaduct debate. While activists mobilizing Class Warfare were successful in getting their narrative reproduced in the media, the storyline almost never appeared in the statements of local or state elected officials. Indeed, as noted earlier, the few elected officials who did oppose both the surface/transit and tunnel options often found themselves describing the benefits of a new elevated highway through reference to themes developed within An Open Waterfront for All. This fi nding indicates that elected officials found it necessary to appeal to the dominant storylines to maintain their credibility in the public debate, even while continuing to criticize the excessive cost of a tunnel replacement.

UNDERMINING A PROGRESSIVE POLITICS OF MOBILITY ON THE WATERFRONT Unlike the two dominant storylines, Class Warfare called attention to the distributive politics of replacing the Viaduct. The editorial by leaders of the Seattle Displacement Coalition (Colter and Fox 2007) was perhaps the most explicit in calling attention to the wide disparities between many Seattle neighbourhoods and downtown in terms of access to sidewalks, bike lanes, open space, and transit. It hinted at a significant potential for alliances to be made between environmental activists seeking to reduce automobile dependency and those parties seeking social justice. Here we can imagine how environmental responsibility may be mobilized as a justification for distributing public investments to underserved neighbourhoods rather than concentrating them in mega-projects downtown. This kind of distributive politics would call for focusing investments fi rst in low-income areas where

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 117 car-free living is at least feasible and the social need for alternative forms of mobility is highest. Unfortunately, the potential for such alliances was undermined in the Viaduct debates in three distinct ways. First, the two dominant storylines not only ignored such distributive political questions, but also directly contradicted these questions by asserting that everybody benefits from an open waterfront and that everyone needs to adapt to address problems like climate change. As a consequence, distributive political claims lost their relevance to and credibility in the policy debate. Second, as the description of Class Warfare indicates, debates over the redevelopment and reconfiguration of urban space can produce antagonistic cultural divides between urban environmentalists and those seeking greater social equality in the city. This is not always the case. There are examples elsewhere of environmentalists and social justice advocates building coalitions and successfully advocating urban transport policies that actively undermine automobility (e.g., Cresswell 2006; Cohen and Hobson 2004). However, in Seattle the few advocates for the poor who engaged in the debate explicitly adopted the Class Warfare storyline and aligned themselves with those who opposed the neoliberal economic development agenda of many tunnel supporters. Therefore, the discourse coalition linking the tunnel and surface/transit campaigns implicitly positioned environmentalism in opposition to social justice. In Seattle the rift between these camps runs very deep. In an interview, a leader of the county labour council aptly summarized the popular conception of this rift as “Old Seattle” versus “New Seattle” (Freiboth 2008). Old Seattle refers to the industrial, manufacturing, and maritime economies and those culturally associated with them, whereas New Seattle refers to those who recently moved to the city to participate in the growing technology and ‘creative economy’ sectors. Freiboth noted that the anti-waterfront revitalization campaign took a stand for Old Seattle in a rapidly changing city in which, they feel, the lifestyles and job skills of New Seattle are increasingly privileged. This cultural rift between those opposing revitalization and those supporting a surface/transit option presented a significant barrier to opening a productive dialogue, thus undermining the potential for an alliance against the neoliberal strategies of downtown economic growth boosters. The third factor that undermined potential for a progressive political alliance was that the debate concerned only one segment of roadway along Seattle’s waterfront. Focusing only on the waterfront area prompted a polarizing debate between those seeking benefits for the waterfront and those whose concerns were for impacts outside the study area. A more comprehensive consideration of how to improve non-automobile-based mobility and accessibility throughout the city would have avoided this conflict and could therefore have helped in building creative alliances between environmentalists and advocates for poor and working-class residents in pursuit of common goals.

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CONCLUSION: MOBILITY POLITICS HAVE MATERIAL EFFECTS This case study illustrates that the politics of mobility concern more than simply struggles over how to prioritize limited infrastructure so as to facilitate particular means of transportation. Rather they concern struggles to define which kinds of economic and social life should be facilitated by public investments and which ones should be discouraged. Such struggles are magnified on urban waterfronts, where flows of people, goods, capital, and wastes are attributed with heightened social, ecological, and symbolic significance. Discourse analysis can help to reveal how the ability of activists to shape these struggles is constrained and structured by dominant storylines. This structuration has real material effects. In early 2009, the state governor, county executive, and Mayor Nickels announced their joint decision to move forward with a ‘deep bore’ tunnel replacement for the Viaduct (Gregoire, Sims, and Nickels 2009). A Waterfront for All and Social Progress featured prominently in their justification for this plan. The parties agreed to allocate all available state and federal funds—U.S.$2.4 billion—to building the tunnel, while failing to ensure funding for transit and street network improvements along the waterfront or elsewhere in the city. The differences in mobilities promoted by the tunnel are rather stark. While it is promised that the tunnel will improve views, noise pollution, and property values downtown (Pascall 2006), a lack of exits makes it difficult to access downtown from areas to the north and south. No investment is made in improving alternative modes of mobility for those affected by the changes. As a consequence, both environmentalists and advocates for more equitable allocation of public resources lose in this plan, while the benefits are funneled to downtown businesses, residents, property owners, and developers. These findings indicate that scholars and activists must identify an alternative urban politics of mobility if they wish to more effectively challenge the neoliberal urban economic development agenda shaping urban waterfront transformations across the globe. NOTES 1. Kevin Ramsey acknowledges the University of Washington Graduate School, Nancy Bell Evans Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and Association of American Geographers Qualitative Methods Specialty Group for research funding support. Mark Purcell, Sarah Elwood, Michael Brown, Matt Wilson, and Maureen Hickey all provided ideas and conceptual feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. Finally, the editors of this volume provided exceptional editorial support, from which this chapter benefited substantially.

REFERENCES Allied Arts. 2008. Mission statement: The promise of city life. Allied Arts of Seattle. Accessed June 16, 2010.

Urban Waterfront Transformation as a Politics of Mobility 119 Barnett, Erica C. 2007. Yes and hell yes: What we voted for when we voted down the tunnel and the rebuild. The Stranger, 22–28 March. Berger, Knute. 2004. Babes in toyland throwing a tantrum about Seattle’s inner child. Seattle Weekly, 7 July. Brunner, Jim, Andrew Garber, and Mike Lindblom. 2007. Viaduct? Tunnel? Voters say no and no. Seattle Times, 14 March, A1. Bunce, Susannah and Gene Desfor. 2007. Introduction: Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations. Cities 24(4): 251–258. The City of Seattle. 2008. Center city Seattle. Accessed June 16, 2010. Cohen, Stuart and Jeff Hobson. 2004. Transportation choices in the San Francisco Bay area. In Highway robbery: Transportation racism & new routes to equity, eds. R.D. Bullard, G.S. Johnson, and A.O. Torres. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Colter, Carolee and John V. Fox. 2007. Seattle’s ‘Big Dig’: Why we say ‘NO’ to the mayor’s tunnel proposal. Accessed 8 March 2008. Connelly, Joel. 2006. All roads lead to one big viaduct mess. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2 June, B1. . 2007. Waterfront tunnel vision overlooks impact on workers. Seattle PI, 5 March. Cox, Kevin R. and Jeffrey J. McCarthy. 1982. Neighbourhood activism as a politics of turf: A critical analysis. In Conflict, politics and the urban scene, eds. K.R. Cox and R.J. Johnston. London: Longman. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. New York: Routledge. FHA, WSDOT, and City of Seattle. 2006. SR 99: Alaskan Way Viaduct and seawall replacement project supplemental draft environmental impact statement. Accessed June 16, 2010. Fox, John. 2008. Personal interview, 9 January. Freiboth, David. 2008. Personal interview, 2 September. Gates, Mimi. n.d. Quality of urban life. Allied Arts of Seattle. Accessed June 16, 2010. Gilmore, Susan. 2008. ‘Choppway’ plan for Alaskan Way Viaduct unveiled. Seattle Times, 26 September. Gregoire, Christine O., Ron Sims, and Greg Nickels. 2009. A letter of commitment between the state of Washington, King County and City of Seattle: Consensus on a recommended alternative for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct and seawall. Accessed June 16, 2010. Hagerman, Chris. 2007. Shaping neighborhoods and nature: Urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon. Cities 24(4): 285–297. Hajer, Maarten A. 1995. The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process. Oxford: Oxford University Press; New York: Clarendon Press. Henderson, Jason. 2004. The politics of mobility and business elites in Atlanta, Georgia. Urban Geography 25(3): 193–216. Klingle, Matthew W. 2007. Emerald city: An environmental history of Seattle. The Lamar series in western history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Licata, Nick. 2006. Urban politics #220, 22 September. Accessed June 16, 2010. Lindblom, Mike. 2007. Gregoire now open to options besides viaduct replacement. Seattle Times, 12 December.

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McCann, Eugene J. 2002. The cultural politics of local economic development: Meaning-making, place-making, and the urban policy process. Geoforum 33:385–398. McGann, Chris. 2001. Schell’s viaduct vision: Level it. His tunnel idea would open up the waterfront and speed traffic. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 30 April, B1. . 2008. Gregoire: ‘Watch me’ tear down the viaduct: Governor tells the city she won’t let issue be pushed to back burner. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 3 January, A1. McOmber, Martin. 2006. Mayor Nickels’ statement on fi ndings of governor’s expert review panel. Seattle.gov. Accessed June 16, 2010. MIG. 2007. Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project stakeholder interview report. Portland, OR: MIG, Inc. Moon, Cary. 2006. Culture shift: Seattle can kill the waterfront highway and get a new lease on life. Real Change News. November 9, 2006. Nickels, Greg. 2004. A tunnel to keep the traffic moving, a new welcome mat for Seattle’s front door. Seattle Times. Accessed June 16, 2006. . 2007. UW Evans School Viaduct replacement panel discussion. Seattle Channel. February 20. Pascall, Glen. 2006. Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project—a comprehensive assessment of benefits. Seattle: Alaskan Way Tunnel Coalition. PWC. 2006. Transit + streets fi rst. <www.seattle.gov/council/attachments/06surface_ street_text.pdf> Accessed June 16, 2010. . 2008. Vision. People’s Waterfront Coalition 2006. Accessed 25 February 2008. Radil, Amy. 2007. Supporters of Viaduct rebuild complain of ‘class warfare’. Accessed June 16, 2010. Ramsey, Kevin S. 2009. Adapting (to) the ‘climate crisis’: Urban environmental governance and the politics of mobility in Seattle, geography. Seattle: University of Washington. Seattle Times. 2007. Viaduct Q&A with Council President Licata. Accessed June 16, 2010. Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. 2000. The city and the car. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24(4): 737–757. Sims, Ron. 2007. UW Evans School Viaduct replacement panel discussion. Seattle Channel. February 20. Steinbrueck, Peter. 2006. Climate’s right for fresh viaduct plan. Seattle Times. Accessed June 16, 2010. Swyngedouw, Erik, Frank Moulaert, and Arantxa Rodriguez. 2002. Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode 34(3): 547–582. The Seattle Channel. 2009. Issues In-Depth: Alaskan Way Viaduct. SeattleChannel.org Accessed June 16, 2010. Vigar, Geoff. 2002. The politics of mobility: Transport, the environment, and public policy. New York: Spon Press. Westneat, Danny. 2007. Chopp’s “No!” to tunnel reverberates. Seattle Times, 14 January. Wilhelm, Steve. 2006. Industries and truckers to fight waterfront tunnel. Puget Sound Business Journal. Accessed June 16, 2010. Young, Bob. 2007. Vying over viaduct: Political campaign heats up over unusual tunnel-or-rebuild election. Seattle Times, 13 February, B1.

6

London Docklands Revisited The Dynamics of Waterfront Development Sue Brownill 1

The redevelopment of London’s Docklands remains one of the world’s most significant and contested examples of waterfront regeneration. The activities of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), with its mission to ‘regenerate’ the extensive former dock area to the east of the city of London, are often seen as epitomizing the policies and ideologies of the 1980s; the physical embodiment of a belief in markets as the prime mechanism for redevelopment brought about by an agency that privileged business over local interests. Major projects promoted by the LDDC, such as Canary Wharf, underline this perception and illustrate the disputed nature of the LDDC’s legacy (see Figure 6.1). Since its emergence as a fi nancial centre, Canary Wharf has often been represented as a development essential to securing London’s status as a world city and a model to be followed elsewhere (Greater London Authority [GLA] 2004). Yet it is equally portrayed as a symbol of the intensifi cation of

Figure 6.1 E2BN).

The Canary Wharf development (Photograph courtesy of D. Earl and

122 Sue Brownill socio-economic polarization and the vulnerability to boom and slump resulting from such a market-led regeneration strategy (Minton 2009; Massey 2007). Although the LDDC may have ceased to exist in 1998, the regeneration of the Docklands area has continued. Over the years new agencies have emerged; a different policy rhetoric has replaced the ideology of the free market, and the physical regeneration of the area intensified, at least until the fi nancial crisis of 2008. But to what extent, if any, does this continuing story represent a significantly different approach to waterfront regeneration? This chapter explores the continuing evolution of the regeneration of Docklands, to reveal how the processes and practices through which change occurs on urban waterfronts unfold over time. Rather than characterizing these changes as a succession of ‘eras’ of regeneration or the mainstreaming of neoliberal urbanization (points which will be returned to later), the chapter explores the ways in which different approaches to regeneration have been in constant tension throughout the regeneration of Docklands, and how this dynamic has evolved in time and space. The chapter begins by discussing this approach to the ‘dynamics’ of regeneration in more depth. It then explores the evolution of the regeneration of Docklands, focusing on how these dynamics have come together during three different moments in its long and contested history: the initial days of top-down, private-sector-dominated regeneration of the LDDC from 1981 to 1987; the ‘second wave’ of LDDC development, with its shift to consensus and social regeneration from 1987 to 1998; and the post-LDDC days, with the re-emergence of urban development corporations (UDCs) under the banner of ‘New Labour’ policies, from 1998 onwards.

THE DYNAMICS OF DOCKLANDS REGENERATION The chronology presented in Table 6.1 reveals the history of the redevelopment of London’s Docklands following the closure of the fi rst upstream dock in 1968. While such a chronology provides a useful summary of events, it may give the impression that history is linear, with the steady progression of one ‘era’ of redevelopment, represented by a particular planning style, followed by another. In this way it is possible to trace the movement from the plan-led interventions in the 1970s, through the LDDC ‘free market’ days of the 1980s, to the later evolution of its more socially oriented ‘second wave’, and ending with the current attempts to merge competitiveness and cohesion under New Labour. This is an approach followed by Carmona (2009) in his identification of five ‘planning models’ in the history of the regeneration of the Isle of Dogs, the area of Docklands that has seen the most intensive regeneration and within which Canary Wharf is located (Figure 6.2).

London Docklands Revisited Table 6.1

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A Short History of Docklands Development

1968

• First upstream dock closes • Start of piecemeal redevelopment at St. Katherine’s Dock by then-Greater London Council. Mix of public and private developments and housing

1976

• London Docklands Strategic Plan published by partnership of Labour local authorities and central government. • Aimed at ‘redressing the imbalances’ of East London; plan-led, Keynesianism-based

1981

• London Docklands Development Corporation established by first Thatcher administration. • Governance form and strategies aimed at addressing market failure. • Local opposition sparked

1982

• Enterprise Zone created on Isle of Dogs • Tax and financial incentives • Removal of need for planning permission in Enterprise Zone

1984

• People’s Plan for the Royal Docks published • Poplar planning inspired alternative to London City Airport plans

1985

• Initial Canary Wharf scheme proposed

1986

• Greater London Council abolished

1987/88 • Docklands Light Railway and London City Airport open • Olympia and York take over Canary Wharf scheme • Conservative government re-elected • Land and property markets soar • Planning gain deals signed; second wave and ‘social regeneration’ • London Docklands Development Corporation Community Services Division established 1990

• Jubilee Line extension approved

1992

• Economic downturn • Decision to wind down Urban Development Corporations taken • Community Services Division closed • Canary Wharf goes into receivership

1997

• Election of New Labour government

1998

• London Docklands Development Corporation closes • Planning control reverts to Boroughs • Upturn in markets enables London Docklands Development Corporation to leave on a ‘high’ • London Docklands Development Corporation writes its own obituary stressing partnership and outputs

1999

• Greater London Authority established with strategic planning powers • Ken Livingstone elected as Labour Party Mayor of London • Jubilee Line opens • Increasing complexity of governance in the area (continued)

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Table 6.1

(continued)

2003

• Sustainable Communities Action Plan published by Central Government, including establishment of Thames Gateway Growth Area • Attention shifted to regional and subregional levels • Ideology of sustainable communities as driver for regeneration

2004

• London Plan published by Greater London Authority • Urban Development Corporations established by central government in London Thames Gateway and Thurrock • Attempts to merge competitiveness and cohesion within overall strategic framework

2005

• Choice of London for 2012 Olympics announced • Stratford site becomes focus for regeneration

2006

• Olympic Development Agency established • Subregional Development Framework for East London and Lower Lea Valley vision published by Greater London Authority • Further institutional and strategic complexity • Booming property market entrenches public/private model for delivery of regeneration and social objectives

2008/09 • Election of Conservative Boris Johnson as new Mayor of London • Global financial crisis • Relaxing of some focus on planning gain and social objectives • Greater reliance on public funding for key sites such as Olympics • Major schemes such as Silvertown Quays stalled

Figure 6.2

Map of London Docklands (Map S. Brownill).

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Keith (2009, 79), however, cautions against seeing the history of places in this linear fashion, arguing that “the present may bear the contested weight of past narratives”. Other writers note the dangers of focusing on distinct planning eras. Allmendinger (2003) points out that in the search for differences between planning styles, continuities and underlying processes can be ignored. Similarly, Hall (2003) argues against concentrating on the apparent coherence of particular approaches, in favour of examining the tensions and contradictions within them. By way of illustration, it is interesting to look at one of the many strategies produced for development sites within the Docklands area; the Lower Lea Valley. The vision for the Lower Lea was launched by a UDC heralding a ‘water city’ and a ‘new Amsterdam’ for the Lower Lea, with twenty thousand new homes and fifty thousand new jobs, linked to each other by a linear water park (London Thames Gateway Urban Development Corporation [LTGUDC] 2006). Although this may sound like an extract from an historical document from the 1980s-era LDDC, this vision was launched in 2006 by a ‘new’ UDC (the LTGUDC), in partnership with the GLA, both of which were set up by a Labour government. The ‘opportunity area planning framework’ that accompanies the glossy vision contains a foreword by Ken Livingstone, the then mayor of London, who in the early 1980s as leader of the Greater London Council was an implacable opponent of the LDDC. In the foreword he stresses the need to “attract new investment and opportunities”, but within a sustainable framework (GLA 2006). Elsewhere, in a possible attempt to distance himself from the LDDC, he urges the need “to learn the lessons from past development policies” (GLA 2005, 8). This example suggests that the process that is going on is altogether more complex than simply a shift from one era or style of regeneration to another. Institutional forms have been discarded and reintroduced; new regeneration discourses have emerged around sustainability, while others around attracting investment have persisted, and politicians have sought to move away from the past while promoting seemingly similar agendas. This points to the need for an analytical approach that can capture the making and remaking of the governance forms and discourses of waterfront regeneration that, I would argue, characterize the regeneration of areas such as London Docklands. One such approach is to view this history in terms of the evolution of the forms of governance and urbanization associated with neoliberalism (Moulaert, Rodriguez, and Swyngedouw 2003). According to this account, certain principles that underpin neoliberalism, such as the belief in the role of markets and the competitiveness of places as drivers for economic growth, have become embedded within successive regeneration strategies. Alongside this, new forms and scales of governance have emerged to promote such principles, privilege the role of the private sector in decision-making, and reduce state intervention in markets (Brenner and Theodore 2002). These strategies and forms of governance have come together in the creation of urban mega-projects such as Canary Wharf (Moulaert, Rodriguez, and

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Swyngedouw 2003). While such a view provides a powerful analysis of contemporary urbanization, there are limitations associated with it, not least the tendency to assume a ‘hegemonic’ view of an all-powerful neoliberalism “as though there is an automatic transmission belt from some ethereal sphere of greater forces to how it plays out on the ground” (Massey 2007, 11). For a more nuanced approach to understanding the processes of change within waterfront regeneration, I draw on ideas from an emerging literature. Raco (2005b) sees within current development programs a number of rationalities, including neoliberalism, but also discourses around sustainable and inclusive development. Such programs “contain within them competing and confl icting agendas” resulting in a “hybridity of development discourses” (Raco 2005b, 343). This implies that empirical analysis of the way policy plays itself out in particular places needs to highlight the complexity of these hybridities, rather than characterizing them as solely ‘neoliberal’ or ‘sustainable’. Newman (2001), in looking at evolving forms of governance, also recognizes the existence of different discourses, but stresses the dynamics between them rather than the merger that is suggested by the idea of ‘hybridity’. She argues that governance arrangements can be understood as carrying different discourses or models within them, each in tension with the other. Therefore, changes over time can be characterized not by the shift from one model of governance to another, but by a shift in balance between competing discourses. In this way, areas of policy such as regeneration can be seen as “a site in which different discourses and practices are played out” (Newman 2001, 139). Finally, Jessop (2000) reminds us that there are contradictions within as well as between discourses of regeneration. He notes certain dilemmas that regeneration is constantly required to address but that it is rarely able to overcome. These include the balance between the state and the market and the need to take local action in an environment where the relations affecting local conditions are global. Other dilemmas oppose competition with cohesion, flexibility with strategic guidance, and inclusive forms of governance with exclusive ones. Looking at the regeneration of Docklands therefore entails exploring how different discourses of regeneration, different modes of governance, and different practices and strategies have developed over time, and how these have constantly interacted, collided, repelled, and intersected with each other. It also means being mindful of the contradictions within these discourses. Figure 6.3 summarizes this dynamic situation. It identifi es five discourses that have been evident throughout the regeneration of Docklands and locates them in relation to the tensions and contradictions already outlined. The different approaches attempt to resolve in different ways the tensions between centralized and decentralized or ‘networked’ governance arrangements, between regeneration strategies that move towards promoting competitiveness or social inclusion and

London Docklands Revisited

Figure 6.3

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The dynamics of Docklands’ regeneration (Diagram S. Brownill).

practices of regeneration that can be fl exible and opportunistic or strategic and plan-led. It must be stressed that these approaches are not static, and that they can co-exist and interact in the same time and space. Therefore, rather than only seeing the transition between different eras or styles or the march of neoliberalism, I see “complex, unpredictable spatio-temporal processes” (Lefebvre 1991). The empirical focus of the rest of this chapter explores how these dynamics have evolved within Docklands. Many accounts have detailed the forty-year history of the London Docklands’ regeneration (Carmona 2009; Fainstein 1994; Brownill 1993; Imrie and Thomas 1999, 1993). In what follows, three periods within this history are focused on. These periods are the early years of the LDDC; the ‘second wave’ of LDDC regeneration; and the post-LDDC era. While at fi rst sight this might appear to repeat the very linearization of history that was critiqued earlier, the intention here is to reveal the underlying dynamics between different discourses and practices and to focus on how these processes and relations have become embedded over time and in space, rather than to distinguish between eras of planning. The case study draws on extensive secondary data from work carried out by the author (Brownill and Carpenter 2009; Florio and Brownill 2000; Brownill 1999, 1993; Brownill et al. 1998) and others (Carmona 2009; Massey 2007; Raco 2005a, 2005b), as well as primary data, including the analysis of recent planning documents for the area and interviews with key actors (Brownill and Ward 2009).

128 Sue Brownill THE EARLY YEARS OF THE LDDC (1981–1985): ADDRESSING MARKET FAILURE The period from the establishment of the LDDC in 1981 until 1987, when developers Olympia and York secured Canary Wharf, was characterized by a particular discourse, or more appropriately, an ideology of regeneration, based on ‘addressing market failure’ and rolling back the state. The radical right-wing Thatcher administration elected in 1979 depicted urban problems as resulting from a lack of private-sector activity, caused in part by the ‘crowding out’ of the private sector by overly prescriptive publicsector plans (Local Government Land and Planning Act 1980). Areas such as Docklands needed action to remove the dead hand of state bureaucracy and stimulate land and property markets. The benefits of this property-led regeneration would then ‘trickle down’ to local populations. This regeneration rhetoric was accompanied by particular governance forms and regeneration practices. The LDDC itself was an example of an institutional form (the UDC) designed to privilege market relations in decision-making by removing power from local governments and placing it in the hands of a semi-autonomous agency run by government appointees. Those powers included the ability to make decisions on development proposals, to tender for infrastructure and services, and to sell development sites. The LDDC board was accountable only to parliament, met in secret, and was not required to publish minutes or agendas. The fi rst two chairmen were property developers, and private-sector interests dominated, to the exclusion of local people and their directly elected representatives. Two significant aspects of the practices of regeneration associated with this approach were ‘leverage’ and opportunistic planning. Leverage refers to the use of public intervention to lever in private-sector activity. In its fi rst annual report, for example, the LDDC defi ned its job as “to trigger investment by others in the private sector” (LDDC 1982, 8), through investment in infrastructure such as the Docklands Light Railway. This was intensified in the Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone with the introduction of tax and fiscal incentives for development. The LDDC adopted a flexible approach to planning, claiming that “the era of the grand plan has passed” (LDDC 1982, 8). Instead, planning was to be opportunistic, to capture rather than control market activity. Once again the Enterprise Zone received special treatment, with the removal of requirements for developers to obtain formal planning permission for their proposals. This style of planning was reflected in the “development frameworks” the LDDC drew up for sub-areas of Docklands (see, for example, LDDC 1985). These documents were designed to indicate the possibilities for development and infrastructure provision without being prescriptive and, in a trend that has become all-pervasive in Docklands, concentrated more on design than strategy. The frameworks were also intended to be marketing tools for ‘selling’ the potential of the area and increasing land values in the process.

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Canary Wharf is arguably the ultimate spatial expression of this approach. This development was not initiated by the LDDC, but by a consortium headed by U.S. entrepreneur G. Ware Travelstead. He saw that the Thatcher government’s deregulation of the financial markets and the financial services sector in 1986, coupled with the increased use of new technologies in financial trading, would lead to increased demand for a particular type of office space. The similarly deregulated space of Docklands was the ideal place to serve this expected demand. The initial development of twelve million square feet of office space in the Isle of Dogs was approved in secret by the LDDC board, with no requirement for public debate. Because this was in the Enterprise Zone, it required no formal scrutiny of the development proposal in the form of planning permissions and was also supported by investment in infrastructure and substantial tax and fiscal subsidies. Equally illustrative of attempts to create new property markets were the large number of largely private housing schemes built at this time. In many ways it would easy to summarize this phase of the regeneration of Docklands as representing an era of market-led planning or even neoliberalism. However, this would be an oversimplification. Thornley (1991) notes that the dimensions of planning underlying the ‘Thatcherism’ label did illustrate some dimensions of neoliberalism, such as the dominance of market criteria in decision-making, but other rationalities were also apparent. These included the anti-bureaucratic crusade to free up the market and the fight against the ‘enemy within’ that supported state-led and marketcritical policies. Significant contradictions emerged within the LDDC’s approach, in particular the gap between the free market rhetoric and what was happening on the ground. As Cochrane (1999, 250) notes, UDCs “were not the pure children of Thatcher because they drew on a clear cut interventionist agenda”. Leverage planning, as already seen in connection with Canary Wharf, depended on substantial public-sector intervention in the provision of infrastructure and land reclamation. Thus rather than ‘market-led’ planning, the LDDC’s approach was state investment to create land and property markets. Problems also emerged with the opportunistic approach to planning, most notably the failure to integrate land use with transport infrastructure. With the increasing amounts of floor-space being built, the initial transport infrastructure proved inadequate. This led to reverse leverage (privatesector investment leading to increasing public intervention) in the form of costly transport projects such as upgrades of the Docklands Light Railway, major new roads, and the Jubilee Line extension. The LDDC had resolved the dilemma of accountable versus speedy decision-making, in favour of bypassing local democracy and excluding interests other than the private sector. But this resulted in other problems, notably vociferous local opposition and a lack of legitimacy for LDDC decisions. This democratic deficit was exploited by local people and reported extensively in the media. Added to this was the failure of benefits to ‘trickle down’ to local

130 Sue Brownill communities. LDDC’s 1982 Annual Report stated that “regeneration can mean a great deal or very little” (LDDC 1982, 2). In the early years of the LDDC, many local residents thought that the LDDC’s version of regeneration meant a great deal for property developers and very little for them, and they argued for an alternative approach (Foster 1999; Brownill 1993). Not only was the LDDC’s approach to regeneration contested, it was also challenged by opposing visions for the future of the area. As Table 6.1 shows, the regeneration of Docklands did not start with the LDDC. Prior to its establishment, the regeneration of Docklands had been based on a very different set of priorities and governance arrangements. The London Docklands Strategic Plan (Docklands Joint Committee [DJC] 1976) had set out a strategy of public-sector intervention aimed at addressing the needs of East Londoners and supporting the existing local economy, including dock use. This was overseen by a multi-interest partnership in the form of the DJC, but planning powers and decision-making had lain largely with local government. Two months before the LDDC was established, a left-wing Labour Greater London Council was elected, led by Ken Livingstone. The Greater London Council (GLC) developed the ideas in the London Docklands Strategic Plan into an alternative regeneration strategy aimed at ‘restructuring for labour’ and promoted participatory governance processes based on ‘popular planning’ as well as funding local community groups opposed to the LDDC. Docklands, therefore, became the site of ideological clashes between two very different regeneration discourses. This was particularly evident in the Royal Docks, where local community groups, supported by the GLC, drew up the People’s Plan (Newham Docklands Forum 1984) as an alternative to the LDDC-backed plans for the area, which ultimately became London City Airport. Instead of providing services for businesspeople, the People’s Plan proposed a transport interchange based on keeping the docks open, the construction of housing for local families, and leisure, sports, and educational services. It was a ‘bottom-up’ plan based on extensive consultation and involvement, in contrast to the LDDC’s top-down and exclusionary governance arrangements. Ultimately, however, it was the LDDC that had the power, land, and resources to implement its vision for Docklands. Massey, who was herself involved with the GLC, described how “out of the rubble of the battle over the future of Docklands rose Canary Wharf” (2007, 81). Nevertheless, this episode shows that underneath the impression of a ‘fixed’ form of regeneration within Docklands at this time was a dynamic situation embodying conflict, contradictions, and opposing visions.

THE SECOND WAVE (1987–1998) Although Canary Wharf might have represented a ‘victory’ for the LDDC’s vision for Docklands, that vision did not remain static. By 1987, the LDDC

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was asserting that “social-regeneration—meeting people’s needs—is more important than physically building the fabric” (LDDC 1987, 2). By 1989 the LDDC was claiming that its success was achieved “by attracting significant investment from the private sector, in partnership with government, local authorities and local communities” (LDDC 1989, 3; emphasis added). This suggests changes in both the governance of regeneration in the area and its direction. A number of factors contributed to the emergence of the ‘second wave’ of regeneration, as the LDDC called it. First, there were attempts to overcome the criticisms of the previous approach. Not only were local residents criticizing the LDDC for failing to meet local needs and win the hearts and minds of local people, but so were parliament and developers (House of Commons 1988). Second, the increased revenues from land sales gave the LDDC some autonomy from central government requirements to concentrate only on land and property markets. Third, with the abolition of the GLC in 1986 and the election of a third Conservative government in 1987, local authorities and communities decided that more resources might be gained from negotiating with the LDDC than by opposing it. The conflict that had characterized the area in the early days subsided, and the alternative regeneration discourses fell silent, making Docklands a “less ideologically noisy place” (Florio and Brownill 2000, 55). A consensus therefore emerged between different interests regarding the direction that regeneration should take. Finally, national political changes surrounding the replacement of Thatcher with John Major brought changes in regeneration policy objectives at a national level. In particular, emphasis was placed on partnerships that attempted to bring together the public, private, and community sectors in ways that avoided the exclusion of the UDCs, and on regeneration that was ‘holistic’ rather than purely property-led (Oatley 1998). This shift in LDDC rhetoric manifested itself in a variety of ways. Agreements to secure local benefits in return for permission to develop major schemes were signed between the LDDC, the local authorities, and the developers at Canary Wharf and in the Royal Docks. These included provision for local jobs, training schemes, and social housing. Separate arrangements were made to secure a £400 million contribution from the new developers of Canary Wharf, Olympia and York, for the extension of the Jubilee Line of the London Underground system. A Community Services Division was set up within the LDDC in 1988, with an initial budget of £60 million per year, focused on social housing, community development, and the provision of jobs and training (LDDC 1987). In response to the criticisms of its earlier approach, the LDDC also attempted to strike a different balance between flexibility and planning. In a series of monographs published at the end of its existence, it claimed that far from being opportunistic, it had always had a strategy built around transport provision, conservation, and promoting London as a world city (LDDC 1998a, 1998b). It made a deathbed repentance on the need to

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coordinate land use and transport. However, this rested on a rewriting of history (Florio and Brownill 2000) and a particular interpretation of what constitutes a strategic approach, summed up by Carmona (2009) as ‘strategic flexibility’. Strategic flexibility sought to set out objectives to “orchestrate expectations and construct a rationale” (Florio and Brownill 2000, 63), without prescribing land uses. The rise of master-planning can be seen as another way of resolving these tensions. Carmona (2009) notes the significance of the example set by Olympia and York through the master-planning of the Canary Wharf estate between 1987 and 1992, with its attention to detail and high design standards. But this was a ‘private-management’ style of planning and design (Carmona 2009; Brindley, Rydin, and Stoker 1989), wherein developers took control of the regeneration process for particular sites, rather than an overall state-led approach. Peck and Tickell (2002) see in such policy development an evolution from earlier ‘rolled back’ forms of neoliberalism, which stripped away social welfare and removed state capacities, to a ‘rolled out’ version that saw the need to address the negative externalities caused by such an approach. However, an alternative interpretation would be to see this approach to regeneration as striking a different balance between the conflicting goals and dilemmas of regeneration highlighted in Figure 6.3, following the failure of trickledown strategies. It would also point to an absence of alternative discourses of regeneration, or their dilution within a seeming consensus on strategy. On the ground, the results of such an approach are seen by contrasting the Royal Docks with earlier developments on the Isle of Dogs. Schemes on the Royal Docks, such as the Britannia Urban Village (Figure 6.4), reflected attempts at mixed-tenure and mixed-use developments instead of major office buildings. The developers of this scheme even held a participatory planning exercise with local residents. Road and light rail infrastructure was put in place before major developments and new public-sector schemes were built, including a new campus for East London University. But this ‘new’ approach was not without its own contradictions and limitations. Brownill et al. (1998) argue that claims for a move to ‘partnership’ were premature because the decision-making structures of the LDDC remained unchanged. They also note that it was the local authorities that saw more significant inclusion in the new Docklands consensus, rather than the local community. The community investment programs were also manifestly unable to address the growing polarization in the area. Figures from the Isle of Dogs Community Foundation (2004) show that 60 percent of children living in the wards adjacent to Canary Wharf were living in poverty despite the community investment programs put in place. The budgets of these programs represented a mere 0.06 percent of the development’s total value. They were also vulnerable to market fluctuations. The buoyant land and property market of the 1980s crashed in the early 1990s, cutting off the flow of funds from developers and land sales to the LDDC and leading to a scaling back of community investment.

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Figure 6.4 ‘Second wave’ developments in the Royal Docks: Britannia Village (Photograph S. Brownill).

The same recession revealed the problems associated with relying on land and property markets as the engine for regeneration, as highlighted by the 1992 collapse of Olympia and York, the Canary Wharf developers. Indeed, at that time Fainstein (1994), drawing on the fact that close to 50 percent of the built space in Docklands was vacant, called it a “white elephant”—a symbol of a failed and outdated approach to regeneration. The LDDC was forced to call on more central government funds to provide the infrastructure to ‘lever’ the area out of recession. Alarmed at this, and at the perception that the LDDC had ceased to be the streamlined agent of the private sector and was “increasingly acting as a local authority” (LDDC 1998b, 4), in 1992 central government decided to close the LDDC as well as the twelve other UDCs that had been established nationally by this time (Imrie and Thomas 1999). The phased withdrawal from different parts of the LDDC area began with the Surrey Docks in 1994 and ended with the Royal Docks in 1998. Cochrane (1999, 249) argues that at the time of its demise, the LDDC was “allowed to sink relatively quietly into the sunset”, largely because of the local and national consensus on regeneration that existed at that time. However, it is also possible to see the continuing resonance of the clash of past discourses. Interviews with ex-LDDC officers reveal an anger and

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frustration that the successes of the LDDC, as they saw them, went unremarked. By 1998 markets had revived and Canary Wharf was not only fully occupied but set to double in size. The LDDC was able to claim that, since 1981, twenty-four thousand houses had been built, the population had increased by 144 percent and major new infrastructure had been provided (LDDC 1998b). The ex-officers attribute this silence to academics and the media only wanting to remember the ‘failures’ of the 1980s. Brownill and Ward (2009) see in this a continuing clash of differing ‘ideas’ of Docklands, as either a successful regeneration model to be followed or an exclusionary, unplanned approach to be rejected. This continuing dynamic between past and present discourses of regeneration continued once the LDDC had closed down, as the next section will show.

A NEW REGENERATION NARRATIVE? DOCKLANDS AFTER THE LDDC: 2003–2007 The Docklands story does not end with the LDDC. Since 1998 the discourses and governance of waterfront regeneration in Docklands have continued to evolve. The election of a New Labour government in 1997 marked a return to rhetoric and ideology in U.K. politics. This was reflected in the emergence of a ‘new’ regeneration narrative built around global competitiveness, networked governance, and social and environmental sustainability (Morgan 2002). This section explores the dynamics of regeneration within this period, concentrating on the years 2003–2007, during which major policy initiatives were launched but before the onset of recession. One significant change post-1998 was the disappearance of a defi ned policy area called ‘Docklands’ and of centralized oversight of its regeneration by a single agency. Instead a shifting and fragmented policy environment emerged, with attention moving to the regional and subregional levels of East London and the Thames Gateway—a corridor stretching forty miles on either side of the Thames from the Isle of Dogs to the coast (Allmendinger and Houghton 2007; Office for the Deputy Prime Minister [ODPM] 2003a, 2003c). Nevertheless, within the capital, East London remained the “priority area for development, regeneration and infrastructure improvement” (GLA 2005, 1). A complex geography of governance emerged. Immediately after the closure of the LDDC, planning powers reverted to the local boroughs. In 1999 regional government reappeared in the form of the GLA, which also acquired strategic planning powers. One year later a regional regeneration agency called the London Development Agency was established, linked to the GLA but with a separate board. This fragmentation was exacerbated by the establishment in 2005 of the Olympic Development Agency to develop the main site for the 2012 London Olympics in Stratford. Finally and remarkably, just five years after the LDDC was closed and UDCs had been termed an “historical

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curiosity” (Deas and Ward 1999), this governance form made a comeback with the establishment of two new UDCs; one covering the borough of Thurrock in Essex, and the other, the LTGUDC, taking in sections of the former LDDC area in the Lower Lea Valley as well as other areas further east. A substantial number of overlapping strategies and visions were produced by these various agencies. Indeed, the rhetoric and ideological content of these ‘visions’ stands in stark contrast to the almost sober prose of the LDDC documents from the 1980s. Buck et al. (2005) refer to a “new conventional wisdom” emerging within U.K. urban policy at this time, built on three elements: promoting global competitiveness (including London’s quest for world city status); ensuring social inclusion; and providing the networked governance forms that can link these different objectives. These elements are clearly visible in the strategies produced for East London. For example, in establishing a “growth area” in the Thames Gateway, the government stated that “the success of the Gateway is key to the wider UK economy and ensuring that London remains a global capital” (ODPM 2005, 2). The regeneration strategy of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH), now responsible for the Isle of Dogs, promoted the area as a “world-class quarter” and a “global city-district” (LBTH 2005, 5). The London Plan, produced by the GLA, has a “vision”: to develop London as an exemplary, sustainable world city based on the three balanced and interwoven themes of strong, long-term and diverse economic growth, social inclusivity and fundamental improvements in the environment and use of resources. (GLA 2004, 5; emphasis added) The use here of ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ neatly glosses over the fact that these may be mutually exclusive objectives. Such contradictions are evident in the government’s strategies for the Thames Gateway and other growth areas. This growth was to be achieved within sustainable communities that combined social, economic, and physical regeneration within a framework of localized governance and sustainability. It is this regeneration discourse that Raco (2005b) typifies as exhibiting the hybridity of neoliberalism and sustainability referred to previously. But it is also possible to see within this new narrative the persistence of previous regeneration discourses. The London Thames Gateway UDC’s vision, tellingly entitled Engines for Growth, talks about addressing “market failure” (LTGUDC 2005). This strategy also refers to “Docklands style” developments, suggesting that the past lives on within more recent approaches. In this way it is possible to see within the ‘new’ regeneration narrative an interplay between a range of discourses and agendas, some familiar and some evolving. Some writers are pessimistic about attempts to reconcile these contradictory objectives and discourses. Gordon (2004) sees an unquestioning reliance on ‘growth’ in these strategies. Massey (2007) notes that the reliance on fi nance capital, property development, and tall buildings, which led to

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the polarization of places such as the Isle of Dogs, were central to Mayor Livingstone’s attempts to retain London’s status as a global city. However, she also sees potential for alternative forms of globalization and urbanization to be opened up through the interaction between these different discourses and narratives and through the contradictions within them. Governance arrangements post-LDDC reflected the New Labour belief that networked, reflexive governance was a prerequisite to deliver its visions for growth and competitiveness (Stoker 2004; Morgan 2002). This resulted in the decentralization of governance to a variety of levels and the complex intermixing of different scales and types of agencies and different modes of decision-making already sketched out (Brownill and Carpenter 2009; Allmendinger and Houghton 2007). The re-emergence of the UDC is illustrative of these trends. No longer was the UDC a mechanism to force through a particular style of regeneration. Instead, “with its focus on planning powers, integration of regeneration effort and ability to generate increased private sector confidence”, it was seen pragmatically as a delivery vehicle with powers and functions appropriate to tackling brownfield sites (ODPM 2003b, 7). The new UDCs were not intended to bypass local government as their predecessors had, but to work in partnership with them, ‘adding value’ as part of the networked governance arrangements of New Labour (Raco 2005a). They were even termed “benign” (ODPM 2003b), and their boards were dominated by public-sector interests, although the community and voluntary sectors were once again excluded (Brownill and Carpenter 2009). It is also possible to see a variety of planning styles in operation within regeneration practice at this time, and the continuing evolution of the ‘strategic flexibility’ referred to in the previous section. Through the London Plan, for example, the capital once again had a strategic, statutory land-use plan, suggesting that the era of the ‘grand plan’ may well have returned. But flexibility lived on, in the ‘opportunity zones’ of the London Plan (GLA 2004) and the ‘zones of change’ in the Thames Gateway strategy (ODPM 2005), which were intended as sites open to ideas from the private sector. To this can be added the continuing centrality of design as a key element of strategy. For example, the GLA established an agency called Design for London that commissioned Lord Rogers to produce a design-based, growth-oriented ‘vision’ for East London called ‘City East’. Houghton and Allmendinger (2007) cite this as one example of the ‘new’ flexibility in planning that seeks to promote growth within the conditions of current urban development. Carmona (2009) and Hunt (2009) independently note the continuing influence of ‘privatemanagement planning’, based on the perceived success of the Canary Wharf master-planning process. Interviewees pointed to examples such as the giant Ebbsfleet development in the Thames Gateway as following these principles. However, Minton (2009, 5) is more critical, seeing this style of planning as a form of “ground control” leading to the privatization of city spaces, and Canary Wharf as “the standard model for the creation of every new place in towns and cities across the country”.

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These multiple discourses, governance forms, and practices resulted in a fragmented approach to regeneration on the ground. In areas such as the Isle of Dogs, the world city vision was vigorously pursued. By 1998, seven million square feet of development had been built at Canary Wharf and seven million more had been approved. Examination of planning applications reveals that by 2007 a further 11.7 million square feet were in the pipeline or planned, including two major extensions at Wood Wharf and Canary Riverside (Brownill and Ward 2009). On the Isle of Dogs, the Millennium Quarter was created just south of Canary Wharf, through the redevelopment of sites originally built in the mid-1980s, showing not only the intensity of development but the impermanence of the landscape. Finally, in the Royal Docks, Silvertown Quays became a flagship project for the GLA, centred on Biota!, an aquarium designed by Sir Terry Farrell, and also including five thousand residential units, workspaces, and retail and leisure uses (London Development Agency [LDA] 2005). But there were also attempts to strike a different balance between competitiveness and cohesion in different places. Gordon (2004) suggests that one reason for the emphasis on high-value development within GLA plans was that the extraction of developer contributions was seen as the only viable means of funding social benefits. For example, the London Plan had a policy that 50 percent of housing built in the capital should be affordable; a target that could only be achieved by establishing affordability requirements within private housing developments. This led to a redefi nition of the concept of leverage planning, illustrated by reference in the East London Sub-Regional Development Framework (a sub-document of the London Plan) to “embracing the opportunities for new strategic development” through the “leverage it brings to improve the urban structure and the level of urban services” (GLA 2005, 6; emphasis added). Similarly the vision for the Lower Lea Valley talked of “exemplary sustainable development” and “a network of compact, mixed-use, mixed tenure neighbourhoods complete with good public transport, shops, leisure facilities, schools healthcare and jobs” (LTGUDC 2006). Canning Town—also on the banks of the Lea Valley—was more successful in attempts to reconcile competitiveness and cohesion than the Isle of Dogs. Canning Town consisted largely of social housing that was bypassed by the LDDC. Post-LDDC it has been subject to a number of initiatives, including bottom-up efforts to address social exclusion such as the national New Deal for Communities initiative. LTGUDC has continued this focus, remodeling the area not as a flagship of global competitiveness but as a mixed-use, mixed-tenure area with a new ‘town centre’, and through initiatives such as The Place, which provide training and educational support for local residents (LTGUDC 2007). Even in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Tower Hamlets College has become a national centre for education in fi nancial services, with the aim of getting more local residents into jobs at Canary Wharf (see for example, National Skills Academy Financial Services 2009).

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Whether or not such developments can overcome the inherent contradictions between cohesion and competitiveness remains to be seen. Massey (2007) argues that the focus on ‘world city’–type developments has meant that the polarization of the LDDC era has intensified. Figures from the Tower Hamlets Regeneration Strategy (LBTH 2005) confi rm this. The borough is only just behind the city of London in terms of the average income of those working in the area (close to £60,000 p.a.), but this figure is skewed by a few highly paid jobs and by the fact that most of these highly paid workers do not live in the borough. At the same time, the borough was ranked fourth nationally in terms of combined levels of poverty, poor housing, education levels, and access to services, and over one-quarter of residents had incomes below £15,000 per year (Local Futures 2007). At Canary Wharf such inequalities were highlighted by a successful local campaign to secure a living wage for the people who cleaned the offices of the high-earning bankers (Mason 2007). However, this localized campaigning has not been reflected in coherent alternative regeneration strategies. In terms of governance, the move from centralization to decentralization has produced a complex governance landscape with its own contradictions. Within the Thames Gateway, for example, the myriad governance agencies were seen as resulting in confusion and problems of ‘joining-up’ (Catney, Dixon, and Henneberry 2008; National Audit Office 2007). This led some, including the architect Lord Richard Rogers, to reflect nostalgically on the LDDC, seeing it as a model of how to get things done (Carpenter 2005). The small budgets of the new delivery agencies also slowed up delivery (Raco 2005a), with LTGUDC receiving £120 million in government grants over the three years 2008–2011, compared with the LDDC getting ten times that at 1998 prices. Research has also questioned whether the new governance arrangements have shifted the relations of power and influence within regeneration. Thornley et al. (2005), for example, identified continuing ‘business privilege’ in the drawing up of the London Plan, noting how the pursuit of the world city vision for London was predicated on ensuring support from financial and property institutions, and providing them with privileged access to decision-making. Docklands post-LDDC therefore became a place where different discourses, different governance arrangements, and different practices of planning co-existed and interacted. No one ‘model’ of regeneration emerged and there were no major ideological clashes; instead, the tensions between these different discourses played themselves out in different ways in different projects and strategies. Rather than constituting a new ‘era’, we can see a different resolution of the age-old dilemmas of regeneration and a different interplay of governance forms and regeneration narratives and practices. At this time it is also possible to see past regeneration narratives entering the present in complex ways, with Docklands being simultaneously referred to as a model to be rejected and an aspiration to be realized. The contested ‘ideas’ of Docklands that had emerged in the early 1980s therefore continued to interact within the dynamics of regeneration in later years.

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CONCLUSIONS: THE RECESSION—THE END OF AN ERA? In September 2008, the evolution of waterfront regeneration in London, as elsewhere, took a dramatic turn with the onset of the global fi nancial crisis. Docklands, and in particular Canary Wharf, became a symbol of this crisis, forming the backdrop to countless media stories. With the highprofile closure of banks such as Lehman Brothers, which had located there, it also became a site where the crisis was played out. Although at the time of writing this crisis is yet to run its course, by way of conclusion it is worth reflecting on some of its emerging impacts. Clearly the underpinnings of many of the previous regeneration approaches are threatened. It is difficult to sustain growth strategies and to extract value for social investment in a recession. For example, the value of the Canary Wharf estate slumped from £7.2 billion in December 2007 to £4.9 billion in December 2008, placing its owners, Songbird Acquisitions, at risk of being put into administration and putting into doubt plans for further expansion of the site (Duncan 2009). Plans for Silvertown Quays have also stalled (Klettner 2009). Some see in this an end to the forms of urbanism that have been dominant since the 1980s, and call for a return to the plan-led and public-sector-led approach of the 1970s (Hall 2008). Indeed, this is evident in the Olympic Village, which has seen the planned investment by private housebuilders replaced by £1 billion of public-sector investment (Sell 2009). The recession could also be an opportunity for rebalancing local against global and inclusion against competitiveness, as suggested by Massey (2007). Regeneration discourses that were less prominent in the consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s have reemerged. But whether the short-term impact of the recession equals a longterm return to these different regeneration discourses, or merely an interlude before business returns to normal, remains to be seen. Construction continues at Wood Wharf, a major development close to Canary Wharf; at the same time, public expenditure cuts are likely to have a significant impact. The complexity of the situation appears to be increasing. Political and governance changes in the U.K. are likely to add to this complexity. A change from Labour to Conservative control occurred within London in 2008 with the election of Boris Johnson as mayor, and this is likely to be repeated at the national level in 2010. While the focus on East London as a site for regeneration has been retained within policy documents, there is less emphasis on social inclusion and on achieving cross-subsidies from development (GLA 2008). The complex forms of governance associated with the localism of New Labour are also likely to be restructured. While it may be tempting to see the recession as an end of an era of waterfront regeneration in Docklands, the analysis built up in this chapter would suggest otherwise. Instead a picture is emerging of a continuing interplay between competing agendas, discourses, and practices of regeneration, an interplay that is likely to shift the balance between them. The past is also reentering the present in different ways, as the contested ‘idea’ of Docklands as

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a regeneration approach continues to be refashioned, either as either a symbol of a failed model of urbanism or as a way out of crisis. Rather than typifying these processes, analysis needs to capture their complexities and consider the alternative futures they present. Meanwhile, in an uncertain world one thing can still be relied upon: that is, the Docklands’ continuing role as a microcosm of wider shifts in the dynamics of waterfront regeneration.

NOTES 1. The author would like to thank Rob Woodward who drew the map for my chapter, Diane Earl and gallery E2BN for the use of her photograph of Canary Wharf in Figure 6.1, and the volume editors for dealing with all the details.

REFERENCES Allmendinger Phillip. 2003. From new right to new left in UK planning. Urban Policy and Research 21(1): 57–79. Allmendinger, Phillip and Graham Houghton. 2007 The fluid scales and scope of UK spatial planning. Environment and Planning A 39:1478–1469. Brenner, Neil and Nick Theodore. 2002. Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Brindley, Tim, Yvonne Rydin, and Gerry Stoker. 1989. Remaking planning. London: Unwin Hyman. Brownill, Sue. 1993. Developing London’s Docklands: Another great planning disaster? 2nd ed. London: Paul Chapman. . 1999. Turning the East End into the West End? In British urban policy: An evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations, eds. Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas. London: Sage. Brownill, Sue and Juliet Carpenter. 2009. Fit for purpose? Governance and integrated planning in the Thames Gateway, England. Urban Studies 46(2): 251–274. Brownill, Sue, Ben Kochan, Simona Florio, and Connie Razzaque. 1998. From exclusion to partnership? The LDDC and community consultation. Rising East 2(2): 42–72. Brownill, Sue and Steve Ward. 2009. The idea of Docklands. Paper presented to 23rd Congress of the Association of European Schools of Planning, Liverpool. Buck, Nick, Iain Gordon, Alan Harding, and Ivan Turok, eds. 2005. Changing cities: Rethinking urban competitiveness, cohesion and governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carmona, Mathew. 2009. The Isle of Dogs: Four development waves, five planning models, thirty-five years, and a renaissance . . . of sorts. Progress in Planning 71:87–151. Carpenter, Jamie. 2005. Rogers returns. Regeneration and Renewal 18(November): 18–19. Catney Phillip, Tim Dixon, and John Henneberry. 2008. Hyperactive governance in the Thames Gateway. Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal 2(2): 124–145. Cochrane, Alan. 1999. Just another failed urban experiment? In British urban policy: An evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations, eds. Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas. London: Sage.

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Deas, Ian and Colin Ward. 1999. The song is over but the memory lingers. Local Economy 14(2): 114–132. Docklands Joint Committee. 1976. The London Docklands strategic plan. London: DJC. Duncan, Hugo. 2009. How the recession is poisoning the Wharf. London Evening Standard, 2 June. Fainstein, Susan. 1994. The city builders: Property, politics and planning in London and New York. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Florio, Simona and Sue Brownill. 2000. Whatever happened to criticism? Interpreting the London Docklands Development Corporations obituary. City 4(1): 53–64. Foster, Janet. 1999. Docklands. London: UCL Press. Gordon, Ian. 2004. Capital needs, capital growth and global city rhetoric in Mayor Livingstone’s London Plan. GaWC Research Bulletin 145. Loughborough: University of Loughborough. Greater London Authority. 2004. The London Plan. London: GLA. . 2005. Sub-regional development framework: East London. London: GLA. . 2006. Lower Lea Valley development framework. London: GLA. . 2008. Planning for a better London. London: GLA. Hall, Peter. 2008. Our future might lie in Keynesianism. Regeneration and Renewal 26(September): 16. Hall, Steven. 2003. The ‘Third Way’ revisited: ‘New’ Labour, spatial policy and the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal. Planning, Practice and Research 18(4): 265–277. Houghton, Graham and Phillip Allmendinger. 2007. ‘Soft spaces’ in planning. Town and Country Planning (September): 306–309. Hunt, Tristram. 2009. Britain in their sites. Episode three. BBC Radio Three, 7 June. House of Commons. 1988. HC-327–11. The employment effects of UDCs. Employment Committee 3rd report Vol 2. Minutes of evidence. London: HMSO. Imrie, Rob and Thomas Huw. 1993. British urban policy and the Urban Development Corporations. 1st ed. London: Paul Chapman. . 1999. British urban policy: An evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Isle of Dogs Community Foundation. 2004. Regenerating the Isle of Dogs. Update. London: IDCF. Jessop, Bob. 2000. Governance failure. In The new politics of British local governance, ed. Gerry Stoker. Basingstoke: McMillan. Keith, Michael. 2009. Figuring city change: Understanding urban regeneration in Britain’s Thames Gateway. In Regenerating London, eds. Rob Imrie, Mike Raco, and Loretta Lees. London: Routledge. Klettner, A. 2009. Massive Silvertown Quays development mothballed by LDA. Architects Journal, 28 September. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Local Futures. 2007. The state of the borough: An economic, social and environmental profile of Tower Hamlets. London: Local Futures. Local Government Planning and Land Act. 1980. London: HMSO. London Borough of Tower Hamlets. 2005. Regeneration strategy. London: LBTH. London Development Agency. 2005. Silvertown Quays masterplan and design code. London: LDA. London Docklands Development Corporation. 1982. Annual report and accounts for 1981–82. London: LDDC.

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. 1985. A draft development framework for the Royal Docks. London: LDDC. . 1987. Corporate plan. London: LDDC. . 1989. Annual report and accounts for 1988–89. London: LDDC. . 1998a. Attracting investment creating value: Establishing a property market in London Docklands. London: LDDC. . 1998b. A strategy for regeneration: The planning and development strategy of the LDDC. London: LDDC. London Thames Gateway Urban Development Corporation. 2005. Engines for growth: A vision for the Lower Lea Valley and London Riverside. London: LTGDC. . 2006. Vision for the Lower Lea Valley. London: LTGUDC. . 2007. Canning Town: The centre of attention. London: LTGUDC. Mason, P. 2007. New dawn for the workers, New Statesman, 16 April, 32–34. Massey, Doreen. 2007. World city. Cambridge: Polity Press. Minton, Anna. 2009. Ground control. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Morgan Kevin. 2002. The new regeneration narrative: Local development in the multi-level polity. Local Economy 17(3): 191–199. Moulaert, Frank, Arantxa Rodriguez, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2003. The globalised city: Economic restructuring and social polarisation in European cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. National Audit Office. 2007. The Thames Gateway: Laying the foundations. London: National Audit Office. National Skills Academy Financial Services. 2009. Tower Hamlets College. Accessed 23 September 2009. Newham Docklands Forum. 1984. The people’s plan for the Royal Docks. London: Newham Docklands Forum. Newman, Janet. 2001. Modernising governance. London: Sage. Oatley Nick. 1998. Cities, economic competitiveness and urban policy. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Office for the Deputy Prime Minister. 2003a. Creating sustainable communities: Making it happen: Thames Gateway and the growth areas. London: ODPM. . 2003b. Sustainable communities: An Urban Development Corporation for the London Thames Gateway. London: ODPM. . 2003c. Sustainable communities: Building for the future. London: ODPM. . 2005. Creating sustainable communities: Delivering the Thames Gateway. London: ODPM. Peck, Jamie and Alan Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalising space. Antipode 34:380– 404. Raco, Mike. 2005a. A step change or a step back? The Thames Gateway and the re-birth of the UDCs. Local Economy 20(2): 141–153. . 2005b. Sustainable development, rolled-out neoliberalism and sustainable communities. Antipode 37(2): 324–347. Sell, Christopher. 2009. Public money to fund Olympic Village. Architects Journal 13(May). Accessed June 25, 2010. Stoker, Gerry. 2004. Transforming local governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Thornley, Andy. 1991. Urban planning under Thatcherism: The challenge of the market. London: Routledge. Thornley, Andy, Yvonne Rydin, Karen Scanlon, and Keith West. 2005. Business privilege and the strategic planning agenda of the Greater London Authority. Urban Studies 42(11): 1947–1968.

7

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism Jasper Rubin1

Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), recently suggested that as part of “an agenda for prosperity” San Francisco should “fully fund a public-private economic development entity”, “depoliticize the planning process . . . [and] restore the ideals of a professional planning department” (Metcalf 2009, 33). Metcalf’s proposals are growth-centred and market-oriented and imply that planning as an endeavour of the state should be rational. 2 Such ideas fall within the gamut of neoliberal thought and ideology, if not practice. Indeed, the neoliberal approach to solving perceived urban problems is increasingly common, and one would not be surprised to encounter some version of it in most cities in the U.S. and the global north. That it is even being plied in progressive San Francisco, sometimes called the “left coast city”, is perhaps a sign that we are indeed living in an age of neoliberal urbanism. While San Francisco has been experiencing the effects of neoliberalism in many ways, its waterfront exhibits something slightly different. Changes along the water’s edge are not, for the most part, the kind typically associated with the flows of capital investment in an increasingly deregulated and privatized urban environment. Rather, the waterfront provides an example of a relatively successful struggle to emphasize public and civic space instead of accumulation and spectacle. This is due to a complex and ‘burdensome’ set of land-use policies and building restrictions that apply to waterfront development in San Francisco. This chapter examines the evolution of these policies and restrictions, which originated about forty years ago and have, so far, created a bulwark against the pressures of contemporary neoliberal urbanization. Importantly, they are the result of a civic-minded planning and regulatory regime that began as a response to massive, modernist proposals for the development of Port property in the 1960s, a time that marked the end of San Francisco as a major shipping port. So, while understanding the contours of San Francisco’s waterfront landscape requires an historical approach, we start with a brief discussion of urban neoliberalism, with particular reference to San Francisco.

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NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CITY Neoliberalism is at once a hazy and complex concept, which David Wilson (2004, 771) has described as a “series of differentiated, keenly negotiating, processural [sic], and space-mobilizing constructions”. Neoliberalism is not found in a pure form; rather, it comes to exist as variations on a theme. It is not imposed on places, or economies, or political units, everywhere or at every scale in the same way. Instead, “actually existing” neoliberalisms (Brenner and Theodore 2002) reflect the particularities of the politicaleconomic, social, and cultural structures or formations that are in place. Neoliberalism is seen variously as contextual—historically and geographically specific—contingent, embedded, and multi-scalar (Peck and Tickell 2007; Wilson 2004; Brenner and Theodore 2002). Despite its apparently fluid nature, neoliberalism is taken to have some generally agreed-upon, more or less concrete characteristics. Broadly speaking, it has entailed a “roll-back” of Keynesian welfare state policies and a “roll-out” of new or restructured institutions and policy agendas that are anti-statist (Peck and Tickell 2002). Its main hallmarks, all rather interrelated, include: deregulation; the devolution of government functions and responsibilities, usually without a concomitant increase in aid to newly burdened local entities; a free market fundamentalism that underlies new strategies for capital accumulation and relies on and encourages new modes of governance; and the privatization of public resources, including, for example, the creation of quasi-public entities and the use of contractors to carry out government activities. Clearly neoliberalism is an urbanized phenomenon. Cities are fundamental to its realization; in them, an ideology that cleaves to the free market as the best way to promote individual freedom and the efficient distribution of resources becomes tangible and materialized. Cities serve as key sites in the pursuit of economic restructuring and capital accumulation, and are primary loci for implementing new policy regimes that support such endeavours. Governance of the neoliberal city is often entrepreneurial (Harvey 1989). For Harvey, the transition from managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism is focused on “investment and economic development with the speculative construction of place rather than amelioration of conditions . . . as its political and economic goal” (Harvey 1989, 8). As Peck and Tickell (2002) point out, though, this switch cannot be due entirely to neoliberalism. With fewer resources available to them, local state institutions are encouraged to pursue pro-growth strategies in the hope of siphoning off fees and taxes for public coffers and of creating jobs and extensive economic multipliers. Local governments are also forced along the entrepreneurial path by larger structural impulses. For instance, Hackworth (2007) points to the critical role of bond rating agencies, which require cities to adopt fiscal austerity measures, reduce public-sector employment, and adopt market-oriented policy in order to receive acceptable investment-level ratings.

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 145 Although hardly unique to neoliberalism, representatives of capital fuel its fi res by perpetuating a discourse of development, boosterism, gentrification, and the need for a ‘business-friendly’ city.3 These conditions result in cutbacks to social welfare programs and a turn to punitive and authoritarian policy mandates. Surveillance and policing increase and criminalization of the poor and the antisocial deepens (Mitchell 2003; MacLeod 2002; Smith 1996). The private sphere expands into the public realm, for instance, through public/private partnerships and the flourishing of business improvement districts. Streets are cleaned, flower baskets are hung from light standards, and good urban design becomes a ‘best practice’. To survive and prosper, therefore, the city must be attractive to fi rms in dynamic sectors of the economy, to visitor-consumers from around the world, and to potential new residents of the well-heeled, creative variety. Indeed, the entrepreneurial city has been closely tied to a ‘creative class’ urban growth strategy (Zimmerman 2008). The built environment becomes the focus of strenuous efforts to sell the city, which is adorned with spectacle: entertainment centres, mixed-use projects, cultural events, consumable cultural diversity, and, of course, gleaming, revitalized waterfronts. In Lefebvrian terms, neoliberal urbanism emphasizes exchange value over use value. That is to say that an emphasis on the market, commodities, and property erodes what Lefebvre has famously called the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996). For Lefebvre, the right to the city is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places” (1996, 179). Lefebvre asserts that the working class has been expelled from the centre, which to him meant both the heart of the physical city and decision-making processes. Claiming the right to the city, then, means claiming the right to inhabit the city as well as the right to participate in the city’s creation. The idea of the right to the city has increasingly become a rallying cry and concept used to frame, if not address, problems confronting urban society, from how we deal with public space and the homeless (Mitchell 2003) to the pursuit of global initiatives to improve urban governance (UNESCO 2005). Recently, Mark Purcell has argued that the right to the city can be leveraged as a “counter-claim” to neoliberal attempts to stake out the city as a place to pursue accumulation strategies (Purcell 2008). Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city, framed partly in the “opposition between use value (the city and urban life) and exchange value (spaces bought and sold, the consumption of products, goods, places and signs)” (Lefebvre 1996, 86), provides us with a conceptual link to the ideas of fi xity and flow. Waterfronts embody elements of both fi xity and flow, but what is fi xed and what flows changes over time. In considering the link between exchange and use values and fi xity and flow, the key characteristic of a waterfront is that it is an edge. This edge is critical because crossing it

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frequently requires large capital investments in wharfs, piers, quays, cranes, railroads, roads, etc. And both the use and exchange value of the water’s edge depends very much on those capital investments. Although the edge is a relatively fi xed feature, its precise location will vary as a result of both human interventions and biophysical forces. The kinds of flows that cross the land–water edge can vary dramatically, especially when the functions of the waterfront are in transition. When a waterfront is dominated by shipping, that is, providing facilities for the flow of goods and commodities, capital is fixed in extensive infrastructure for loading, unloading, and storage of goods and intermodal facilities. However, as the flow of these goods changes in volume, or is redirected to new destinations, shipping declines and the exchange value of land at the water’s edge will also decline. But waterfront land that no longer accommodates shipping holds the potential for new developments, and may be revalued through market processes. The revaluation, however, may be subject to contestation. The meeting of land and water is considered evocative, engaging to the senses, and environmentally important—and these characteristics can be exploited in different ways. Extracting exchange value from an under-utilized waterfront requires attracting new flows of capital. This capital, in turn, is used in the production of a new built environment (e.g., offices and luxury apartments) that becomes fixed in place for years and serves to enhance accumulation (itself another kind of flow). However, the creation of open space and access to the water, for instance, emphasizes use value and is the result of a different kind of investment. Thus, the character of a waterfront at any moment in time can be seen to have resulted from struggles over exchange and use values. Whoever has prevailed in these struggles represents a dominant social and economic group, and its interests will become fixed in the built environment. In the case of San Francisco, land-use planning and regulation have been a critical part of this struggle, and planning figures prominently in Lefebvre’s discussion of the right to the city. Primarily, Lefebvre sees planning as an ideological and technocratic endeavour that serves to segment the population; that is, planning is a function of the state that preserves the ‘centre’ as a bastion for the powerful and the elite. At the same time, it displaces the working class (and more generally ‘non-dominant’ groups) from the centre, depriving them of the right to the city. And, by helping to transform the urban core into a place of commodities and consumption, planning emphasizes exchange value rather than use value. But planning is also necessary to reform the city: “The realization of urban society calls for a planning oriented towards social needs, those of urban society” (Lefebvre 1996, 178). Lefebvre asserts that a reorientation of planning is a revolutionary act that can only be successful if the working class takes charge. Of course, I make no claims that waterfront planning in San Francisco has been revolutionary. But I do suggest that its evolution has been keenly influenced by public interest in preserving use value, which has been supported by an enlightened, as opposed to technocratic, bureaucracy, and the results have

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 147 been more than superficial (see Lefebvre 1996, 178–179). Thus, in the case of San Francisco’s waterfront, the planning and regulatory regime should be seen as an institutional fi xity that has, as we will see, caused the flow of neoliberalism in San Francisco to ebb at the waterfront, and allowed wider social needs to be met.

NEOLIBERAL SAN FRANCISCO The holy grail of the neoliberal urban quest is for cities to become ‘worldclass’, and San Francisco, once known as “the city that knows how”, has probably already achieved this goal: it is a centre of innovation, creativity, and job creation; it is a city of headquarters, including those of companies such as Bechtel, the Gap, Lucasfilm, Wells Fargo, and a raft of high-end business services firms; it has a zeal for ‘starchitect’ projects (especially museums) and is a locus for investment in major cultural institutions; and it induces consumption at impressive levels. These qualities have helped transform San Francisco’s built environment over the last twenty years, and the changes have been legion. The downtown has expanded both upward and outward, and its advance has been coupled with a march of luxury condo towers that spike regenerating neighbourhoods. Several major, upmarket hotels have been constructed, a large upscale shopping mall has been poured into the shell of a landmark downtown building, and market-rate housing spreads like exotic weeds through the once-industrial eastern side of the city, displacing bluecollar jobs and local businesses. San Francisco’s recent gentrification has been rapid and extensive, carried out at a scale and, often, in a methodical fashion that differentiates it from the more ‘organic’ form wherein neighbourhoods are slowly transformed with sweat equity. For San Francisco, gentrification indeed has been, as Hackworth (2007) describes it, the “knife’s edge” of neoliberal urbanism, and it is bifurcating the city’s class structure. Such transformations are abetted by governance and policy agendas that help to create San Francisco’s actually existing neoliberalisms. Signs of public-sector urban entrepreneurialism abound, highlighted by the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce development in the 1990s. The term ‘best practices’ is favoured by the current mayor, Gavin Newsom, and is ever on the lips of department heads and senior managers. Mayor Newsom rose to office on a homelessness program called “Care not Cash” that stopped cash payments to homeless people and replaced them with a housing placement and support service system that has been widely criticized (see Murphy 2008). Newsom has also deployed surveillance cameras in troubled neighbourhoods, although his program pales against what has been done in the U.K. (see MacLeod 2002). In tenacious support of the free market, the downtown elite and the mayor’s growth machine fought furiously against a major community planning process aimed, in part, at supporting the working class. Public/private partnerships proliferate, especially

148 Jasper Rubin under the aegis of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Port of San Francisco (the latter will be discussed later). Business improvement districts (BIDS) have spread beyond the typical downtown areas into neighbourhood high streets. Even in the mundane world of parking provision, neoliberal factions push for market-based pricing schemes for access to public street space (Henderson 2008). And the city has of late bent over backwards to attract biotechnology, green tech, and multimedia fi rms with a mix of tax exemptions, land-use controls, and a discourse that builds a world-class city from “Better Neighbourhoods” programs and hip urban living. Indeed, even a city that prides itself on its cultural diversity may be shifting from being “a place of diverse production to a place of homogeneous consumption” (Chion 2009, 436) as its diversity is put on display and made part of the marketing of neighbourhoods and bourgeois lifestyles, all to attract the right demographic mix and to sustain its creative class. But cities are more than “zones of ideological and institutional experimentation in this era of market-oriented politics; they are also preeminent sites of resistance and struggle” (Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007, ix). While the efficacy of localized urban resistance is a matter of debate, San Francisco has had some success.4 The city has adopted social support policies that include initiating a universal health care program for its residents, imposing a notinsignificant inclusionary housing requirement, and becoming a sanctuary city—one that protects illegal immigrants by disallowing the use of resources to implement or support federal immigration law, typically preventing inquiries into an individual’s immigration status. And along the waterfront the pace of change has been slow, and what has happened to its built environment, especially recently, is quite different from what has occurred in many other parts of the city under the shadow of neoliberal urbanism. That San Francisco’s waterfront has not been turned over completely to consumption or sacrificed to the demands of the property market supports arguments made by Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard (2007) that there can be meaningful resistance to neoliberal impulses at the “urban frontier”. San Francisco’s actually existing neoliberalism, then, is not one that has become fully dominant. Neoliberal pressures on the city have been tempered by a progressive culture and what is in some ways a relatively caring government. Critical to the transformation of the waterfront has been a ‘green’ politics based in grassroots environmental activism, influenced by a strong sense of place felt by many residents and cityplanners. This transformation has been much different from what it might have been had the Port been successful with its proposals to replace the flow of goods across the northern waterfront with a flow of new investment.

MODERNIST MISSES In this chapter “port” and “waterfront” refer to the area under the jurisdiction of the Port of San Francisco, which includes piers and a number of inland

Figure 7.1

Axonometric drawing of San Francisco Port’s northern waterfront (courtesy of the Port of San Francisco).

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seawall lots (Figure 7.1). The discussion focuses on the northern waterfront, where maritime industrial activities have all but disappeared and where the potential for change has been greatest. San Francisco’s waterfront is of course not what it used to be. Like many older ports, it lost much of its maritime activity as a result of containerization and broader urban restructuring, processes that began in the 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s (Rubin, forthcoming). Across the San Francisco Bay, the city of Oakland’s port was quicker to develop container facilities and, in the end, enjoyed a site and situation far more adaptable to the requirements of the new shipping technology. The volume of its cargo operations surged past San Francisco’s in 1969 and it has remained the dominant port ever since. The Port struggled over the subsequent decades to revive its shipping operations, but has never moved beyond serving niche markets. But San Francisco’s story is unusual. While many other ports were able to reinvent their waterfronts, developing disused lands with offices, housing, hotels, and entertainment facilities, San Francisco’s waterfront was largely stagnant for three or four decades, until the 1990s. It has no office towers, housing has been built in only two places along its seven-mile stretch, and hotels are absent. Disused piers have not erupted with mega-projects— new or old (Lehrer and Laidley 2008). Rather, there has been an emphasis, so far, on adaptive reuse, moderately scaled, contextual development, access to the water, and provision of other public amenities. At about the same time that the Port experienced its decline in shipping, San Francisco itself was rapidly becoming a post-industrial city, a change that pressed its downtown close to the water’s edge. Initiated in the 1950s and built over a twenty-five-year period, a massive mixed-used project sponsored by the city’s redevelopment agency ate away at the old urban fabric across the Embarcadero from the symbolic, if not functional, heart of the waterfront. The Embarcadero is a very broad right-of-way that once accommodated the Port’s rail services as well as truck and automobile traffic. While these changes to the built environment did not occur within areas under the Port’s jurisdiction, they were close enough to create land-use conflicts with those maritime activities that could still make use of fi nger piers. The increasing divide between the city and its Port was made more abrupt and distinct by the construction of the elevated Embarcadero Freeway during the late 1950s. Although intended to improve truck access to docks in the area, the freeway really served downtown commercial development and Chinatown businesses, and it fit better with new visions for the waterfront being formed by Port officials (Rubin, forthcoming). Construction of the Embarcadero Freeway was halted in 1959 as a consequence of the populist freeway revolts. Severely damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, it was torn down in the early 1990s and eventually replaced by a palm tree– lined multimodal roadway. In this context, Port Authority President Cyril Magnin and his agency concluded that most of the northern waterfront was ripe for change and that shipping and other maritime activities should be concentrated along

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 151 the southern waterfront, far from downtown (Rubin, forthcoming). Thus, in the 1950s began a long-running discourse framed in the rhetoric of decay and rebirth, what one might conceive of as an organic trope, to borrow from Gibson (2003)—that new life could spring out from the water and over it, and that profit from new development along the northern waterfront could seed the growth of shipping activities to the south. Until 1969 the Port was owned and operated by the state of California, which meant that the Port Authority could pursue a course for change without consulting local city government. Furthermore, the Port did not have any plans, land-use policies, or regulations for guiding development of its property (Rubin, forthcoming). Practically unrestrained, Magnin and the Port began in the 1950s to entertain proposals for mammoth, modernist visions for recreating the northern waterfront. The most grandiose was Magnin’s pet project, Embarcadero City (Figure 7.2), a fabrication of unrestrained modernist dreams, sketched into the realm of the possible by two architects, John S. Bolles and Ernst Born, in about 1958 (San Francisco Port Authority 1959). While the Embarcadero City concept and others of its ilk did not result in physical changes, they set the stage for what would become a critical struggle over development at the end of the 1960s. What was common to these projects, other than their failure to materialize, was their clear disregard for their physical and environmental context, especially with respect to the water. The goal of such proposals was to enhance real estate

Figure 7.2 A sketch of the proposal for Embarcadero City by Bolles and Born, circa 1960 (courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library).

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value, and to serve as an extension of downtown and the urban edge in a land-strapped city. These schemes thus emphasized exchange value and the flow of capital accumulation; if the northern waterfront could not support industry, then it would support investment in the second circuit of capital and become a new kind of commodity. These proposals are important to this story because the hubris of the modernist vision they presented, along with a steadily shrinking Bay (the result of being filled for development and industrial purposes), served as a wake-up call to activists and planners. The last of these projects were proposed at the end of the 1960s. Because they were fully developed concepts proposed by developers to local officials, not just ideas sketched and modeled by architects, they were much more real than their predecessors. But they came along just as three events of fundamental importance to planning and regulation were unfolding. First, a successful campaign to transfer control of the Port from the state of California to the city of San Francisco concluded in 1969. The Port’s physical jurisdiction did not change and it retained control of its property, but after the transfer any proposals for development of its property were subject to local planning policy, building height and bulk controls, and the entitlement process (the process of obtaining all permits and permissions— ministerial, legislative, and judicial—required to undertake a development project). Activists and neighbourhood groups could now influence the Port through the local planning process, even as the Port became a jewel in the eye of the mayor’s office and some members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city’s legislative body. In actuality, the conditions of the transfer established the Port as a quasi-independent agency, resulting, for instance, in the Port not receiving direct fi nancial support from the city. However, when the Port decides to pursue development of its property it must seek the approval of its governing commission (whose members are appointed by the mayor) and, if the development exceeds certain thresholds, it must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. The transfer was not an act of neoliberal devolution but rather the result of a locally generated campaign, and it required ballot approval by San Francisco residents. SPUR supported the change, suggesting that “a confl ict of interests between the fi nancial needs of the Port and the environmental, social and cultural needs of the City may develop under the present port ownership” (SPUR 1968, 8). The transfer came with strings, however. As part of the transfer agreement, the State required that the Port invest one hundred million dollars in shipping and related activities. Furthermore, to support that investment, the Port was required to maximize the return from development of any land surplus to maritime needs. Of course, highest and best uses tend to be the most controversial, especially in light of the events outlined below, which together formalized environmental concerns into policy and regulation. The second important event was the deepening influence of environmentalism on local planning. The San Francisco Bay Area was the birthplace of

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 153 the urban environmental movement in the U.S., in which concern was not just for air and water quality, but also for the environment more broadly conceived—that is, the need for public access to natural areas and open spaces and thus for constrained urban development (see Walker 2007). Partly because of strong ties to the University of California-Berkeley, and the work of Telesis—an influential organization of planners and architects active during the 1940s and 1950s—the city’s planners have been very sensitive to environmental issues and to the importance of development that respects the natural setting and reflects social needs, not just economic imperatives (Violich 2001). One result of this concern was the adoption of the Northern Waterfront Plan, part of San Francisco’s General Plan, which established land-use policies and generated new height and bulk controls on and near the waterfront (San Francisco Planning Department 1969). Heights were limited to forty feet in many areas, and open space and public access to the Bay were required as part of any development on the waterfront—both of which were real disincentives to developers. Without the Port’s transfer to the city, the Northern Waterfront Plan would have had no impact on land within the Port’s jurisdiction (Rubin, forthcoming). The third event was the creation of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). Urban and industrial growth had, by the mid-1960s, reduced the open surface of the Bay by a third and wetlands by 75 percent (Rubin, forthcoming). Three women from the city of Berkeley, shocked by such unbridled development, launched a grassroots campaign to stop destruction of the Bay. Their efforts grew into an organization called Save the Bay. Save the Bay was extraordinarily successful at exerting pressure on local city councils and politicos in Sacramento, the state capital, and was also able to launch lawsuits and intervene in court proceedings related to major development proposals (Gulick 1988). Working with local elected representatives, Save the Bay successfully pushed for the passage of the McAteer-Petris Act in 1965—the legislation that created BCDC. The agency’s main task is to administer a comprehensive and enforceable plan to protect San Francisco Bay and its shoreline. Its primary tool in this regard is the Bay Plan, fi rst published in 1969. Perhaps the most important power of the Plan is to limit bay fill, which includes piers and most anything built over the water. The Plan also controls uses on new or replacement fill, particularly prohibiting office and housing, which, other than being non-maritime, are considered privatizing uses (BCDC 1979). BCDC’s jurisdiction included most, but not all, of the Port’s property. Despite the evolving planning and regulatory environment, the Port was still burdened with the need to generate income to invest in maritime activities and to resuscitate the dying waterfront. So it cast its net for development proposals. The fi rst, in 1967, was Ferry Port Plaza, proposed by a Hawaiian developer with fi nancing from New York, and designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). The project included a twelve-hundredroom luxury hotel, offices, shops, and parking for twenty-four hundred

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cars crammed onto a single sixteen-hectare pier that was to replace four older piers just north of the Ferry Building. The project was endorsed by the mayor, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, and the American Institute of Architects. It moved forward quickly and in 1969 the Port entered a lease agreement with the sponsors. Approvals from the Planning Department and Board of Supervisors came soon thereafter. Despite strong local support, BCDC’s approval of the project was not certain, and proponents pinned their hopes on something called the ‘rule of equivalencies’. The rule would have allowed BCDC to approve non-water-related development, such as office space, if an equal amount of open water was created elsewhere, by removing old piers for instance. Even so, environmentalists were aghast at the project’s sixteen-football-field footprint over the water, and vociferously opposed it at a pivotal BCDC hearing. Calls to prevent the “rape of the waterfront” came from the Marine Conservation League, Friends of the Earth, San Francisco Beautiful, and other groups (San Francisco Chronicle 1970a). Ultimately, the issue was decided by California’s attorney general, who concluded that BCDC had to maintain its restrictions on non-water-oriented development, regardless of whether old piers were removed (Workman 1970b). San Francisco mayor, Joseph Alioto, railed against the decision, and argued that BCDC did not have the power to create “a condition that effectively embalms rotting piers”—he was wrong about BCDC but right about the impact of the decision (Workman 1970c). At about the same time that Ferry Port Plaza was being considered, the Port was soliciting proposals for the area just south of the Ferry Building, not far from the Bay Bridge. It chose a scheme proposed by U.S. Steel to replace existing piers with a cruise terminal, shopping centre, twentyfive-storey hotel, and a 168-metre office tower that would have been taller than the pylons of the Bay Bridge. The battle lines were drawn quickly. Not unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce favoured the project as did unions (whose members stood to benefit from construction and cruise-oriented maritime work), while community activists, architects, conservationists, and city-planning department staff did not (San Francisco Chronicle 1970c; Burns 1970). This time, the struggle converged over height limits. The San Francisco Planning Commission, the decision-making body for the city’s planning department, was in the process of approving implementation actions associated with the new Northern Waterfront Plan, which included adopting height limits. They agreed to increase the height limit in the project area from the originally proposed range of 26 to 53 metres to 122 metres and sent the change to the Board of Supervisors for approval (San Francisco Chronicle 1970b). But under pressure from the Port, which argued that a height of 168 metres was necessary to allow sufficient office space to make the project fi nancially feasible, the Board of Supervisors returned the issue to the Planning Commission, which duly approved 168 metres despite staff recommendations to do otherwise

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 155 (Workman 1970a). In the meantime, the fight was taken up by a newly created citizen-activist umbrella group called the Citizen’s Waterfront Committee. With support from dissenting voices on the board and the Planning Commission, activists and neighbourhood organizers were able to use a combination of environmental and design issues to pressure the board to vote on the question of height limits. In a six to four decision, led by Diane Feinstein (now a U.S. Senator), the board imposed the planning department’s original height range, effectively killing the project (Burns 1971). Thus, 1970 marked the end of the kind of modernist vision that could only have been proposed in the absence of regulation and policy. What replaced it was a new consciousness of the Bay promoted by environmentalists and neighbourhood activists and supported by a new regulatory agency, evolving land-use policy, and a planning process. As the 1969 Northern Waterfront Plan put it, “urban forms should fully develop the outstanding natural beauty and qualities inherent in the character of the northern waterfront. The form and arrangement of the man-made urban elements should be determined by and subordinate to the great natural forms of the water and the land” (San Francisco Planning Department 1969, 38). The threat of environmental degradation wrought by unconstrained development was also a threat to the physical character of an important part of San Francisco—its waterfront and the views of the Bay. That threat resulted in a struggle over place, over use value versus exchange value, over fi xity and flow. This time use value prevailed, creating the potential for a different kind of waterfront development in the future. By the early 1970s, a morass of plans and regulations had been created that all but prohibited capital investment in the waterfront in four ways. First, two of the most important ‘economic engines’ of development projects—office space and housing—were not permitted. Without them, developers could not afford to pay for open space and other amenities increasingly demanded by the public and newly required by policy. Second, limits to the physical parameters of buildings, such as height, bulk, and setbacks, further weakened potential profitability. Third, significant amounts of public open space and Bay access were required of projects. Along with requirements for historic preservation, this was a major expense and another disincentive for undertaking standard accumulation strategies. Fourth, the layers of uncoordinated policy plans and regulations created an entitlement process that was incredibly complex, required a fair amount of initial capital outlay, and held no certainty for developers. The effect of the success of environmentalists and neighbourhood activists, and of policies adopted by agencies like BCDC, the Planning Department, and the California State Lands Commission (discussed below), was to stifle almost entirely any possibility of development for the next twenty-five years, until the mid-1990s. There were some notable exceptions to the stasis gripping the northern waterfront during this time. The most significant of these was Pier 39, the

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venture of one Warren Simmons, an ex–Pan Am Airlines pilot turned local restaurateur. The Pier 39 retail and entertainment complex, currently one of the most visited places in the U.S., was perhaps the only commercial enterprise that could have been undertaken in this context. Even with all its tacky spectacle, Pier 39 is surrounded by open space and public marinas, one of which is now inhabited by California sea lions—a rare instance of mutual benefit to sea creature and proprietor. At the other end of the northern waterfront in South Beach-Rincon Point, an act of the state legislature removed restrictions associated with the public trust (discussed below) on a few parcels of Port property so that ultra- affordable/transitional housing for ex-convicts could be built. Finally, two public open space projects were also completed, a pedestrian/cycling path known as the Promenade (later much expanded), and Pier 7, an award-winning public fishing pier dedicated in 1990. For the most part, these changes increased the flow of people to the waterfront and sketched into space the beginnings of successful resistance to economically driven waterfront development.

THE STATE STEPS IN In the early 1980s, the Office of the Attorney General of California wrote a series of opinions that tightened restrictions on development of Port land. Two were particularly important. The fi rst had to do with the status of “trust” lands. When California joined the United States in 1850, the state became the owner of all land underlying navigable waterways, including tidelands, to be held in trust for the benefit of the people of California (Wilmar 1999). Port land consists primarily of tidelands that were filled in by the state to build docks, wharves, and other facilities necessary to promote commercial activity in San Francisco’s harbour. Even though the Port has been transferred to the city, its land is held in trust for the people of California. The California State Lands Commission (SLC) oversees the use of trust lands, including most of the Port’s property, and regulates them according to the public trust doctrine, which is based in common law and embodied in the California Constitution (California State Lands Commission, n.d.). In turn, public trust doctrine defi nes the allowable uses of submerged land and tideland areas, filled or unfi lled, public or private. Housing and office, as well as many other non-maritime uses, are considered to be inconsistent with the public trust. Importantly, however, the trust did not become a factor in waterfront development issues until about 1982. Until that point, generally speaking, state and local officials felt that as long as proposed development included even a minimal element of, or support for, maritime or trust-consistent activity, then the law was being upheld. However, in the early 1980s, the Attorney General’s office was drawn into a controversial development proposed by the Port of Long Beach. An opinion written by Deputy Attorney General Nancy Saggese concluded

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 157 that office buildings could only be constructed on trust land if their primary purpose was to directly support trust (that is, port) activities. Some non-water-oriented office space could be included, but only if it was clearly incidental to the main purpose of the building (Saggese 1982). This opinion was one of several that empowered the SLC to enforce restrictions on the development of trust lands. The result has been of fundamental importance to California’s coastal waters, and spurred the SLC’s rapid transformation into a powerful state agency. It fi rst affected the Port in a meaningful way when, in an attempt to generate income to support rehabilitation of the commercial fishing fleet, the Port was told by the SLC that its plan for condos on Pier 45 was not trust-compliant (Temko 1985). The Port tried again about a year later with a proposal for a convention centre and a hotel, both of which could meet trust requirements, especially if the former was to be used by some maritime organizations (i.e., International Longshore and Warehouse Union meetings and shippers’ conferences). However, BCDC was concerned about the proposal and so in 1986 its executive director requested an opinion from the attorney general about the acceptability of repair or modification to existing piers under the McAteer-Petris Act and the Bay Plan. The issue was this: if piers needed to be substantially altered, would that trigger use limitations associated with new bay fill? The answer was yes (Van De Kamp 1986). This meant that if an older pier needed to be upgraded to support the weight of new development, as was the case for Pier 45, that development would be subject to restrictions on new bay fill; that is, uses must be water-oriented and cannot include general offices, convention centres, or housing. As a result, hotels were the only substantial revenue-generating uses left on the table; the proposal was withdrawn. Along with the fi ndings pertaining to the ‘rule of equivalencies’ mentioned earlier, these legal decisions achieved three things: they empowered a state agency, solidified the interpretation of state legislation, and reasserted the mandate of a regional government agency to protect a natural resource through development restrictions. Here is an example of the assertion of state power to restrict investment, quite contrary to devolution of responsibilities associated with neoliberalism. This is also an example of the kind of embedded structure with which a neoliberal program must negotiate, and that contributes to the particular, actually existing neoliberalisms that differentiate places. As much as neoliberalism is a process, this is an example of a regulatory seawall around which it has had to flow.

YES, THERE MAY BE AN ALTERNATIVE . . . In true entrepreneurial spirit, the Port did not give up attempts to initiate projects that would generate profit, although its discourse shifted to reflect new circumstances: a change from the need to pursue privatization

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in support of maritime operations and revive a dying waterfront, to the need to pursue privatization to buy public amenities that were otherwise unaffordable.5 So, exploiting something of a loop-hole in the growing body of policy and regulation, the Port pursued a series of hotel-based projects in the late 1980s. While none was of the scale of the earlier projects, they generated concern that a wall of hotels would cordon off the waterfront and create a space for tourists and consumers but not the general public. The issue of hotels came to a head when the Port Commission shocked a full hearing room by voting to approve a hotel-on-a-pier project instead of a sailing centre and conference facility (Massey 1989). Incensed at yet another boondoggle, one port commissioner worked with the activist groups San Francisco Tomorrow and the Sierra Club to put Proposition H on the 1990 ballot. It passed, imposing a moratorium on hotels and requiring the Port to develop its Waterfront Land Use Plan (WLUP). After six years of intensive community-based planning, the WLUP was approved in 1997, the Port’s fi rst such document. An essential aspect of the WLUP is that it envisions the waterfront as a place for open space, access to the water, recreation, and pedestrian and mass transit improvements (Port of San Francisco 2000). Thus, much about the plan is focused on making the waterfront a civic space; that is, serving a quite broadly identified societal need, not primarily those of private development interests and the creation of éclat. Nevertheless, the plan is based on the premise that public/private partnerships are the only way to pay for public amenities. Therefore, the Port carefully negotiated with the BCDC and city agencies to identify a number of opportunity sites that would accommodate revenue-generating development projects if they supported other public goals as identified by BCDC and local planning policy. While clearly in the mold of a neoliberal-style arrangement because it creates opportunities for private capital, this policy structure starts with the idea of serving public goals, as opposed to allowing the market to produce whatever it needs with the hope that public benefit would then trickle down or somehow be negotiated from it. Since 1997, two projects implementing the plan’s policies have been completed. They are almost universally considered successes: the San Francisco Giants’ Baseball Park (opened in 2000) and the rehabilitation of the Ferry Building (completed in 2003, Figure 7.3). Both projects took years of negotiation and required complex and delicately balanced fi nancial packages to succeed. The ballpark, while privately funded, has no on-site parking, is served by public transportation, including ferries, and is surrounded by public plazas and a place for the public to watch at least a few innings of each game for free. Rehabilitation of the Ferry Building and adjacent Pier 1 (which has a large transit shed) created a public market, public ferry terminal, public open space, and a home for the offices of the Port. Tax credits for historic preservation and general office space included in both structures helped the project to

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 159

Figure 7.3

The Ferry Building and Harry Bridges Plaza (Photograph J. Rubin).

be fi nancially feasible. The office space was allowed because it supported trust-compliant uses, such as historic preservation, and water-oriented uses as required by BCDC. This kind of arrangement—allowing non-maritime uses if they demonstrably supported goals of the SLC and BCDC—was negotiated primarily as part of developing the Port’s WLUP. While several public-use projects have been completed in the dozen years since the plan was adopted, including the waterside Rincon Park and a children’s play area near the ballpark, no other development proposals have been successful, although not for want of trying. Two projects in particular are significant because their failure signaled an end to the dominance of the basic formula of providing public real estate for private capital. The first was a proposal to develop a massive complex at Piers 27–31, at the base of Telegraph Hill. The project was to include 13,470 square metres of shops, restaurants, a YMCA facility, boat ramps, and a plaza. To pay for this the project required 20,345 square metres of office space. After several years and a swirl of controversy, the sponsor sold its negotiating rights to the local real estate giant Shornstein and Company (Port of San Francisco 2008). Mere months after taking over the project, Shornstein insisted that because the cost to pay for seismic retrofitting and repairs to the piers had doubled to $145 million, a significant amount of office space would be required. This essentially killed the project because the retrofit would have used all of the money otherwise needed to provide the required public amenities and therefore secure approval of the project (Port of San Francisco 2008). It is difficult to imagine that all of the office space necessary to finance the project would have been approved.

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A similar fate befell a proposal by Bovis/Lend Lease to develop Piers 30–32, several miles to the south. They backed out of a project years in the making because of soaring costs for seismic upgrades to pier structures (Port of San Francisco 2008). Theirs was a complex arrangement that included state approval for a condo tower on a land-side lot (just the second time that housing has been built on Port property), profit from which was to support a new cruise terminal and waterfront park. But they too would have had to increase office space to pay for $155 million in renovations, or drop the public amenities; either option would have made the project untenable, both politically and legally. To end its contractural obligations, Lend Lease actually paid avoidable fees and ceded to the Port most of the profit from sales of the condominiums, the only part of the project that was completed (Dineen 2007, 2006). The failure of two difficult and controversial projects and the hard-won success of even a non-controversial one like the Ferry Building forced the Port to reassess its approach. The city and other agencies have followed suit and have begun to re-evaluate the regulatory and financial shackles strapped to the Port. Indeed, a new paradigm based on public financing has been ushered in. So far it has met with some success. Instrumental to this success have been an energetic and creative staff and a new director for the Port who has been extremely effective in negotiations with other city agencies and the state of California. The foundations of future development are in a ten-year capital plan, first published in 2006, and its ties to new sources of public financing (Port of San Francisco 2006). The capital plan has three key components. First, the city has used its bonding capacity to support its Port by including $34 million for waterfront open space improvements on a recent successful ballot measure. Second, state legislation has enabled the agency to create “Infrastructure Finance Districts” that will allow the Port to capture a tax increment from future development and use it for public amenities. Finally, an amendment to the city charter will allow payroll and hotel tax to be returned to the Port, not sent to the city’s general fund (Port of San Francisco 2009). These changes in the mundane world of finance have profound implications for the waterfront. The environmental movement, activist organizations, and public policy have shielded the waterfront from many forms of development. However, policies are passive, and advocacy groups could not actively pursue change (e.g., by undertaking development projects more to their liking). Now the Port has the wherewithal to generate funds that will go no small distance in meeting public mandates with fewer of the burdens imposed by public/ private partnerships and the imperatives of capital accumulation.

CONCLUSION: A WATERFRONT FOR THE PEOPLE? Generated by local and regional government agencies spurred on by activist citizens and conscientious bureaucrats, regulation and policy have fixed in place restrictions on waterfront development in San Francisco that attenuate

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 161 the flow of capital investment and the creep of privatization along the waterfront. Instead, much of the northern waterfront is devoted to public access to the Bay, open space, and various civic uses. Over the last decade, the Port has completed various small parks and walkways (including most recently Pier 14, a new public strolling pier), and the Exploratorium, a children’s science museum, has nearly completed the approval process for relocating to Piers 15–17. These successes, while perhaps not profound, are nevertheless a testament to a planning and policy development process that, as much as one may reasonably expect, has been a legitimate and intensely deliberated socio-political project, not the sham sometimes associated with neoliberalized planning practice (see Purcell 2008). This is notably different from the deregulation and free market policy agendas that are typically hallmarks of neoliberalism. In fact, the creation of BCDC and the adoption of new planning policy are nearly the opposite of ‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism.6 When the state of California absolved itself of responsibility for the Port, it did so in response to the local political will, not as a punitive act of devolution. Through the attorney general, the state of California also confirmed the power of public trust, rather than limiting it or devolving responsibilities for it to local jurisdictions. And instead of institutions retreating from active support of the public interest, largely to expand the role of private interests and promote public entrepreneurship, local government moved to limit the potential for development and to strengthen its ability to protect and enhance the public realm. That is, local government took an anti-growth stance and increased regulation. So, in the case of San Francisco, that neoliberal policies and agendas have not been fully embedded into the dynamic of the transformation of its waterfront is a defining feature of the city’s actually existing neoliberalism. Thus, the story of San Francisco’s northern waterfront supports the case that neoliberalism does not take on a pure form. Its impact has been diluted, even negated, as it has flowed through, or been forced around, local social, political, and cultural structures. The conditions outlined in this chapter made even the most marketdriven public/private arrangements for development economically unfeasible. Happily, this situation led to a creative reorientation on the part of the staff and leadership of the Port who have proposed new, more enlightened ways to generate revenue—a dramatic change for an agency that for years acted as a locally situated agent for neoliberal urban development. It is now clear that to make the most of the opportunities presented by underused waterfront land does not require unbridled market-based development. There are new possibilities for emphasizing the public importance of the area, ones that represent a far different and perhaps equally effective way to position the city globally. Change along the waterfront has actually increased the amount of civic space in San Francisco, right at the city’s front door and across from a downtown aching to expand. An optimistic reading would have it as a bulwark against the flow of neoliberal urbanization affecting much of the rest of San Francisco and its residents.

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The result, so far, is that San Francisco’s northern waterfront is a place very different from what was envisioned after shipping all but abandoned it. For the most part, its transformation also stands counter to the logic of neoliberal urbanization—both in its built environment and in the processes that have been generating change. Instead of monumental projects that show little consideration for existing urban form, that all but ignore the public realm, and that treat the Bay as potential landfi ll, conservationists, activists, and public agencies have forced the creation of a different landscape for a wider public. The story is not yet over, but there seems to be real promise that use value and a right to the waterfront will be secured for the citizenry, as opposed to a waterfront made primarily into a commodity by the dominance of exchange value. Such ‘localized’ changes in a built environment may not ‘scale-up’ to impact the larger structural impulses that support and perpetuate neoliberal urbanization, but the kind of successes outlined here are nevertheless meaningful to a not insignificant number of people in their daily lives. Moreover, the creation of public space is, in Lefebvrian terms, critical to the city as an oeuvre. While open spaces, strolling paths, and public piers are just physical, material parts of the city, they take on importance as the space for civic life, for interaction, for satisfying what Lefebvre calls “anthropological needs” (Lefebvre 1996). And if the right to the city is in part a right to participate in the city as oeuvre, then San Francisco’s waterfront and the process of creating its present form can be seen, I suggest, even if in a small way, as a spatialized instance of the ‘right to urban life’.

NOTES 1. Some of the material in this chapter is based on work to be published as A Negotiated Landscape: The Transformation of San Francisco’s Waterfront Since 1950 by the Center for American Places at Columbia College. My thanks go to George Thompson and Brandy Saverese for their support and accommodation, and to the San Francisco Public Library for the use of “Aerial View of San Francisco Waterfront” in Figure 7.2. 2. Here, the idea of a ‘professional’ planning department is one that removes red tape, makes value-neutral decisions, and, one presumes, reduces risk for developers. To its credit, the San Francisco Planning Department is still a relatively progressive bureaucracy, and strives to pursue a legitimate, deliberative agenda as part of its neighbourhood planning efforts—though it is under constant pressure, as evidenced by this quotation. 3. The elephant in the room for much of the literature on neoliberalism is that, in many instances, the urban populace itself pushes for policies and actions that are essentially neoliberal. Few have examined this, although an exception is found in the work of David Harvey, who at a general level has addressed why we “have so easily acquiesced in this state of affairs” (2005, 38). 4. For some, local resistance is unlikely to be a sufficient challenge to extralocal power structures and large-scale forces in any lasting fashion (see Peck

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 163 and Tickell 2002). For others, it can be effective, especially when “opportunities for communicative action and consensus building abound” (Miller 2007, 244). And there is the possibility that even as neoliberalism restructures everyday life it will engender new forms of resistance that may foster “a new model of urbanity that far exceeds the mere structures of state and corporate economy” (Keil 2002, 598). 5. A more detailed analysis of the Port’s evolution as an agency can be found in “A Negotiated Landscape: Planning, Regulation, and the Transformation of San Francisco’s Waterfront, 1950 to the Present” (Rubin 2003). In a similar vein, Peter Hendee Brown has recently pointed out that it has not been uncommon in the U.S. for port authorities to have moved away from a focus on maritime issues to becoming agencies with more diverse interests responsive to a broader set of constituencies (Brown 2009). 6. At least at the sub-national scale. It is beyond the scope and point of this chapter to address, for instance, federal level ‘roll-back’ neoliberalism and its impact on funding for open space projects.

REFERENCES Bay Conservation and Development Commission. 1979. San Francisco Bay plan. San Francisco: San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. 2002. Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Antipode 34(3): 349–379. Brown, Peter Hendee. 2009. America’s waterfront revival, port authorities and urban redevelopment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Burns, J. 1970. A big debate on waterfront skyscraper. San Francisco Chronicle, 28 October, 1. . 1971. S.F. supervisors block the U.S. Steel Tower. San Francisco Chronicle, 17 February, 1. California State Lands Commission. n.d. The public trust document. Sacramento. Accessed 3 October 2009. Chion, Miriam. 2009. Producing urban vitality: The case of dance in San Francisco. Urban Geography 30(4): 416–439. Dineen, J.K. 2006. Cruise ship terminal in hot water. San Francisco Business Times, 15 May. Accessed 6 October 2009. . 2007. S.F. cruise terminal finds new berth. San Francisco Business Times, 28 September. Accessed 6 October 2009. Gibson, Timothy A. 2003. The trope of the organic city. Space and Culture 6(4): 429–448. Gulick, Esther. 1988. Saving San Francisco Bay: Past, present and future. Presented at The Horace M. Albright Conservation Lectureship, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Forestry, 14 April. Accessed 11 February 2008. Hackworth, Jason. 2007. The neoliberal city: Governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografi ska Annaler 71(1): 3–17. . 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

164 Jasper Rubin Henderson, Jason. 2008. The spaces of parking: Mapping the politics of mobility in San Francisco. Antipode 41(1): 70–91. Keil, Roger. 2002. ‘Common sense’ neoliberalism: Progressive Conservative urbanism in Toronto, Canada. Antipode 34(3): 580–601. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on cities. Translated by E. Kofman and E. Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lehrer, Ute and Jennefer Laidley. 2008. Old mega-projects newly packaged? Waterfront redevelopment in Toronto. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(4): 786–803. Leitner, Helga, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard, eds. 2007. Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers. New York: The Guilford Press. MacLeod, Gordon. 2002. From urban entrepreneurialism to a ‘revanchist city’? On the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s renaissance. Antipode 34(3): 602–624. Massey, S. 1989. Panel ok’s plan for hotel on S.F. waterfront. San Francisco Chronicle, 12 December, A1. Metcalf, G. 2009. S.F. needs an agenda for prosperity. San Francisco Business Times, 33. July 24. Miller, Byron. 2007. Modes of governance, modes of resistance. In Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers, eds. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. New York: The Guilford Press. Mitchell, Don. 2003. The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. New York: The Guilford Press. Murphy, Stacey. 2008. ‘Compassionate’ strategies of managing homelessness: Postrevanchist geographies in San Francisco. Antipode 41(2): 305–325. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3): 380– 404. . 2007. Conceptualizing neoliberalism, thinking Thatcherism. In Contesting neoliberalization: Urban frontiers, eds. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. New York: The Guilford Press. Port of San Francisco. 2000. The Port of San Francisco waterfront land use plan. San Francisco: Port of San Francisco. . 2006. Port of San Francisco 10-year capital plan. San Francisco: Port of San Francisco. . 2008. Memorandum: Information presentation on a ten-year review of the waterfront land use plan. December 3. San Francisco: Port of San Francisco. . 2009. Port of San Francisco 10-year capital plan, fi scal year 2009–2018 Update. San Francisco: Port of San Francisco. Purcell, Mark. 2008. Recapturing democracy: Neoliberialization and the struggle for alternative urban futures. New York: Routledge. Rubin, Jasper. 2003. A negotiated landscape: Planning, regulation, and the transformation of San Francisco’s waterfront, 1950 to the present. PhD diss., University of Maryland. . Forthcoming. A negotiated landscape: The transformation of San Francisco’s waterfront since 1950. Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College: Distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Saggese, Nancy A. 1982. Commercial office building use of tidelands. Los Angeles: Office of the Attorney General of California. San Francisco Chronicle. 1970a. Alioto hails U.S. steel’s Bay project. San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September, 1. . 1970b. Board tackles waterfront building rules. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 March, 1. . 1970c. Waterfront high-rise ok’d by city planners. San Francisco Chronicle, 8 January, 1.

San Francisco’s Waterfront in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism 165 San Francisco Planning Department. 1969. The northern waterfront plan. San Francisco: City and County of San Francisco Planning Department. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. 1968. San Francisco Port . . . asset or liability? San Francisco: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. San Francisco Port Authority. 1959. Portside news. February. San Francisco: State of California. Smith, Neil. 1996. The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. New York: Routledge. Temko, A. 1985. Fisherman’s Wharf projects revived. San Francisco Chronicle, 30 January, 2. UNESCO. 2005. Urban policies and the right to the city. Paris: UNESCO. Van De Kamp, J.K. 1986. Request for informal opinion concerning BCDC jurisdiction over piers that predate the establishment of BCDC. Sacramento: Office of the Attorney General of California. Violich, Francis. 2001. Intellectual evolution in the fi eld of city and regional planning: A personal perspective toward holistic planning and education 1937– 2010. Working paper 2001–07. Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California. Walker, Richard A. 2007. The country in the city: The greening of the San Francisco Bay area. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wilmar, M. 1999. The public trust doctrine. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association newsletter, November. San Francisco: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. Wilson, David. 2004. Toward a contingent urban neoliberalism. Urban Geography 25(8): 771–783. Workman, B. 1970a. A 550-foot waterfront height OKd. San Francisco Chronicle, 11 September, 1. . 1970b. A legal setback for Bay projects. San Francisco Chronicle, 16 October, 1. . 1970c. A setback for Ferry Port Plaza. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December, 1. Zimmerman, Jeffrey. 2008. From brew town to cool town: Neoliberalism and the creative city development strategy in Milwaukee. Cities 25(2008): 230–242.

8

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites for Analyzing Neoliberalism and its Contestations Susanna Schaller and Johannes Novy1

Contrary to the doom-and-gloom reports that followed the cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001, New York City until recently seemed not only to have recovered but also to have undergone a veritable boom. In fact, until the recent financial crisis of 2008–2009, the city experienced its biggest construction boom in decades. According to the New York Building Congress (2008), an association of developers, architects, and vendors, total construction spending reached a record U.S.$33.8 billion in 2008, compared to $16.4 billion in 2000. This unprecedented activity has radically transformed the face of the city: dozens of new skyscrapers designed by world-famous architects dot the skyline, entire neighbourhoods have seen escalating rents and real estate values, and several large-scale urban development projects have created new hubs for business, commerce, and entertainment in areas previously thought to be unfit for investment (Angotti 2008; Fainstein 2005). Without favourable political and economic factors outside of the city’s control, New York’s dizzying pace of development in the past years clearly would not have been possible. At the same time, however, several scholars have pointed out that the extent of New York’s recent development boom is also at least in part owed to shifts in local policy. Observers argue that the city’s current administration, under the leadership of business CEO and media mogul Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, has made a particularly significant contribution to the restructuring and remaking of New York’s urban space (Angotti 2008; Brash 2006; Fainstein 2005). Since taking office in 2002, Bloomberg has abandoned the city’s earlier lopsided policy focus on tax breaks, zoning waivers, and other giveaways to attract development, and fully embraced the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial economy by embarking on a proactive, top-down development agenda, which has consisted of numerous area rezonings, several property-led urban redevelopment ventures, and efforts to improve the city’s transport infrastructure and to expand and enhance public space. The stated aim is to prepare New York for future population growth, to fuel economic development, and to specifically enhance the city’s attractiveness to investors, middle- and upper-class residents, and visitors. Corresponding with the more general metamorphosis of the neoliberal project towards what Peck and Tickell (2002) refer to as “roll-out

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 167 neoliberalism”, this shift in policy is especially evident with respect to developments along New York’s waterfront, developments to which Bloomberg’s administration ascribes particular strategic importance. In recent years, waterfront areas that had previously housed port-related industry have, along with other remaining industrial zones, become the focus of some of the most extensive and ambitious redevelopment efforts in the entire city. This deliberate attempt to ‘reclaim’ the waterfront is, like the ‘Bloomberg way’ generally (Brash 2006), celebrated by many. But it has not been uncontested; to the contrary, New York’s waterfront neighbourhoods constitute arenas where competing urban imaginaries collide, as community groups, political figures, and citywide alliances organized around specific interests such as environmentalism, labour rights, affordable housing, and industrial retention seek to assert the possibility of alternative futures. Through a case study analysis of waterfront planning in New York, we seek to illustrate the importance of a dynamic conceptualization of neoliberal urbanism, one that examines how seemingly top-down development plans and projects are reworked in and through local policy environments, as well as through oppositional practices (Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007). Embedded in a more general discussion of the evolution of New York’s waterfront in recent decades and the current administration’s approach to urban and economic development, this chapter homes in on two case studies. Focusing on Willets Point in Queens and Gowanus in Brooklyn, the chapter juxtaposes the competing spatial imaginaries that seek to define urban redevelopment initiatives. Consequently, we present the city administration’s vision of each project as articulated and documented in public presentations and meetings, as well as discuss emerging practices of contestation by alliances that have sought to stop or shape the implementation of these mostly upscale redevelopment efforts. These countervailing voices suggest that urban waterfronts are not only of critical importance as strategic sites for twenty-first-century accumulation strategies, but that they also constitute places where demands for more equitable paths of development are vocalized.

WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT IN NYC New York has by most standards been relatively slow to redevelop its shoreline. This is particularly remarkable because New York is surrounded by water; four of the city’s five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island—are on islands. Moreover, New York’s astounding 578-milelong shoreline has historically been recognized as one of the city’s main assets. One of the greatest natural harbours in the world, New York’s location at the confluence of the Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean was one of the main attractions for the Dutch, who built wharves in southern Manhattan in the seventeenth century and provided the basis for the city’s rise as one of the world’s major cities.

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Historically characterized as a rather “inward looking city”, New York’s port-related uses created barriers between large sections of the waterfront and the city’s inhabitants (Gastil 2002, 21). The detachment of the city from its shores intensified further in the mid-twentieth century, when New York’s once-bustling port fell into decay. As with other cities in the United States, the rise of containerization in the 1950s and the loss of industrial jobs to cheaper labour markets changed New York’s competitive position as a port facility and left many of the city’s docks idle. The consolidation of the NY/NJ port on the New Jersey side of the harbour further contributed to the decline of the city’s ‘working waterfront’. Working-class neighbourhoods along the city’s shorelines became host to a variety of ‘unsightly’ uses such as waste sites, hazardous manufacturing facilities, and highways. More recently, during the last decades of the twentieth century, New York began to “re-embrace the . . . ecosystem at its heart” (Hiss 1996, 28), and waterfront areas that had lost their original raison d’être again became a territory of opportunities. The 1972 federal mandate to clean the country’s waterways and improve sewage treatment practices reduced pollution levels, and living and playing by the water’s edge once again became conceivable. Illustrating a new phase of post-industrial growth that was marked by high-profi le redevelopment and gentrification (Sites 2003; Smith 2002), entrepreneurial activities began to transform waterfront neighbourhoods. Marinas, restaurants, offices, hotels, and apartments were built. A broad array of niche manufacturers and informal and vernacular uses contributed further to the waterfront’s gradually changing appeal. Rather than being a driving force, the public sector remained relatively inactive in the early phases of these processes. New York remained, in the words of the non-profit Center for an Urban Future (CUF), “one of the only major cities in the world that hasn’t made its waterfront a central part of economic, housing and tourism strategy” (Bowles and Kotkin 2003, 33). Of course, several showcase projects spearheaded or supported by the public-sector stem from that time, including Battery Park City (a new neighbourhood along the Hudson), the South Street Seaport (an adaptive reuse of an old historic quarter), and the Hudson River Park (a popular recreation area that was built with public money). Nevertheless, developments along the waterfront remained, as one commentator put it, “a painful symbol of New York’s lack of vision and resolve” (Mastro 1995, 19). With the election of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, this picture started to change. In his initial State of the City address in 2002, he made clear that the waterfront would be a major focus of his urban and economic development policy efforts. “We must bring new life to the waterfront, from the North Shore of Staten Island to the under-used waterfront of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal”, the mayor proclaimed (City of New York 2002). Soon waterfront projects that sought to transform New York’s inaccessible and abandoned industrial landscape through property-led regeneration were proliferating from Staten Island to the Bronx; many of them

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 169 were initially components of an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. By 2004, the nonprofit Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance had identified sixty-one waterfront projects underway, mostly emphasizing commercial, residential, and recreational uses, with several more in the pipeline (O’Brien 2005). Mitchell Moss, a renowned waterfront scholar,

Figure 8.1 “Selected planning and economic development initiatives” within a recent city publication (courtesy of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New York City Department of City Planning).

170 Susanna Schaller and Johannes Novy proclaimed that the Bloomberg administration had done “more rezoning of the waterfront and made more efforts to modernize and encourage the reuse of industrial property than has ever occurred [in New York]” (in Barbanel 2004, 11).

PROPERTY-LED DEVELOPMENT AND “THE BLOOMBERG WAY” Bloomberg’s administration was not the fi rst to declare waterfront redevelopment a priority, but it seems to be the fi rst to follow through with its promise—even if present economic circumstances in New York are likely to impede the completion of some projects. Its commitment to remake the waterfront must be seen against the backdrop of a more general realignment of urban policy in New York. Embodying an elitist, corporatist style of governance, the ‘Bloomberg Way’ (Brash 2006) is exemplary of what Peck and Tickell (2002) have described as neoliberalism’s “roll-out” phase, in which the state takes on a more aggressive role through the introduction of new institutions, policies, and governmentalities. Whereas previous administrations primarily sought to provide incentives for private-sector development through opportunistic modes of planning, tax breaks, and direct fi nancial incentives, the Bloomberg administration has been differentiated by a far more comprehensive urban planning and economic development agenda, aimed at providing the spatial requirements for capital accumulation through property-led regeneration and place-making (Brash 2006; Fainstein 2005; Lander and Wolf-Powers 2004). Moreover, despite a well-documented economic shift away from a manufacturing base and towards a service- and information-based economy, some have assessed current policies and practices as representing a substantive change in New York’s approach to economic development: “While observers of urban economies have been debating the emergence of the post-industrial city for decades, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the fi rst to focus its economic development and urban planning policy around it” (Lander and Wolf-Powers 2004, 11). In this context, special emphasis is devoted to the city’s competitiveness as a premiere location for high-end businesses, the upper classes, and those who serve them. “New York City is never going to be the lowest-priced place to do business”, Bloomberg told an elite Manhattan business group in 2003, adding that he conceived New York as a “high-end product, maybe even a luxury product” that would offer “tremendous value . . . for those companies able to capitalize on it”, and that he intended to govern the city accordingly (cited in Cardwell 2003, 3). At the same time, the current administration’s agenda is also rationalized by the chronic housing shortage the city faced when Bloomberg took office, which was widely perceived as posing a liability to the city’s quality of life and future economic success, and by the need

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 171 to accommodate a projected population increase of one million new New Yorkers by 2030. Bloomberg was convinced that instead of deregulation, privatization, and low taxes, public-sector intervention and investment were needed to incentivize private-sector development and fulfill the place-making needs of a post-industrial city (Lander and Wolf-Powers 2004). As soon as he took office, he proceeded to expedite what Fainstein (2005) aptly described as a “return of urban renewal”; that is, he embarked on a comprehensive effort to rezone ‘underutilized’ land for new property development and recreation, to revive decayed commercial districts, to respond to the city’s housing crisis by building and renovating housing throughout the city, to develop infrastructure, and to connect physical changes with economic opportunity. Indicative of Bloomberg’s approach are nearly one hundred rezoning changes—more than the previous six administrations combined (Gross 2008)—as well as an ambitious U.S.$3 billion municipal housing plan announced in 2002 and several large-scale redevelopment projects spearheaded by New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) on land that was previously publicly held. Waterfront areas that had housed port-related industry had, along with the city’s other remaining industrially zoned areas, long been deemed under-utilized and decaying, but they were also recognized as one of New York’s main assets by reason of their geographical location. These areas offered key locational advantages for the creation of ‘new’ urban places and to “extract value from the city” (Garvin 2006; Armstrong and Lund 2005; Wolf-Powers 2005; Weber 2002, 537). By 2008, the city administration argued that “more than 60 miles [or nearly ninety-seven kilometres] of waterfront land” had been reclaimed (City of New York 2008). An independent study notes that an estimated 7.28 square kilometres of areas zoned for industry and manufacturing were rezoned between 2002 and 2007—primarily for residential and commercial uses (Pratt Center for Community Development 2008a). The Bloomberg administration’s approach to waterfront development has been widely applauded for its attention to issues of livability: the promotion of pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use urban neighbourhoods, the creation of hundreds of acres of new green spaces, and an emphasis on high design standards. Furthermore, the administration has received credit for pushing “concerns about long-term sustainability to the forefront [in infrastructure policy and planning]” (Angotti 2007), as exemplified by the 2007 launch of PlaNYC 2030. PlaNYC 2030 created an agency to guide, coordinate, and implement policy, planning, and investment decisions over a thirty-year period across all sectors of government, with the aim of preparing the city’s physical environment—land, air, and water—for long-term sustainability. These developments under Bloomberg have also prompted a growing sense of unease. Some argue that Bloomberg’s polices have been geared toward producing a city oriented almost exclusively toward middle- and

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Figure 8.2 Several new green spaces, public promenades, and bike lanes dot New York’s waterfront, as seen in this view of West Harlem (Photograph J. Schaller).

upper-class residents and consumers and high-end service businesses, with little sensitivity to the needs of working-class, low-income residents or small retail and manufacturing businesses. His policies have thus been criticized for amplifying the inequalities embedded in a postindustrial economy, by driving up real estate values and displacing low-income housing as well as remaining centres of industrial and manufacturing activity (Angotti 2008; Brash 2006; Lander and Wolf-Powers 2004). PlaNYC 2030, which ostensibly guides the city’s development, does not directly address these issues, opening it up to critique.2 Moreover, the plan’s conceptualization of ‘sustainability’ is limited and eschews issues of long-term social and economic sustainability. Instead, the “emphasis on sustainability and environment seems to flow from a long-term vision of large-scale real estate growth” (Angotti 2007, 1). Many waterfront communities faced with redevelopment, such as Greenpoint Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Dutch Kills in Queens, and Hunters Point in the Bronx, have become sites of intense struggle as community-based groups, local public officials, and civic associations confront the city’s plans by advocating and initiating alternatives. The following case studies illustrate that the ongoing transformation of waterfront areas in the city is complex, shaped by local as well as extra-local planning processes, actions,

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 173 and policies. The Willets Point redevelopment plan, for example, can be seen as closely exemplifying the administration’s interventionist and sometimes uncompromising style of governance. The case study of the Gowanus rezoning planning effort, on the other hand, highlights the notion that civil society initiatives to advance alternative visions can be effective, given appropriate political opportunity structures (Tarrow 1994). The case studies, then, explore the dynamic of imposition and accommodation that occurs when neoliberal development patterns are translated and implemented as plans at the local level.

WILLETS POINT REZONING AND DEVELOPMENT PLAN Willets Point, a twenty-five-hectare industrial site in Queens, has been a focus of the city administration’s redevelopment plans since 2002. Geographically the Willets Point area lies near the Queens waterfront, but it is surrounded by major highways. It is also a heavily polluted site. Willets Point served as an ash dump until well into the 1930s, and from as early as the 1940s it has been home to auto-related businesses, from which it derived its designation as the Iron Triangle (EDC 2008b). This area, which lacks basic infrastructure and public services, has been explored as a possible redevelopment site by several successive administrations. Robert Moses in particular sought to incorporate the area into redevelopment initiatives, not once but twice: as part of the 1939 World’s Fair, which resulted in the initial street grid being laid and the arrival of heavy manufacturing into the area, and in 1960 for the city’s second World’s Fair. However these plans never fully came to fruition and Willets Point developed into a gritty manufacturing area where local entrepreneurialism has created a seemingly chaotic but interdependent and functional business landscape (Angotti 2006). The site currently houses myriad businesses, including the House of Spices, a national distributor of Indian spices and food with one hundred employees, and several construction and scrap-metal businesses; but the majority of enterprises are auto-related (Angotti 2006). The current administration’s redevelopment plan does not incorporate existing business in its vision for the area’s future, which has been marketed by the administration as a “dynamic center of life, energy, and economic activity” (EDC 2008a, 1). In concrete terms, the plan projects the development of approximately fi fty-five hundred residential units, a major entertainment district with 158,000 square metres of retail space, forty-six thousand square metres of office space, a seven-hundred-room hotel, and possibly a convention centre (EDC 2009, 1–9). A dissection of the administration’s official vision for the site and of the counter-proposals and alternatives offered by scholars and by citywide and local advocacy organizations illustrates the contradictory impulses

174 Susanna Schaller and Johannes Novy embodied in neoliberalization processes. Examining the contestation of the project highlights the multiplicity of interests that try to shape the contours of an urban redevelopment project. Willets Point, then, embodies contradictory conceptions and representations of urban space, as exemplified in the following quote: To many people, the area is a gritty, sloppy eyesore of slapdash shops and workers lingering in dirt streets trying to flag down drivers to offer them on-the-spot repair deals. But to Mr. Ardizzone [the lone resident, who by his own account has lived in Willets Point his whole life], the place is a paradise, a haven for immigrant workers trying to make a buck and longtime multi-generation businesses that will have a tough time relocating. (Kilgannon 2008) The Willets Point site is located adjacent to the former Shea Stadium and its new replacement, Citi Field, and close to the USTA National Tennis Center. The site gained notoriety as part of the Bloomberg administration’s Olympic bid plans when stadium proposals for the West Side of Manhattan failed to gain the desired traction, requiring a shift in focus (Bagli and Cooper 2005; Zinser et al. 2005). After the Olympic bid’s failure, the site was subsequently proposed as a LEED Neighborhood Pilot Project by the administration—that is, a green, sustainable neighbourhood redevelopment project under the auspices of the U.S. Green Building Council. This proposal is being marketed by the administration as a “dynamic sustainable community” (EDC 2008b, 2–3). The ‘Bloomberg’ plan is not simply a rezoning initiative, but incorporates elements of the ‘top-down’ planning style of Robert Moses during the 1950s and 1960s urban renewal initiatives, in that it threatens to use eminent domain to ensure that the city gains control over the entire site before tendering out the property to a private developer. 3 A sustainability narrative pervades presentations and documents created by the EDC, the agency spearheading the project. The language also homes in on key progressive planning concepts. The project is hailed in the official documents and presentations as a “transit-oriented development that would leverage the District’s superior transit and highway infrastructure” (EDC 2008b, 1–6) to “convert the existing underdeveloped and environmentally degraded Willets Point Development District into a vibrant, mixed-use urban environment”, characterized by pedestrian-friendly and activated streetscapes (EDC 2009, 1–9). This is the language for a new urban vision; one that distances itself from and places itself in opposition to an obsolete and contaminated industrial landscape. However, advocates for an alternative planning solution for the Willets Point site question the defi nition of sustainability underlying the city’s vision, which focuses largely on green building technologies and on meeting LEED-NP criteria that would characterize most locations in New York City, such as proximity to mass transit,

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Figure 8.3

Willets Point, Queens, New York (Photograph J. Schaller).

walkability, and urban design that integrates commercial and residential uses (Watson 2008). The definition of sustainability that emerges from the EDC documents fails to adequately address the “socio-economic costs associated with the wholesale removal of viable businesses and potential industry clusters” in the city (Municipal Art Society [MAS] 2008, 4; Angotti 2006). The longterm economic development vision for Willets Point provides a case in

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point: besides jobs linked to the remediation and construction phases, the economic development strategy hinges on creating opportunities for retail development and service sector jobs associated with a proposed convention centre and hotel. Community plans and oppositional narratives question whether this development strategy, focused primarily on creating what are usually low-paying jobs without benefits, truly contributes to building a sustainable community (Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b). Some scholars and citywide advocacy groups argue that planning for Willets Point should build on and support the largely immigrant, familybased business community, such as the unique auto-related industry cluster that thrives on the interdependencies and competition that have developed here (Willets Point Industry and Realty Association [WPIRA] 2008; Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b; Angotti 2006). These recommendations are not unfounded, but had been articulated in an earlier study by the EDC’s predecessor, the NYC Public Development Corporation (PDC), which noted that “Willets Point is an important and invaluable industrial resource for New York City [where] low rents create an environment favorable to fledgling businesses” (PDC 1991, 1). A vision of sustainability built on a compact of social equity and fairness informs the various counter-imaginaries that have been articulated for the area. Professor Thomas Angotti, commissioned by a local city council member to assess land-use patterns and the potential for redevelopment in the area, concluded that any planning for Willets Point must proceed from the local businesses, workers, and property owners (Angotti 2006). The study also poses a challenge to the city’s narrative, which invariably condemns auto-related businesses (EDC 2008b). Interestingly, Angotti offers a vision that redefi nes these businesses as a local asset for sustainable and green development. The WPIRA, furthermore, inverts the discourse of obsolescence and environmental degradation used to justify the city’s plan, and instead assigns the blame to the city. Recounting the business and property owners’ attempts to force the city to improve infrastructure conditions, WPIRA claims that the city’s active neglect has blighted the area and consequently devalued the current owners’ properties (Potkewitz 2008). A fair development scenario, it proffers, would provide the infrastructure improvements to allow local owners to invest in the economic development of the area. A coalition of local organizations, in collaboration with the Pratt Center for Community Development (a university-based advocacy planning and design centre), worked to identify local planning priorities. Even though this coalition was heavily represented by affordable housing advocates, they too premised redevelopment on the fair treatment of workers and businesses in the area (Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b). Interestingly, some of the same physical characteristics that are highlighted as assets in the proposed rezoning and redevelopment plan are cited by its detractors as the foundation for alternative planning solutions. The

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 177 highways that run adjacent to the site consist of multiple lanes of elevated traffic and highway underpasses, and thus present formidable psychological barriers, interrupting potential pedestrian pathways especially between the water’s edge and nearby neighbourhoods. The MAS, furthermore, argues that the site’s “adjacency to other industrial sites, its relative proximity to the College Point industrial park and its accessibility to major transportation routes as well as the airport” may make it “more appropriate for strategic investment in industrial uses” (MAS 2008, 4). Notably, the environmental impact statement for the Willets Point project seems to also lend support to this conclusion. It states: The proposed plan would not be consistent with the industrial uses currently located along the waterfront to the north and east of the District. However, these uses are separated from the District by the Whitestone Expressway and Northern Boulevard, as well as the Flushing River, and therefore would not result in significant adverse land use impacts on the proposed uses. The proposed uses would also not interfere with the active industrial waterfront uses—including barge operations—in the Flushing River and Flushing Bay. (FDEIS 2008, 3–29) The planning goals expressed by the city are laudable in and of themselves. They have, however, been used as guidelines in a multiplicity of rezoning initiatives, which seem to recycle the same language to sell and market a singular vision. The question arises as to whether this waterfront area is really suited for the post-industrial type of development the city has in mind. This is a ‘waterfront’ site, disconnected from neighbourhoods inland by highways that, in this case, fortuitously separate these residential neighbourhoods from the industrial businesses that thrive in Willets. While it is certain that some waterfront areas are ripe for residential and mixed-use development, community-based planners argue that the peculiarities of each area must be examined and must serve as the foundation for an inclusive planning process (Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b; Giles 2007; Angotti 2006). Local community groups, citywide advocacy organizations and city council members from the Borough of Queens have all questioned not only the vision for Willets Point but also the planning process that produced it (MAS 2008; Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b; Giles 2007; Angotti 2006). The planning process was based in Flushing, a neighbourhood already in the city’s sights for revitalization because of its downtown redevelopment potential. Yet, Willets Point, as several planners have pointed out, is physically separated from downtown Flushing by major infrastructural and utility sites, creating a substantial barrier between the two (MAS 2008; Angotti 2006). Observers have furthermore pointed out that the Corona neighbourhood, more closely linked to Willets Point, was largely ignored during the city’s public outreach. Local businesses and property

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owners in particular have expressed their frustration about their inability to effectively participate in shaping the plan (WPIRA 2009; Pratt Center for Community Development 2008b; Angotti 2006). The WPIRA made its disappointment known publicly, as evidenced in the following excerpt from the organization’s website: In virtually every article for the past two years, the EDC has made a claim that it has been working with the Willets area businesses. . . . Despite attempts to have discussions with the EDC, the business owners have been put on the back burner while the EDC proceeded with its plans. Only after a major protest and pressure was brought to bear, did the EDC begin to have any meaningful discussions with WPIRA. (WPIRA 2008) The city insisted throughout the public review process that Willets Point “requires a redevelopment plan for future sustainable growth, [that] will only be able to occur as the site is cleared, cleaned and raised” (Potkewitz 2008; see also Watson 2008). However, as many advocacy groups had predicted, the financial crisis has created serious challenges for the city’s redevelopment plan. It seems that the city has for now revised its strategy, allowing a phased development to proceed, even though this was precisely the type of development the EDC said was infeasible because of the site’s contamination. What this may mean for the future of Willets Point remains to be seen. While the administration seems to have begun to rethink its approach to the redevelopment of Willets Point only in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis, it seems to have recalibrated its plans for the Gowanus Canal corridor in response to effective planning advocacy and community organizing, as well as to local and extra-local (including federal) policy priorities.

GOWANUS CANAL CORRIDOR REZONING PROPOSAL Placed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation on its list of the country’s most endangered historic places (Pogrebin 2007), Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront constitutes an area of the city that is currently undergoing particularly dramatic changes. Industrial heritage sites worthy of preservation, active manufacturing sites, and several low-income communities along the borough’s shores have for several years been confronted with mounting development pressures due to Brooklyn’s newly hip status. Extensive efforts by the Bloomberg administration to encourage residential and commercial redevelopment through land-use changes, such as the rezoning of 180 city blocks along the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront in 2005, have intensified this pressure (Curran 2004, 2007; Wolf-Powers 2005). The Gowanus Canal was completed in the 1860s and extends about a mile and a half north from Gowanus Bay. By the 1920s, the canal had

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Figure 8.4

Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York (Photograph J. Schaller).

distinguished itself as the “nation’s busiest industrial and commercial waterway” (Plunz and Culligan 2007, 35). By spurring industrial growth on its banks it became key to the development of the adjacent brownstone neighbourhoods of Park Slope and Cobble Hill (Plunz and Culligan 2007). This location between two now very desirable residential neighbourhoods has recently brought Gowanus into the spotlight as a potential area for redevelopment. Gowanus has undergone slow processes of gentrification for at least a decade, as artists and small manufacturing businesses have moved into vacant industrial spaces. It is thus an area of dynamic tension where industrial businesses that have been in Gowanus for several generations, such as petroleum tank cleaners, coexist with new niche manufacturers as well as artists seeking affordable space. What is more, people also live in the area, despite its current zoning as industrial and despite the canal’s reputation as one of the most polluted urban waterways in the country.4 While extensive contamination complicates planning,5 there is no shortage of ideas, visions, and concrete proposals for the redevelopment of Gowanus, including reimagining the canal as ‘New York’s Little Venice’ (Prete et al. 2001). The narrow canal and the vernacular industrial architecture, with many buildings directly abutting the canal, evoke the potential for a residential neighbourhood with direct access to the waterway. Some brave souls already kayak through the murky waters, and others hope to reclaim

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the canal for the famous large oysters that once populated the stream. A design proposal by architecture firm dlandstudio, described on their website as a ‘sponge park’, seeks to simultaneously help clean the Gowanus Canal’s waters and provide a publicly accessible open space along the canal’s edge (dlandstudio.com 2008). The area is also coveted by developers, such as the Toll Brothers, who have recently won rezoning approval for property they own alongside the canal in anticipation of a building boom. Nonetheless, Gowanus, which is part of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) and ‘Ombudsman area’, and designated for manufacturing use, is still home to a thriving business community and is explicitly subject to the administration’s industrial policy (Mayor’s Office for Industrial Business 2005; MAS 2009). Low vacancy rates for industrial space have been the norm in recent years, and advocates for industrial and manufacturing retention in the city have argued that Gowanus constitutes one of the last centrally located manufacturing areas with the potential for growth (MAS 2009). In 2004, with funding from Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, the local Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) embarked on a planning process to bring together the myriad visions for the canal area in one ‘comprehensive’ plan. The 2005 draft plan proposes that the Gowanus area strive toward establishing itself as a “green community, dedicated to sustainability” (GCCDC 2005, 1). It states the following: The community strongly supports the restoration of the canal for its historic, ecological and recreational value and embraces the health of the canal as a critical element for achieving revitalization. The continued restoration of the canal becomes the impetus for transforming Gowanus into a “green community” that practices sustainability in all aspects of its daily life and operations . . . [and] promoting land use regulations that allow authentic mixed-uses to be retained, revitalized, and newly developed, permitting a combination of light industrial, commercial, retail and residential uses. (2005, 1) New York City’s Department of City Planning (DCP) began studying the neighbourhood in 2006–2007 and released its draft rezoning proposal in 2008. The stated intention, echoing the GCCDC plan, is to “permit a mix of uses, including residential, commercial, retail, light industrial, community facility and artist spaces” (DCP 2008). Concentrating the rezoning on a twenty-five-block area, the draft plan proposes to leave about thirty-five blocks zoned for manufacturing, ostensibly protecting industrial and manufacturing businesses and spaces in the area. The draft plan envisions two mixed-use residential/commercial districts around the northwestern edge of the canal. Another mixed-use district, which allows light manufacturing, would be created on the eastern side. The rezoning would considerably increase the allowable bulk and height for new structures, although any new development on waterfront properties

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 181 would require the creation of a public esplanade and open space along the canal’s edge. Anticipating the rezoning, the Gowanus Summit, a coalition of organizations similar to the one in Willets Point, came together to elaborate shared principles, published as the “Platform for Responsible Redevelopment of the Gowanus Canal”, to guide and set specific ground rules for redevelopment (Gowanus Summit 2007).6 The Summit sought to establish an affordable housing threshold, to push for zoning regulations that could preserve the unique mix of uses in the area, and to limit the height and bulk of new structures in order to ensure redevelopment contextual with the existing built environment. Additionally, the Summit cautioned against any development prior to comprehensive environmental remediation and infrastructure improvements (Gowanus Summit 2007; see also MAS 2009). Finally, the Summit demanded that developers abide by fair contracting rules. The Summit’s aims as articulated within the principles were to achieve social and economic equity goals as outcomes of any redevelopment, environmental restoration, long-term sustainability, and the promotion of green technologies. The DCP’s rezoning framework was arguably well intentioned, yet the plan still falls short of the vision articulated by community stakeholders and planning advocates. This is not surprising because zoning can be a blunt tool. When the proposal was formally presented at a public hearing in 2009, as part of the formal public review process, it met with considerable resistance. Advocates for industrial and manufacturing businesses were particularly vocal. Because the Gowanus Canal Corridor lies in close proximity to areas that have recently been rezoned, such as South Park Slope, Downtown Brooklyn, and the major redevelopment project at the Atlantic Yards, the area zoned for industry and manufacturing is already being encroached upon by permitted non-industrial uses such as hotels and large retail stores. Although the DCP plan proposes mixed-use districts for the areas highlighted in both the community plan and the Summit’s document, it fails to acknowledge the disadvantage industrial uses face when having to compete with the ‘highest and best’ use, namely residential use, in New York’s real estate market. Yet the DCP did not build any specific regulations into its draft rezoning proposal to safeguard manufacturing and industrial space, either in the mixed-use districts or in the remaining areas zoned for manufacturing.7 Opposition was also engendered by the density of development that could occur under the plan and by insufficient provision for public access to the waterfront and to the water. The rezoning would allow buildings of up to twelve storeys to rise along the edge of the canal in an area currently characterized by four- to six-storey buildings. And while the mixed-use districts require potential developers of waterfront properties to build a public esplanade, the properties abutting the canal to the northeast are not part of the rezoning, raising the possibility that the east side of the canal might

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be left with a truncated public esplanade. Some questioned the appropriateness of an esplanade altogether, as it contradicts the historical vernacular of the industrial built environment (MAS 2009). The rezoning, then, does not constitute a waterfront plan that lays out a vision or strategy for improving access to the waterfront or the water in a coherent or innovative way that might articulate with the existing industrial landscape (MAS 2009). Finally, critics expressed the fear that under the plan, open space development might occur in a piecemeal fashion because it would only proceed in step with private redevelopment initiatives, leaving barriers to public access (MAS 2009; dlandstudio.com 2008). The DCP framework picks up on elements of the alternative imaginaries advanced by the various stakeholders in Gowanus; it tries to mandate access to the waterfront and it allows for a mix of uses, including light industrial. Interestingly, the city administration’s aim of incorporating many local goals into its plan has been accommodated within the rezoning proposal, although in important ways the articulation of specific land-use regulations still falls short of delivering on these goals. In the Gowanus case it seems that the administration’s approach to the rezoning has also been shaped by an increasing acknowledgment from city agencies such as EDC that New York needs to maintain strategic areas for manufacturing and industrial businesses, as well as space for the maritime industry, so that it can diversify its economy and remain competitive. The intervention of the state and federal environmental protection agencies has halted the rezoning for the time being. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is currently deliberating on whether to list the Gowanus Canal Corridor as a national priorities Superfund site, which would trigger federal involvement and require comprehensive remediation of the area, including a community planning process. The future of Gowanus is consequently still subject to debate.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS Contemporary urban development—even in a ‘poster child’ city of neoliberal urbanism like New York (Greenberg 2008; Hackworth 2007; Harvey 2005; Sites 2003)—is by no means exclusively shaped by top-down, neoliberal-informed patterns and practices. On the contrary, interactions among neoliberalism, oppositional visions, and their discourses transform and redefi ne plans and policies (Leitner et al. 2007). In New York, ‘underutilized’ waterfront areas illustrate particularly well the “reciprocal interaction between neoliberalism and contestation” (Leitner et al. 2007, 22), as they have become central spaces where the hegemonic struggles over the city’s future take place. These waterfront sites are among the few remaining areas where small industrial fi rms can thrive and working-class and low-income people can still live, and precisely for this reason are being eyed with

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 183 particular interest by the city’s administration as sites for commercial and residential expansion, in order to make manifest the vision of a new, postindustrial New York. At the same time, our dissection of specific plans and projects shows that the administration has also accommodated alternative planning solutions, particularly in the case of Gowanus. Some observers have interpreted the city’s more balanced and cooperative approach in the case of Gowanus as perhaps exemplifying a more general shift in the way the city’s current administration approaches waterfront development. Several city agencies have begun to re-evaluate the impact of their strategies on the economies of waterfront communities. For instance, the recent release of the Maritime Support Services Location Study (NYCEDCBNYDC 2007), commissioned by the EDC in 2006 on the heels of drastic waterfront interventions and rezonings, cautioned the city to not compromise the port, presenting it as one of the city’s main assets. Since then, several programs and policies indicate that the city is in fact moving towards a less lop-sided urban and economic development policy approach, and has become more attentive to the small and medium-sized maritime and industrial enterprises and the residential communities that call New York’s waterfront their home. As an example: contrary to earlier predictions, the waterfront of Red Hook, a neighbourhood in close proximity to the Gowanus Canal, will remain a working port, as the city has abandoned its long-standing plan to evict the local Container Port and to redevelop the waterfront property for uses such as a marina for private yachts and a hotel and entertainment complex (Bagli 2008; Schuerman 2007). The Bloomberg administration has also begun supporting maritime industry in nearby Sunset Park. Released in 2009, the Sunset Park Waterfront Vision Plan is expected to pump $165 million in city funds and an additional $105 million in state, federal, and private funds into the neighbourhood, to maintain and expand the number of blue-collar jobs on the waterfront (City of New York 2009). It is unclear to what extent this seeming change of course can be attributed to advocacy efforts such as the ones described, or to what extent other factors such as the current credit crunch and slowing economy have led the Bloomberg administration to abandon some of its grand visions for New York’s waterfronts. At this point in time it is also impossible to assess whether developments of the more recent past signify true change in policy, or whether the market-driven and property-led transformation of further parts of New York’s waterfront is perhaps only postponed. NOTES 1. Susanna Schaller would like to thank her colleagues at The Municipal Art Society as well as activist scholars and advocates at the New York Industrial Retention Network, the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation as their shared expertise has been instrumental in shaping my thinking on issues

184 Susanna Schaller and Johannes Novy

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

with regard to land use, land-use changes, and redevelopment as it pertains to New York’s waterfront neighbourhoods. The authors would also like to thank the Department of City Planning of the City of New York for the use of “Selected Planning and Economic Development Initiatives” in Figure 8.1, and Jeremy Schaller for the photographs, which capture—in images—the case study areas. Unlike most major U.S. cities, New York City does not have a comprehensive plan. Until the recent fi nancial crisis, the redevelopment plan was premised on the projection that a single private developer would take responsibility for site preparation as well as build-out. This development model is fraught with risk, as demonstrated by the ongoing economic woes of other mega-projects in New York City, including Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, and is currently being rethought (Brash 2006; Angotti 2008). This is partly a historical legacy of flexible pre-1961 zoning regulations, which allowed for the emergence of dynamic live-work, mixed-use areas in the outer boroughs, and is partly owed to the increasing granting of zoning variances to developers who have sought to convert industrial buildings to higher-yielding uses, as well as to the illegal conversion of buildings (Angotti 2006). As a result of historical industrial uses and continuing combined sewage overflow pollution (Plunz and Culligan 2007), the canal’s water and the abutting land are so highly contaminated that the New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation asked that the Federal Department of Environmental Protection list the area as a national priorities Superfund site. The designation would trigger federal involvement and require comprehensive remediation of the area. The Summit included GCCDC, the Pratt Center for Community Development, the New York Industrial Retention Network (NYIRN), a citywide advocacy organization, several unions, the Fifth Avenue Committee, a local affordable housing organization, and local civic organizations. For a complete list of members, see Gowanus Summit (2007). For specific mixed-use special district language proposed by advocates for manufacturing and industrial retention and development to protect manufacturing space, see Pratt Center for Community Development (2008a) and MAS (2009).

REFERENCES Angotti, Tom. 2006. Willets Point land-use study. New York: Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. . 2007. Daniel Doctoroff’s legacy. Gotham Gazette, December. Accessed 31 July 2009. . 2008. New York for sale: Community planning confronts global real estate. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Armstrong, Regina and Tina Lund. 2005. Up from the ruins: Why rezoning New York City’s manufacturing areas for housing makes sense. Manhattan Institute: Rethinking Development Report 2 (June). n.p. Accessed June 27, 2010. Bagli, Charles. 2008. For reinvention, Red Hook follows its roots. New York Times, 22 November, Metro Section.

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 185 Bagli, Charles and Michael Cooper. 2005. Olympic bid hurt as New York fails in west side stadium quest. New York Times, 7 June, Metro Section. Barbanel, Josh. 2004. Remaking, or preserving New York, the city’s face. New York Times, 18 January, Metro Section. Bowles, Jonathan and Joel Kotkin. 2003. Engine failure. Center for an Urban Future (September). Accessed 15 August 2009. Brash, Julian. 2006. The Bloomberg way: Development politics, urban ideology, and class transformation in contemporary New York City. PhD thesis, City University of New York. Cardwell, Diane. 2003. Mayor says New York is worth the cost. New York Times, 8 January, Metro Section City of New York. 2002. State of the city address. 30 January. Accessed 9 August 2009. . 2008. PLANYC, Reclaim underutilized waterfronts. Accessed 12 September 2009. . 2009. News from the Blue Room: Mayor Bloomberg announces programs to expand the reactivation of Brooklyn’s working waterfront. Accessed 29 September 2009. City of New York Department of City Planning. 2008. Accessed 9 August 2009. Curran, Winnifred. 2004. Gentrification and the nature of work: Exploring the links in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Environment and Planning A 36:1243–1258. . 2007. ‘From the frying pan to the oven’: Gentrification and the experience of industrial displacement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Urban Studies 44(8): 1427–1440. dlandstudio.com. 2008. Gowanus Canal open space. Accessed 10 November 2009. Fainstein, Susan. 2005. The return of urban renewal: Dan Doctoroff’s grand plans for New York City. Harvard Design Magazine 22:1–5. Final Generic Environmental Impact Statement (FGEIS). 2008. Willet’s Point Development Plan. New York: City of New York Mayor’s Office. Accessed June 27, 2010. Garvin, Alex. 2006. Visions for New York City: Housing and the public realm. Report prepared for the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Gastil, Raymond. 2002. Beyond the edge: New York’s new waterfront. New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press. Giles, Davis. 2007. Willets point to city slow down: Business owners try to apply the brakes before their thriving zone of auto body shops is redeveloped off the map. City Limits. 25 June. Accessed 4 August 2009. Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation. 2005. See it, shape it, share it: Draft Gowanus Canal comprehensive community plan, 29 March. <www.gowanus.org/draftplan.pdf> Accessed 15 August 2009.

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Gowanus Summit. 2007. Platform for responsible redevelopment of the Gowanus Canal. Accessed 8 August 2009. Greenberg, Miriam. 2008. Branding New York: How a city in crisis was sold to the world. New York: Routledge. Gross, Courtney. 2008. Reshaping the city: Who’s being heard—and why? Gotham Gazette. August 25. Accessed June 27, 2010. Hackworth, Jason R. 2007. The neoliberal city: Governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiss, Tony. 1996. Water work. New York Times, 4 August, Metro Section. Kilgannon, Corey. 2008. Staying in Willets Point, and fighting City Hall. New York Times City Cityroom blog. 19 November. Accessed 1 August 2009. Lander, Brad and Laura Wolf-Powers. 2004. Remaking New York City: Can prosperity be shared and sustainable? Brooklyn: Pratt Institute. Leitner, Helga, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. 2007. Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers. New York: Guilford Press. Leitner, Helga, Eric Sheppard, Kristin Sziarto, and Anant Maringanti. 2007. Contesting neoliberalism: Decentering. In Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers, eds. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. New York: Guilford Press. Mastro, Randy. 1995. The road not taken. New York Times, 26 August, Op-Ed Section. Mayor’s Office for Industrial Businesses. 2005. New York City industrial policy: Protecting and growing New York City’s industrial base. Whitepaper. <www. nyc.gov/html/imb/downloads/pdf/whitepaper.pdf> Accessed 15 August 2009. Municipal Art Society. 2008. Willets Point rezoning should consider green manufacturing alternatives. 14 August. Accessed 15 August 2009. . 2009. Statement from the Municipal Art Society of New York regarding the Gowanus rezoning and related actions. 11 March. Accessed 15 August 2009. New York Building Congress. 2008. New York City construction spending forecast to reach $33.8 billion in 2008. Newsletter (Winter). Accessed 20 August 2009. New York City Economic Development Corporation. 2008a. Mayor Bloomberg speaks at city council announcement about agreement on Willets Point redevelopment plan. EDC Press Release, 12 November. Accessed 1 September 2009. . 2008b. Willets Point draft environmental impact statement, August. Accessed November 12, 2009. . 2009. Willets Point fi nal environmental impact statement, September. Accessed November 12, 2009. New York City Economic Development Corporation and Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (NYCEDCBNYDC). 2007. Maritime support services location study. State University of New York, Fort Schuyler, Bronx, NY. Accessed 15 August 2009.

New York City’s Waterfronts as Strategic Sites 187 New York City Public Development Corporation (PDC). 1991. Willet Point Planning Study: Environmental Quality Review. New York: New York City Public Development Corporation. O’Brien, Elizabeth. 2005. N.Y.C.’s riverfront revival: City pledges $36M for waterfront development bond buyer. Bond Buyer, p. 1. July 5. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3): 380– 404. Plunz, Richard and Patricia Culligan. 2007. Eco-Gowanus: Urban remediation by design. New York: Columbia University. Pogrebin, Robin. 2007. Brooklyn waterfront called endangered site. New York Times, 14 June, Metro Section. Potkewitz, Hilary. 2008. Willets Point protesters sue to block $3B city plan. Crains New York, 9 April. Pratt Center for Community Development. 2008a. Issues brief: Protecting New York’s threatened manufacturing space. New York: Pratt Center for Community Development. . 2008b. Making Willets Point work for New York: A plan for neighborhood success, February. New York: Pratt Center for Community Development. Prete, Allison, Ben Sonenberg, and Joe Hamersky. 2001. Lavender Lake Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. New York: Filmakers Library. Schuerman, Matthew. 2007. Battle of Red Hook pivots on cargo and cruise ships. New York Observer, 21 January. Sites, William. 2003. Remaking New York: Primitive globalization and the politics of urban community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Neil. 2002. New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode 34(3): 427–450. Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in movement: Social movements, collective action, and politics. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, Siobhan. 2008. Sustainability at the project level: The case of Willets Point, Queens. Master’s thesis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weber, Rachel. 2002. Extracting value from the city: Neoliberalism and urban redevelopment. Antipode 34(3): 519–540. Willets Point Industry and Realty Association. 2008. Accessed 4 August 2009. Wolf-Powers, Laura. 2005. Up-zoning New York City’s mixed-use neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Education and Research 24(4): 379–393. Zinser, Lynn, Jim Rutenberg, Joe LaPointe, Lee Jenkins, Murray Chass, and Corey Kilgannon. 2005. With deadline bearing down, Olympic bid changes direction. New York Times, 11 June, Sports Section.

Part III

Naturalizing Development and Developing Nature

9

Deep Water and Good Land Socio-nature and Toronto’s Changing Industrial Waterfront Gene Desfor1

On 25 May 1914 an elite group of international city builders and urban reformers fi lled Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto to hear Robert Gourlay present his keynote address to the Sixth National Conference on City Planning—the fi rst such conference to be held in Canada. Gourlay, an original member of the board of directors of the Toronto Harbour Commission, represented the newly established harbour minding and urban development corporation at this gala international event. The Harbour Commission 2 was indeed pleased that Toronto had been selected as the site for the conference, in part to showcase the major waterfront plan it had adopted just a few years earlier. The plan was used as a springboard to discuss fundamental issues faced by this fledgling professional association of city-planners. Frederick Law Olmsted, the conference president, addressed the gathering that day and welcomed the participants, who included such prominent planners as Thomas Adams of the Town Planning Institute in London, England. Gourlay launched his talk on the 1912 Toronto Waterfront Plan by introducing the general principles on which the Commission based its work (Gourlay 1914). He began with port and harbour development, mentioning that these facilities should be safe and commodious, with ample dock space equipped with the most modern infrastructure available for the movement of goods. The harbour should have deep water, he said, and the port should be well integrated with other transportation modes and include ship construction and repair facilities. Gourlay also demonstrated the Commission’s concern for industrial development by mentioning the need to provide model factories to assist inexperienced entrepreneurs and encourage them to locate in the port lands. When it came to ownership, he said, the city’s waterfront should be owned by its citizens and control of waterfront lands should not, except in rare cases, pass into private hands. From a fi nancial perspective, the development scheme should be self-sustaining, so as not to burden those same citizens with fi nancial diffi culties; this principle was key for political acceptance by both the local and dominion governments (Desfor 1988). A fundamental assumption underlying these principles was that this plan for a

192 Gene Desfor major transformation of the city’s waterfront would be institutionalized within the jurisdiction of the newly established Toronto Harbour Commission. Most interestingly, he noted: “We believe that the development of water-front property from an industrial standpoint calls for the reclamation of all lands that are otherwise marshy or waste places. Waterfront property should consist of only deep water and good land” (Gourlay 1914, 2). Such “good land” could be distinguished from wasteful marshes in that it would be solid, stable, and provide an advantageous location for manufacturing, commercial, and warehousing activities. According to Gourlay, the site should have rapid connections by rail and road, electrical energy for light and power, and be highly accessible to downtown Toronto. This major plan to transform the waterfront was required, Gourlay asserted, even though the city possessed, a “state of nature” that was hard to surpass in both aesthetic and recreational terms. Nevertheless that “state of nature” needed to be improved not only because it had been neglected for too long, but also to make Toronto a more effi cient city—or, in Gourlay’s own words, “we aim at removing some of Toronto’s disabilities”. In summing up, he asserted that the plan, when completed, would provide Toronto with the most up-to-date port and harbour on the Great Lakes and its waterfront would become a “playground for its citizens and their thousands of friends from all lands” (Gourlay 1914, 3). Gourlay’s address attests to of the relevance of ‘fi xity and flow’ to the planning and development of a new industrial district. The principles he enumerated should be understood as normative positions guiding the social production of a spatial and temporal ‘fi x’ for the waterfront. The ‘fi x’, consisting of a major urban expansion that was to be built on solid land to replace a fluid marsh, was intended to be a key part of an accumulation process through which capital literally became fi xed in a new and solid physical form. The new land creation was more than simply fi lling in the marsh and lake; it functioned as a major infrastructure project both to significantly expand the city’s territory and further its industrialization ambitions. Central to attracting and directing capital into this infrastructure investment was a discursive process focusing on a doctrine of improvement, which articulated an ideology for the production of this new land form. To legitimate such a major urban territorial expansion, a public consensus had to be reached that the marsh in which the land was to be created was useless and needed to be ‘improved’ to enhance both its exchange and use values. Although, as Gourlay noted, nature had been regarded as an asset to the city, it was also characterized as an obstruction—not only inefficient and unpredictable, but also feared, untamed, and outside the bounds of human control (Desfor and Prudham 2006).

Deep Water and Good Land 193 This chapter focuses on the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, when modernizing visions for Toronto, such as the Harbour Commission’s 1912 plan for good land and deep water, propelled important changes to the city. Toronto, in parallel with other industrializing cities, undertook a series of huge projects that were muscular and material expressions of modernizing impulses and capabilities. These included massive transformations of water, sewage, transportation, and electricity networks, all of which had enormous influence on Torontonians’ everyday lives. The remaking of Toronto’s waterfront figured prominently within this modernizing project, most decisively through the construction of the Port Industrial District in what had been Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh. This southern extension of the city into Lake Ontario expanded and opened up new urban territory, altered spatial relationships between the waterfront and the city, and, perhaps most significantly, was accomplished by establishing new governance arrangements that not only provided the basis for an industrial economy, but also institutionalized largely unaccountable decision-making. The land production process itself can be characterized as a ‘fi x’, through the material and representational interweaving of both society and nature (Figure 9.1). As I will discuss, society and nature were significantly constitutive of and inseparable from each other in the production of an urban landscape—a landscape reflecting the image of modernization and the needs of a rapidly industrializing city.

Figure 9.1 Workers move pipes that carry sludge dredged from lake bottom for the construction of Toronto’s Port Industrial District, circa 1914 (courtesy of the Toronto Port Authority Archives).

194 Gene Desfor ‘FIXING’ TORONTO’S WATERFRONT Urban waterfronts have always been territories where intense biophysical and social processes interact. Human settlement frequently started at the water’s edge and, as urban life expanded, systems vital to the health and welfare of residents had to be constructed, such as those providing drinking water and waste disposal. These systems intimately involved people manipulating nature. For example, provision of potable water through the laying of water-intake pipes has been fundamental to city life. Such attempts to manipulate relationships among the social and the biophysical have been ubiquitous in cities and, in particular, on urban waterfronts. They are prime examples of how society and nature have come together in the production of hybrid commodities and landscapes, which I refer to as ‘socio-nature’ (Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 2004; Smith 1984). The concept of socio-nature allows me to discuss how political and economic interests and their representations of nature are intertwined in shaping a particularly important section of cities—urban waterfronts. During the last few decades, a growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, has contributed to a greater understanding of relationships between nature and society at the urban scale. I refer to a specific aspect of the political ecology literature that stresses the role of capitalist economic relations in shaping both social and physical processes in the production and reproduction of forms of socio-nature in cities (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006; Castree 2005; Kaika 2005; Harvey 1996; Smith 1984; Desfor and Keil 2004; Swyngedouw 2004). Socio-nature, a central concept in this literature and in my chapter, is an apparently contradictory term concerned with attempts to reunite what the Enlightenment and modernity set asunder—that is, the assumption that society and nature are separate and discrete entities. Fundamental to this literature, and to this chapter, is the idea that socio-nature is produced through social practices and underpinned by political decisions. The production of socio-nature serves socio-economic and political interests, reflects the ideological preferences of dominant groups in society, and acts as a condition of possibility for socio-economic change (Desfor and Vesalon 2008). The production of socio-nature at the water’s edge has been an integral aspect of the local urban economy as well as regional and international economic systems. For example, during the development of colonial capitals under mercantilism, waterfronts served as port areas where political, economic, and ecological relationships were intertwined with the sale of African slaves, the trading of natural resources, the development of cartels, and the institutionalization of colonial power. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial practices guided port, canal, and railway infrastructure development, as well as landfi ll technologies and the construction of waterfront factories. Indeed, in many port cities throughout the world, notions of ‘progress’ and modernization have been defi ned

Figure 9.2 Ashbridge’s Bay Area, Toronto, 1894 (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

Deep Water and Good Land 195

Figure 9.3 Toronto’s central waterfront in the late 1980s (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

196 Gene Desfor

Deep Water and Good Land 197 by society’s ability to manipulate socio-nature, using a variety of technological processes, into new landscapes, such as industrial districts. Two key themes associated with the production of socio-nature projects are explored in this chapter, with a particular focus on the area on Toronto’s waterfront surrounding the mouth of the Don River, the Port Industrial District, Toronto Harbour, and Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh. The fi rst of these is the way in which a doctrine of improvement functioned to legitimate particular strategies for the production and reproduction of new waterfront landscapes, both urban and ecological. By improvement, I draw upon the classical notion of perfectibility, particularly with respect to nature, as it was perhaps most famously articulated by liberal philosopher John Locke in his celebrated and influential defence of enclosure and private property rights in the name of improving nature for human use (Locke 1980). I do not mean to agree with Locke’s general ideas concerning property rights, but rather to indicate that his articulation of such rights has been central to modernist discursive legitimation strategies. Locke developed the idea that certain kinds of property rights, in his case the private enclosure of land, would facilitate the improvement of nature by making it more productive. He argued that individuals acquire a property interest as a result of improving land in which they have invested their labour. Locke reasoned that in this way, personal appropriation of nature (land) can continue, as long as there remains sufficient quantity and quality for others to do the same. He suggested that securing exclusive and enforceable rights to own and transform land and nature must be underpinned by normative positions, or what MacPherson (1979) called a moral basis. Like other advocates for property rights, Locke used moral arguments to legitimate the segmentation of the whole of society’s rights to an exclusive subgroup. Improvement of nature—that is, making it somehow better—acts as a key rhetorical trope for Locke, which he makes more concrete through reference to increased efficiency and productivity in land use. In the case of Toronto’s waterfront, a particular discourse of improvement functioned in a specific urban and ecological context to help construct a notion of improvement that had a universal appeal. Such an appeal seems to operate when nature has been perceived to be in a denigrated state (for example, swamps) and when it is to be improved (filled, reclaimed, rationalized, or channelized). In such cases, a discourse of improvement tends to displace specific interests in a project in favour of a universalist interest, so that the improvement seems to reside as a potential within nature itself, rather than as an interest of a specific observer. The second theme, closely linked to the fi rst, concerns the politics of improvement, and in particular a concern for the ways in which heroic visions of the urban-ecological assemblage that was and is Toronto’s waterfront buttressed universalist political arguments. What was good for the waterfront was always what was good for all of Toronto. Nature, in similar fashion, functioned as a kind of undifferentiated category of interest, its

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benefits never seemingly operating in anyone’s particular favour. This rhetorical strategy was tightly linked to similar representations of the ‘city’, so much so that it became difficult to decouple nature from the city in these discourses. Moreover, ‘nature’, like ‘city’, hardly escaped contestation, and struggles over the waterfront were highly political and contentious. With this introduction and conceptual background in mind, I now narrate the historical specificities of the social production of good land and deep water on Toronto’s waterfront.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: TOO THIN TO WALK ON AND TOO THICK TO SWIM IN Perhaps the best place to start exploring these themes is in 1911 when the Dominion Government of Canada under the Laurier administration adopted legislation establishing the Toronto Harbour Commissioners (Canada 1911). The Commission was given broad powers to not only mind the harbour but also to redevelop the waterfront to suit the city’s industrial ambitions. Less than one year after its establishment, the Commission produced a large-scale city building plan entitled Toronto Waterfront Development, 1912–1920. The centre-piece of this plan was a scheme for an industrial district of about twelve hundred acres within an area that was to be constructed by filling in Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh. The marsh was the subject of considerable attention by those who saw little value in this deltaic area. In 1916, the condition of the marsh prior to its ‘improvement’ was described by Norman Wilson, a land surveyor, in his annual report: The northern shore of the marsh was up to the time of the cutting of the Keating Channel in 1893 a matted muskeg, not rooted to the bottom but aground at periods of low water, and floating in periods of high. After the construction of this drainage canal, this muskeg to the north of it, with high water and wind, aided by human agencies, gradually floated away . . . the marsh was adrift. (Fricbergs n.d., 5) And a Harbour Commission engineer similarly noted, with considerably more dramatic flair, in a background report to the 1912 plan: On top of this sand [i.e., the lake bottom] is a semi-liquid mass of decayed vegetable matter and silt from the Don River, which is too thin to walk on and too thick to swim in. (Toronto Harbour Commission 1911, 7) Clearly, the area was a fi ne example of a marsh. But to implement its plan, the Harbour Commission had to simplify and rationalize a complex, deltaic, and increasingly fetid marsh, and convert it into Gourlay’s deep water

Deep Water and Good Land 199 and good land—the key to what some saw as Toronto’s emergence as an industrial hub. The idea that the marshlands should be reclaimed—that is, made into solid land—did not begin with the Commissioners. Rather, it can be traced back to at least 1835 when Captain R.H. Bonnycastle reported on the conditions of the harbour and suggested “reclaiming the great marsh of upwards of a thousand acres in extent, which is at present a fertile source of unhealthiness to the city” (Canada Department of Public Works 1881, 11). Using the marsh specifically for industry was promoted as early as the 1870s, when Kivas Tully, engineer and member of city council, wrote of the possibilities for improvement: “there can be no doubt that the facilities offered on the completion of the permanent channel, will lead to the construction of ship yards, and the buildings for manufacturing purposes, on the vacant land in the possession of the city” (Commissioners of the Harbour of Toronto 1872). To understand the transformation of Toronto’s waterfront in and around the mouth of the Don, and specifically the conversion of the marsh to “good land, and deep water”, it is important to consider Toronto’s position at the time as an emerging industrial city, and the social construction and material configuration of its waterfront as both an opportunity for and obstacle to this emergence. The last three decades of the nineteenth century have been called Canada’s industrial era. Booming agricultural and resource development fueled industrial expansion. As Harold Innis chronicled (Drache 1995), Canada’s political economy was forged in the staples trade as a key supplier of empires, fi rst through its colonial ties to Britain and increasingly to the emerging economic giant to the south. Extensive staples geographies gave rise to intensive urbanization, as industrial processing and transportation linkages fueled the growth of major Canadian centres. By the 1880s, Montreal had emerged as a manufacturing and shipping centre, bolstered by a concentration of railroad coordination and control functions. In Ontario, servicing the expanding mineral, forestry, and agricultural sectors of the hinterland were important in fueling industrialization and urbanization of the populated southern part of the province. Toronto, in particular, achieved phenomenal growth in industrial activity during this time. The city’s population tripled between 1871 and 1901 from 86,000 to more than 234,000 people, fueled by increasing industrial employment, an influx of immigrants, and the annexation of suburban neighbourhoods. Over the same time span, industrial output rose from thirteen million Canadian dollars to fifty-eight million (Goheen 1979). Industrial growth was particularly rapid between 1880 and 1890. Prominent within the emerging industrial establishment were the Massey Manufacturing Company, which moved to Toronto in 1879 to make agricultural implements (Careless 1984), and the Gooderham & Worts distillery, located in the lower Don. By the late nineteenth century, Gooderham & Worts produced more proof spirits than any other company in Canada. As J.M.S. Careless put

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it, “Manufacturing advances in the now thickly settled southern Ontario region partly centered in Toronto because of its large amounts of capital and labour, its well-developed entrepôt structure and radiating transport network” (Careless 1984, 105). A central facet of this radiating transport network was Toronto’s waterfront area around the mouth of the Don. In this context, Toronto faced a crucial dilemma. Its waterfront, critical to shipping by both land and water, was seen as an opportunity but also as a shortcoming. Toronto’s boosterish political and economic elite were anxious to propel the city (and their own interests), particularly in competition with Montreal. They saw the waterfront as strategic but in need of improvement. Specifically, transporting goods in and out in the service of the city and industry would require shipping facilities. Solid land served the railroads, and many central areas of the waterfront had seen major battles between Torontonians and the railroad companies (Mellen 1974). Goheen investigates struggles during the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century when “legally designated public space became socially significant public space” (Goheen 1979, 60). He reports that the railways, despite some spirited public opposition, were able to appropriate much of the central waterfront lands for their own purposes. If significant new port facilities were constructed on solid land and deep water, Toronto’s position in Great Lakes shipping would be enhanced, the monopoly of the railways broken, and it would be possible to bypass Montreal in providing direct access to the Atlantic. Industrial interests and city boosters could rally around fi lling in the marsh.

SOCIO-NATURAL IMPROVEMENT As Gourlay and others had noted, ‘nature’ was regarded as an asset to the city and a prime reason for the settlement of Toronto. But ‘nature’ was also characterized as an obstruction—not only inefficient and unpredictable, but also feared; it was untamed and outside the bounds of human control. As early as 1834, the Report of the Select Committee on Harbour Improvement of the Harbour of York reported the following: But from the moment the peninsula raised its protecting head above the waters, and screened the Don from the surges of the lake, the Don, like a monster of ingratitude, has displayed such destructive industry as to displace by its alluvial disgorgings by far the greater part of the body of water originally enclosed by the peninsula. (Richardson, Chisholm, and Chewett 1834, 15) Here is a deep-seated ambivalence about the ‘nature’ with which Toronto was endowed, an ambivalence in which the ‘natural’ setting functions to both defi ne and impede the city’s potential as a port. On the one hand,

Deep Water and Good Land 201 Toronto’s location on the shores of Lake Ontario was critical to the city’s very existence and growth. Its ‘natural’ harbour—a key reason for European settlement—was protected by a peninsula that had been created by the biophysical processes of the Don River interacting with shore currents and Lake Ontario. Toronto’s European founders considered this ‘natural harbour’ to be a great benefit not only for shipping, but also for military purposes. On the other hand, these very same natural endowments were seen as imperfect: both necessary for and an impediment to the growth and development of the city. Nature somehow did not live up to its potential, and thus human intervention was needed to improve it. The decades at the end of the nineteenth century saw considerable activity aimed at rationalizing the lower Don, speeding the flow of water into and out of the harbour and Ashbridge’s Bay, and reclaiming the marshes (Desfor and Bonnell 2011). The winding course and irregular seasonal flows of the river were the focus of a protracted struggle to fashion a rationalized waterfront of solid land and deep water adjacent to the lake and its ship traffic that would be conducive to industrial land use (Desfor and Vesalon 2008). In particular, the marsh formed at the mouth of the Don by alluvial deposits from the river was seen as dangerous to shipping and as a hindrance to the city’s industrial ambitions. As an 1834 report specifies: Thus the Don, like a cautious and insidious monster, throws out before it two immense feelers of rushes as piloting its track of ruin; and layer by layer, as brick by brick the fabric rises to completion, steadily and fatally the bottom of the bay rises to the surface. (Richardson, Chisholm, and Chewett 1834, 15) The Don River was represented as in need of enhancement. In particular it had to be thwarted from disgorging its alluvial deposits and ruining the harbour. Each spring the river deposited large quantities of silt and detritus into Toronto Harbour, creating hazards for shipping traffic. Damage to property caused by seasonal flooding was yet another problem that area landowners and civic representatives attributed to the river. In 1834, harbour officials thought an engineered solution would be arrived at quite readily: Therefore the Commissioners looking upon the River Don, but as a vehicle for the transport of alluvium into the bed of the Harbour without its waters being to the Port of any significant value, suggest, that the mouths of the Don that open into York Bay may be dammed across, and the course of the Don turned east. (Richardson, Chisholm, and Chewett 1834, 16) As it turned out, improving the Don was not so simple. About fi fty years after this plan, and in response to the accumulation of these problems,

202 Gene Desfor civic politicians put forward a plan to “widen, deepen, and straighten” the Lower Don River in accordance with four central objectives: improving the sanitary condition of the area; making the Don a navigable stream for large vessels; accommodating rail traffic into the city; and creating new lands for industrial purposes (City of Toronto 1889). Little action seems to have followed from this plan until the spring of 1886, when the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, which had for many years been trying to connect its lines with Toronto, succeeded in winning the support of city officials to create an eastern entrance to the city along the west bank of the Don Improvement (Mellen 1974). The powerful railway company did much to secure this project’s fortunes, and in March 1886 the Don Improvement Act was passed by the provincial legislature, empowering the city to borrow funds and expropriate lands to complete the improvement works. Although the Don was straightened—that is, improved—in the late 1880s, transforming the marsh in Ashbridge’s Bay was more complicated. By 1872 problems with the marsh had intensified significantly. An editorial recommended improving the marsh by unleashing the power of private property rights and letting their logic lead to an inevitable conclusion—the production of a more efficient and profitable landscape: What we would recommend is that the City Council survey this marsh, and offer it for sale, with conditions that every purchaser should fill up, if not build, on his portion within a stated time. Manufacturers could thus secure eligible sites, and the now marsh would then become the centre of an active and industrious commerce. The City would receive a remunerative price for what is now worthless and unproductive. (The Leader 1872) The struggle to produce a new form of socio-nature, however, was not only political and economic. Improving nature—the filling in of the marsh— had important connections with health in the city, and this, it seems, also had an important connection with private property rights. Health officials were predicting the imminent arrival of cholera, and they highlighted the need to reclaim the marsh to remove this threat. The extent to which cholera was indeed a real threat to the city is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Jackson 2011), but regardless of the possible exaggeration of such fears, the Provincial Board of Health thought it necessary to instruct the city in June of 1892 to abate the nuisance in Ashbridge’s Bay by filling it in. But this would have direct implications for the riparian and property rights of an elite group of landowners on the north shore of the bay: if the marsh were filled, then their access to the open water of the lake would be blocked. Dr. F.H. Bryce, the then-secretary of the Provincial Board of Health and a great proponent of filling in the marsh, wrote to the landowners. His letter to Mr. John Hendry, the secretary of Ashbridge’s Bay Property Owner’s Association, served to assure them that their property

Deep Water and Good Land 203 interests were a concern to the government and that solutions were being sought that would respect their interests (Bryce 1892). So it seems that resolving a major health concern—which was itself part of ‘nature’—had been tied to the riparian and property rights of a politically active association of elite landowners. In other words, nature was becoming embedded within property rights issues. From the outset, then, narratives positing nature as a given, external influence on urbanization and industrialization had it wrong. Yet so did essentialized representations that would have nature simply made in the image of what the city’s elites wanted it to be. Nature provided both an advantage and an obstacle, and in this sense improvement is always linked to interwoven biophysical and human processes that produce major infrastructure projects. Modernizing, industrializing ambitions shattered any suggestions that nature was simply given, but also laid bare a struggle over how to work with and through the biophysical in the making of a city.

A POLITICS OF UNIVERSALISM Organizing consent for the establishment of the Toronto Harbour Commission and its 1912 waterfront development plan was by no means easy, especially because the plan’s projected cost was an astronomical twenty-five million dollars. To the contrary, this project, and its specific institutional configuration, was the source of considerable political struggle. I argue that heroic visions of spectacularly scaled socio-natures functioned to legitimate waterfront change in part by universalizing them; that is, through representations that seldom explicitly tethered plans for waterfront development to any particular interests. According to these narratives of major infrastructure projects, it was the city, undifferentiated and shared by all, that would benefit. In this manner, waterfront plans would function as a representation of the city’s collective vision of its future. Yet this vision had to be shaped and articulated, molded from the specific to the universal. Indeed, political struggle over the configuration of the waterfront, and who would control its production and use, played out for decades prior to the 1912 plan (Desfor 1988). This protracted period of uncertainty saw rival claims to the waterfront at play, involving different conceptions of political and economic arrangements by which its transformation would be achieved. In this process, prominent roles were played by groups such as the Toronto Board of Trade, the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, and the Civic Guild of Toronto, all of which cloaked their specific interests in Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh in the more general language of improvement to nature, modernization, and the destiny of a city. At the end of the nineteenth century, two competing schemes highlighted contending moves to control and benefit from the reclamation of the Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh—plans that involved quite contrasting political

204 Gene Desfor economies. In the mid-1880s, the Dominion Government had constructed a breakwater to separate the marshlands from Toronto Bay. This was done to prevent all sorts of materials floating from the marsh into the bay and interfering with shipping activities. Yet the breakwater interfered with and generally slowed the flow of water through the marsh. This compounded existing problems arising from large amounts of sewage and refuse being dumped into the marsh. In this context, two schemes emerged as leading contenders to improve the marshland. The fi rst involved a private syndicate of investors headed by Messrs. Beavis and Brown (Figure 9.4). The other was a plan developed by a city commissioner, Emerson Coatsworth. The plans differed in the details of how they would ‘improve’ the marshlands and the Don River, but most importantly for our purposes, each proposed a different configuration of property rights that would prevail over the area’s transformation and subsequent use. Beavis and Brown’s syndicate essentially proposed a direct form of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004): they would undertake the improvement work using private money in exchange for a nominal lease on the reclaimed lands and tax concessions. This was a private development scheme in which the reclaimed marsh area and reconfigured lower Don would underpin an accumulation strategy based on the creation of new land, drawing rent from industrial and shipping interests who would, in theory, flock to the new opportunities afforded by deep water and good land. Under this proposal, the reclaimed marshlands would return to direct city control after a forty-five-year period. In contrast, Coatsworth’s scheme would have been undertaken directly by the city, with the lands remaining under city control and ownership. There was no mistaking this too was a land-based accumulation strategy. But under Coatsworth’s plan, fi nancing would come directly from taxpayers, who would in turn exert more direct control over the development via city representatives. Unquestionably boosterish and commercially oriented, this constituted a different institutional model, formulated in the image of state-led and managed growth, ostensibly in the interests of the wider urban community. In some ways, Coatsworth’s plan was classic urban progressivism, relying on rationalizing and producing a new urban-ecological landscape. This was, according to Coatsworth’s backers, business too important to leave to private capital. As articulated by the then president of the Toronto Board of Trade at its 1892 annual meeting: Why hand this property over to any man or company of men to improve it, and enjoy the rents of it for 40 or 50 years—when the City itself may undertake the work of carrying it out gradually and economically according to plans framed in the public interest . . . and dispose of the reclaimed lands for parks and private dwellings, as well as the site for factories, warehouses and smelting works? (The Globe 1892, 4)

Figure 9.4 Ashbridge’s Bay Improvement Plan, by Beavis and Brown, 1889 (Map G. Desfor and C. King, York University, Department of Geography, Cartographic Lab).

Deep Water and Good Land 205

206 Gene Desfor The struggle over these competing plans is one of the more intriguing chapters in the waterfront’s history, a story replete with power, influence, grand narratives, and private ambitions. The city’s ratepayers opted for the private Beavis and Brown scheme in an 1891 city-council-backed vote, an outcome that the newspaper The Globe ascribed to ratepayer impatience with city council bungling. But well-placed city insiders including Mayor E.F. Clarke, backed by professional staff within the city, opposed allowing the work to be done by a private syndicate. These people succeeded in undermining public and official confidence in the private plan while stalling the development of an alternative plan, and yet without inflaming the sensibilities of ratepayers. The city failed in its attempts to have a plan implemented, first with the Beavis and Brown syndicate and again later with competing private-sector initiatives seeking to capture the expected rents from a reclaimed marsh, and therefore pressure to act quickly mounted. In October of 1892, the city council asked the city engineer E.H. Keating to submit a plan to increase the flow of water in the marsh. He provided a city-led plan that was quickly adopted, and that helped to abate pressing water quality issues. But the reclamation of the marsh and the question of who would control it were not resolved for another two decades. The resolution of these issues came to a head on 2 January 1911, when Toronto’s duly registered electorate went to the polls to elect a city government and to express its preferences on a series of development issues. Among the referendum questions on that Election Day, one asked: Are you in favor of the control and development of Ashbridge’s Bay and the waterfront in the city’s interest by a commission having a majority of its members appointed by the city? (City of Toronto 1911, 129) As framed in the referendum question, control over and accountability of the “commission” was vague and in some respects misleading. The reference to the “city’s interest” indicates that development will be shared by all in the city, but says nothing about how waterfront development is linked to the public interest, other than through an unelected commission making that determination. Similarly, the organization of the new commission and its place within broader government structures were not explicitly mentioned in the referendum question and had not been an issue of open public discussions or consultations. Under these circumstances it is likely that the public had little access to relevant information for determining the extent to which “a commission having a majority of its members appointed by the city” was equivalent to a commission controlled by city council and accountable to Torontonians. The referendum question, as it appeared on the ballot that day, seemed too good to oppose. Even fi fteen years after the referendum, a report of

Deep Water and Good Land 207 the fi rst Royal Commission inquiring into Toronto’s waterfront development remarked that the form of the question was very favourable for those who wished the improvements to be made. It also noted, “There are some ratepayers, however, who would like to know by whom and by what methods public opinion was created in favour of this large undertaking” (Canada 1927, 8). About five months after the referendum, the Dominion Government of Canada ushered in a new era of waterfront development in Toronto with the establishment of the Toronto Harbour Commissioners (Canada 1911). The newly established Commission represented the end of a period of contestation in which various factions of capital came together to institutionalize a set of social relations and undertake a major urban ecological transformation of one form of socio-nature into another. But the establishment of the Commission also marks the beginning of a new period during which it was the lead organization for managing a many-faceted waterfront problem, as well as for shepherding in massive industrial, transportation, and park infrastructure projects supporting increased industrial development in a rapidly changing city at the turn of the twentieth century. The Commission had unprecedented powers; the right to raise capital, to expropriate land, and to operate largely independently of city, provincial, and national governments. It was successful in acquiring ownership of virtually all waterfront property through purchases, expropriation, or exchange.

CONCLUSIONS In his presentation at the 1914 international planning conference, Robert Gourlay spoke about the Harbour Commission’s 1912 waterfront plan as a great public scheme of improvement that would transform a valueless marsh into a productive industrial district. He enumerated the principles on which the plan was based and described how the plan would solve many of the problems facing the city. I have argued that this plan represents an early twentieth-century modernizing impulse that led to the creation of “deep water and good land”, which was intended to help the city meet its industrial ambitions. I have focused on two themes related to the production of a particular form of infrastructure on Toronto’s waterfront. The first concerns the notion of ‘improvement’. Representations of a spectacular and highly urban notion of nature’s ‘improvement’ have been constructed that reshaped Toronto’s waterfront. In these ‘improvement’ projects, nature functions somewhat paradoxically as both an opportunity for and obstacle to the city’s grand industrial ambitions. In this sense, ambitions for waterfront transformations are underpinned not so much by what nature is, but rather what is in the nature of nature to be. According to this notion, humans have

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an influence upon states of nature, and human ambitions for what nature could or should be are important determinants of waterfront change. My second theme has focused on the politics of ‘improvement’. Here I am interested in exploring the ways in which universalist political arguments were employed to legitimate major investments in infrastructure: what was good for the waterfront was always what was good for all of Toronto. ‘Nature’ served as a kind of universal, undifferentiated category of interest, never seemingly in anyone’s particular interest, but represented as being good for the city. In these discourses, it was not possible to separate what was ‘nature’ from what was ‘the city’. Associated with this second theme, I have found that rhetorical tropes about public interest, not least as articulated in and through urban-ecological improvement, influenced the shaping of institutional arrangements for property rights that controlled development of the waterfront and the appropriation of economic surplus from it. Property rights were institutionalized through the Toronto Harbour Commission: a corporatist, state-led body that had a major influence upon the shaping and reshaping of Toronto’s waterfront and whose structure and organization were influenced by local politics, as well as by the broader urban reform movement. This curiously unaccountable localstate body conveyed a populism that seemed to be antagonistic to the narrow interests of big capital, but was at the same time committed to more efficient, rationalized, ecological formations in the interests of expanded capital accumulation. It managed the production of deep water and good land and the establishment of a new industrial landscape intended to modernize the city. I want to end by noting the words of John Ross Robertson, a prominent and outspoken Scottish-born Torontonian who founded a daily newspaper, the Telegram, which became a voice for working-class conservatism and a bitter rival of the liberal paper, the Toronto Star. Robertson was noted for his keen interest in local history and frequently championed populist causes in the city. His dry wit was much apparent in his clever encapsulation of Torontonians’ feelings about the city’s most prominent ‘natural’ feature: “Lake Ontario, whether liquid or solid has always been reckoned among the assets of Toronto” (Kyte 1910, 271). NOTES 1. Much earlier versions of this chapter were co-authored with W. Scott Prudham, Department of Geography, University of Toronto. Also, small sections of this chapter appear in Desfor, Vesalon and Laidley (2011). The author would also like to thank the Toronto Port Authority for the use of the photograph Labourers Moving Pipes in the Port Industrial District in Figure 9.1, and Carolyn King of the Cartography Lab in the Department of Geography at York University for assistance in creating the three maps included in this chapter. 2. The proper name is the Toronto Harbour Commissioners, but I use the common practice of referring to it as the Toronto Harbour Commission—or simply the Commission.

Deep Water and Good Land 209 REFERENCES Bryce, P.H. 1892. Letter to John Hendry, The Globe, 3 September. In The River Don and Ashbridge’s Bay. Toronto Port Authority Archives: SC 26, box 4, folder 4. Canada. 1911. The Toronto Harbour Commissioners Act-1911. 1–2 George V, Chapter 26. . 1927. Commission to investigate the transactions of the Toronto Harbour Commissioners. Toronto: Toronto Port Authority Archives. Canada Department of Public Works. 1881. Memorandum with accompanying plans and documents relative to the past and present state of the harbour of Toronto. Toronto: Toronto Port Authority Archives. Careless, James M. 1984. Toronto to 1918: An illustrated history. Toronto: James Lorimer. Castree, Noel. 2005. Nature. London and New York: Routledge. City of Toronto. 1889. Mayor’s inaugural address. In Council Minutes, Appendix, 14–15. Toronto: City Printers. . 1911. Minutes of City Council 1910. Appendix C. Toronto: City Printers. Commissioners of the Harbour of Toronto. 1872. Annual report of the harbour master. Toronto Port Authority Archives: RG/4, box 4, volume 1. Desfor, Gene. 1988. Planning urban waterfront industrial districts: Toronto’s Ashbridge’s Bay, 1889–1910. Urban History Review 17(2): 77–91. Desfor, Gene and Jennifer Bonnell. 2011. Nature as an agent of urbanization: Changing Toronto’s Lower Don River in the nineteenth and twenty-fi rst centuries. In Changing Toronto’s waterfront, eds. Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Desfor, Gene and Roger Keil. 2004. Nature and the city: Making urban environmental policy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Desfor, Gene and Scott Prudham. 2006. Industrializing nature, naturalizing the urban: Socio-natural transformations of Toronto’s industrial waterfront. Presentation to the Association of American Geographers, Chicago. Desfor, Gene and Lucian Vesalon. 2008. Urban expansion and industrial nature: A political ecology of Toronto’s Port Industrial District. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 586–603. . 2010. The city walks on water: Urban expansion and the social production of waterfront land. In Changing Toronto’s waterfront, eds. Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Drache, Daniel, ed. 1995. Staples, markets, and cultural change: Selected essays of Harold Innis, 1894–1952. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fricsberg, K.S. n. d. Recent changes to Toronto’s shoreline. Toronto: Toronto Port Authority. Globe, The. 1892. Toronto. 21 January, 4. Goheen, P.G. 1979. Currents of change in Toronto, 1850–1900. In The Canadian city: Essays in urban history, eds. G.A. Stelter and A.F.J. Artibise. Toronto: MacMillan. Gourlay, R.S. 1914. Basic principles of water-front development as illustrated by the plans of the Toronto Harbour Commissioners. Toronto Port Authority Archives: RG 1/5, box 2, folder 15. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell. . 2004. The ‘new’ imperialism: Accumulation by dispossession. In Socialist Register 2004: The new imperial challenge, eds. Leo Panich and C. Leys. Toronto: Fernwood Publishing.

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Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006. In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, Paul. 2011. Swampy science in Ashbridge’s Bay. In Changing Toronto’s waterfront, eds. Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of fl ows: Modernity, nature, and the city. New York and London: Routledge. Kyte, K.C. 1910. Old Toronto: Excerpts from landmarks of Toronto by John Ross Robertson. Toronto: Macmillan. Leader, The. 1872. Editorial: The Don Marsh, 14 November. In a collection by V. Roberts, Memorabilia. Toronto Port Authority Archives: SC 26/2, box 7, folder 2. Locke, J. 1980. Second treatise of government. Edited by C.B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. MacPherson, C.B. 1979. Theories of property. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Mellen, F. 1974. The development of the Toronto waterfront during the railway expansion era, 1850–1912. PhD diss., Department of Geography, University of Toronto. Richardson, H., W. Chisholm, and J.G. Chewett. 1834. Report to Sir John Colborne, K.C.B., “In reference to improvement of the harbor”. In K. Tully, 1886, “Letter to the Mayor”. In a collection by V. Roberts, Memorabilia. Toronto Port Authority Archives: SC 26/2, box 7, folder 2. Select Committee on Harbour Improvement of the Harbour of York. 1834. Report. Toronto Port Authority Archives: SC 26/2, box 7, folder 2. Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven development: Nature, capital and the production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toronto Harbour Commission. 1911. Background report to 1912 Toronto waterfront development, 1912–1920. Toronto: Toronto Port Authority Archives.

10 Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront Under the Bridges of Puerto Madero and La Boca Stephanie C. Kane1

Puerto Madero, an internationally inspired model of waterfront development in Buenos Aires, is redolent with transnational corporate authority. La Boca, only one kilometre away, is in contrast a quixotic artistic attraction layered onto a stinking harbour scene. While each has a different relation to the seriously degraded and simplified riverine ecology in which it is embedded, both have played a signifi cant historical role in the development of Buenos Aires as a major nexus of Latin American global trade. Neither, however, is central to the current container shipping industry, which is located in Puerto Nuevo (“New Port”) just upstream from Puerto Madero (see Figure 10.1). While these two waterfront locales share aquatic views and histories, the stark contrast between their “culturally coded geographies” (Shields 1991, 265) shows how development and degradation emerge differentially on a local stage. In this chapter, I compare these two different waterfront sites within the port city of Buenos Aires, with the aim of challenging the binary logic that underpins so much of conventional development discourse. This logic accords value to contemporary ‘revitalized’ waterfront developments that target the affluent and devalue degraded industrial waterfronts where the common or culturally marginal people, the poor and immigrants, live. I aim to convey the vitality that inhabits marginal spaces like La Boca and juxtapose it with the obsolescence that underwrites the putative success of Puerto Madero. A focus on the signature bridges in each of these sites illuminates ways in which port city dwellers, the “Porteños”, strive to shape, to flow with, and to fi x their relation to the rivers that embrace and encumber urban experience. Cultural studies scholar Beatriz Sarlo (2008, 44–45) argues that forces of globalization in Buenos Aires have created a “broken city”. She illustrates this with a photographic image of La Boca’s “industrial iron bridge in ruins” paired with a textual assessment of Puerto Madero, whose newly developed space targeting the affluent she considers only nominally “public” because “although there is no interdiction, there

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Figure 10.1 Central waterfront of Buenos Aires (Map S.C. Kane, adapted from Pampa Fértil [2006]).

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 213 is no reason [for the non-affluent] to go there either.” I build on Sarlo’s impulse to compare the two waterfronts as part of the notion of a broken city. In my analysis, fixities in urban waterfronts are material structures and socio-cultural practices that define and shape flows (e.g., of rivers, people, vehicles, information). Within this schema, large-scale infrastructure dramatizes relationships between engineered fixities and more natural aquatic flows. Captured water runs through canalized networks for drainage, potable water, and sewage, while bridges, shipping docks, and dredging machines transcend, deflect, and reshape rivers; urban aquatic ecology is a synthesis and an encounter between infrastructural and aquatic elements. Flows are multidirectional: rivers flow out to sea, brackish tidal waters flow upstream, they pool and eddy in marshes and mangroves; people, goods, money, music, text and image move and settle in diverse inter-linking and layered channels, networks and niches. Flows are unpredictable: storms overtake balmy weather; wars interrupt relative peace; crimes subvert institutional regulatory and decision-making mechanisms; cancellations and robberies interrupt fieldwork. Thus, fixities and flows layer in and under the surface of earth and everyday life, creating productive tensions of differing magnitudes. Two movable bridges, one in La Boca and one in Puerto Madero, encapsulate the changing and contested meaning of the waterfronts in these two neighbourhoods within Buenos Aires. Although both were built for humans crossing aquatic divides, they differ in transport function, design, and social history. Subconsciously or consciously, these bridges, like many others traversing city waterways, also function culturally; people who use and key their sense of identity to them shape the dynamic balance of their aesthetic and engineering significance (Cleary 2007). Such icons distinguish themselves from their hundreds of mundane counterparts. Although people are less conscious of mundane bridges, they nevertheless involve a choice of river crossing that determines how people traverse urban and national topography (Cooper 2006). Contested meanings, functions, and civic responsibilities for the preservation of iconic bridges change dramatically over time. And in this sense, bridges can be catalysts for communication (Guth 2008). As with the relationship between the Brooklyn Bridge and New York City, the Puerto Madero and La Boca bridges are polyvocal icons. I also characterize the ways in which the bridges, and the proliferation of artistic representations of the bridges, encapsulate struggles over the “asymmetrical fields of power” inhabiting waterfronts (Cresswell 2006, 220). In analyzing the significance of interpretive struggles over the bridges, I assert there is a perilous lack of connection between the everyday concerns of people using the waterfront and the water swirling under the bridges, the toxic lifeblood of the city. Before discussing the sites and their signature bridges, I present an overview of my ethnographic approach in the larger project of which this chapter is a part, and a brief historical overview of urban aquatic ecology and coastal settlement in Argentina.

214 Stephanie C. Kane ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS I carried out ethnographic fieldwork between 2006 and 2007 in three major cities on the Atlantic coast of South America that are being redefi ned on an unprecedented scale by an expanding container shipping industry: in Brazil (Santos and Salvador, September–March) and in Argentina (Buenos Aires, March–August). The study grounds urban ecology in expert and folk knowledge of lives and livelihoods in riverine maritime environments. I took a two-pronged approach: the interface between infrastructure and aquatic ecology was identified and combined with an analysis of the ways people get involved (or not) in watershed and coastline confl icts and collaborations. Methods included interviews, participant observation, and visual documentary walking tours (Guano 2003; Pink 2001; de Certeau 1984). This ethnography takes up the challenge of understanding why and how legal instruments for democratic management of river basins have not significantly reversed regional environmental decline in Latin America (Almansi et al. 2003; Barragán et al. 2003; United Nations 2003). At the same time, it demonstrates how each city has an array of distinctive cultures, ecologies, and economies that shape the way local actors negotiate the forces, consequences, and possibilities of a global economy. In Buenos Aires, fieldwork included formal, semi-structured interviews with professionals in government agencies and shipping, activists and artists, scholars, and experts in universities and non-governmental organizations. To encourage openness, I usually took only hand-notes, though where possible I visually documented the interview context (both still photography and videography was restricted in some port facilities). Initially, I selected interviewees opportunistically, searching for relevant expertise, cold-calling for appointments, getting leads from interviewees, and networking at events. In the second phase, I focused interviews and participant observation on particular waterscapes and events (in Buenos Aires, in addition to Puerto Nuevo, I worked with neighbours of Tigre Delta and the Plate River, who coordinated citywide action with the La Boca neighbourhood assembly). I studied two kinds of community actions related to La Boca. First, there were specific presentations on the toxic condition of the Riachuelo River and the La Boca harbour, where the Riachuelo empties into the Plate (downstream from the Delta and Madero). Secondly, La Boca’s neighbourhood assembly spearheaded a citywide mobilization, bringing together neighbourhood assemblies who had been struggling more or less independently for decades. Together, they confronted an array of interrelated crises regarding water and political will. Formal, public events in 2007 specifically related to La Boca included: a waterfront tour with colleagues upon arrival in the city; a meeting bringing together representatives from an organization of neighbourhood assemblies called the Great Regional Forum (Gran Foro Regional) with the Environmental Commission of the Public College of Lawyers of the Federal

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 215 Capital; the fi rst citywide organizational meeting of all the neighbourhood assemblies of the Inter-basin Space Encounter Riachuelo-Reconquista-Río de la Plata (Encuentro Espacio Intercuencas RRR) in La Boca; a symposium entitled “Water Is a Right” at the General Auditorium of the Nation; a Supreme Court hearing of the government’s integrated but faulty sanitation plan in the Matanzas-Riachuelo River Basin; a two-day forum and workshop entitled “Poverty and Environment” including public health experts, city-planners, and neighbourhood representatives at the National Library; the launching of a new forum entitled “Anti-Discrimination and the Environment” at the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism of the Ministry of Justice, Security and Human Rights. As suggested by this long list of events, there was a great deal of concern, activism, and overwhelming scientific and legal evidence documenting governmental failures to punish industrial polluters, grapple with public health problems, or sufficiently extend legally mandated sanitation and potable water to residents of the conurbation (Federovisky 2007). Puerto Madero, inhabited by a protected and comfortable elite and corporate constituency, was not represented at any of these events. That does not alter the fact that the polluted Plate River flows under its signature bridge. My focus on bridges as icons emerged after returning from the field. Videotapes (by C. Jason Dotson) and still photographs produced in my walking tours provided data for analysis of bridges, art in public space, and transit routes. I interpreted the visual data in the context of my understanding of ecology, infrastructure, and cultural politics. Historical materials circulated on the Internet by the port authorities and neighbourhood associations provided details about the bridges and waterfronts that contributed substantially to the evocation of place and to my argument.

NATURE IN THE ANALYTIC BORDERLANDS OF GLOBALIZATION The central quandary of contemporary ethnography is developing flexible methods for data collection and analysis so as to be able to capture the oftentimes invisible operation of global forces in the heart of the mundane (Marcus 1999). As participant observers, ethnographers, like the persons, communities, and institutions we study, may sense global forces without necessarily having direct sensory or cognitive access to them; that is, we may observe global effects in the midst of quite unconscious participation in processes that produce them. For example, while eating in an elegant harbourfront restaurant we may not be mindful of the transport technology that brings food, water, wine, clothes, waiters, kitchen staff, and equipment there, unless of course we make global supply and migration networks an object of study. An ethnographer may study a place called Buenos Aires: the name refers to governable territory (city and provincial jurisdiction) as

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well as cultural identity, i.e., the place where “Porteños” live, where Tango comes from. Yet Buenos Aires’s territory and culture is unevenly embedded in larger regional and global networks. As an extreme example, most decision-making in the everyday management of the container port zone (Puerto Nuevo) is governed by multinational shipping corporations with headquarters elsewhere. In this sense, an ethnographer’s study of “Buenos Aires” is a partial fiction that attempts to capture the ineffable character, the veritable uniqueness, of this array of connections between culture(s) and place(s). At the same time, an ethnographer must grapple with the knowledge that Buenos Aires is only semi-autonomous, inevitably linked to multiple places outside. In this open cultural geography, Porteños reinvent reflections of themselves, signaling life’s tempo, style, and heritage. Parisian-style cafés and boulevards, pizza places, fashions in wool and leather, gauchos, silveredged cups for sharing hot maté tea, materialize an Argentinean public imaginary that dissolves as you cross the border into Brazil’s interior. At the same time, inter-continental fibre-optic cables transport ever-new flows of information, subjecting and enticing both nations, even as resulting patterns of opportunity reinforce old obstacles and racialized inequalities. Such technological and informational interpellations have forever altered our understanding of spaces, places, and the transoceanic cultural flows that inform, disrupt, and remap local ways of being in the world (Castells 1996). The more ethnographers have grown to appreciate the dynamism afforded by flows (e.g., of models for investing and designing development projects of various kinds), the more imperative it has become to identify and characterize the fi xities that govern content, direction, constraint, and the apportionment of risks and benefits (Tsing 2004). Inequalities, provoked and reinforced by patterned routes and canalized flows, are central to “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2006, 111), a process that provokes a variety of social struggles within the larger experience of uneven geographic development (Caldeira 2000). In this scholarly paradigm, waterfronts should be considered as contested loci that dramatize and juxtapose land–sea realms. Historically, ocean space’s meaning in modern discourses depended upon a rhetorical contrast with land space: geopolitical and development discourses represented land as the paradigmatic space of state governance and economic activity on the one hand and ocean space as an undevelopable, anarchic marine void on the other (Steinberg 2001). Waterfronts, situated at the confluence of ocean space and land space, mediate these spaces in site-specific ways, even though globalization influences the site-specific meaning of these spaces. By virtue of “hypermobility”, for example, multinational shipping operations may neutralize oceanic voids, inducing “space-time compression” (Harvey 1990). But in order to embed in the local, the global also operates outside the “still common conception of unitary space marked by a unitary time” (Sassen 2006, 383); the global also operates in spatio-temporal orders between and within

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 217 the national. Sassen (2006, 382–383) calls these other spatio-temporal orders “analytic borderlands” and argues that scholars need to make them legible, restoring “social thickness” to global processes, revealing the “lumpiness” of global dependence on material, facilities, infrastructures, and peoples. By attending to the functional and aesthetic differentiation of waterfronts, my analysis deciphers various forms of global dependence on nature. For example, the colorful geometric aesthetic of Puerto Nuevo’s container stacks is an unintended consequence of economic function, and the sleek glass and steel aesthetics of Madero’s development is essential to cash flow. Territorial waters are elemental in both Puerto Madero and La Boca, yet act differently. Ships use water as a transport surface; this was the founding function of Madero. But Madero’s space has been subject to “diversion” (détournement). Now water functions as a backdrop or stage, a sign that refers to nature and leisure (Lefebvre 2007) while cranes, hoisting cargo no longer, function as public sculpture. Nature appears as given, a preformed design element that poses solvable architectural and engineering challenges, such as how to get pedestrians across a canal. In this framework, the dynamism of coastal waters targeted for development, once controlled, can be aesthetically appreciated, and sold, as view, surface, or horizon. Fading from importance (or waiting in the analytic borderlands) are the invisible, unintended, and unpredictable processes and effects of the encounter between myriad life forms and landscape forms, organic and inorganic, upstream and downstream. Pedestrians pay scant attention to the disappearance of river fish, or the reasons for the disappearance; who thinks about them until after they are gone? In Madero, corporate dazzle obscures the negative effects and the specific dependencies of development upon aquatic ecology. In yet-to-be-developed La Boca, nature is abject, the harbour bereft, and yet visual art flourishes. Perhaps this art is the effect of a conversion: “As nature becomes, by decree, to seem ever more barren, the individual inner human self becomes the postulated repository for all the qualities extracted from the world” (Evernden 1992, 86–87). As long as they are not too obviously degraded, waterfronts can be developed, as in Madero, using the models of Baltimore or Boston (Hoyle 1988). Nature sells well when culture appears to contain it. But culture cannot contain nature: in all its elaborate diversity, culture emerges from nature. Indeed, culture derives its very potential for change from nature: “The natural does not limit the cultural; it provokes and incites the cultural by generating problems, questions, events that must be addressed and negotiated, symbolized, or left unrepresented” (Grosz 2005, 51). The unpredictability and dynamism of the riverine coastal environment is an unrelenting provocation against and within which urban waterfront cultures in Buenos Aires emerge and diverge. Nature’s provocation is an existential premise that organizes the material structures and socio-cultural practices defi ning and shaping the flows of everyday life.

218 Stephanie C. Kane WATERFRONT NATION When Spanish colonizers fi rst encountered the Plate River Basin, they named it the “Sweet Sea” (Mar Dulce). In 1523, a prescient authority recognized that settlements should be established on higher sites with potable water nearby, not on flood-plains. Except for locating near abundant freshwater, his counsel was almost thoroughly ignored (Asociación de Vecinos La Boca, n.d.). Two settlements were established beside the stream “the Riachuelo”, in 1536 and 1580, on land that belonged to Querandíes Indians. From the Riachuelo’s mouth, Greater Buenos Aires spread. Now home to thirteen million people, this port city is Latin America’s third largest megalopolis. Today’s La Boca neighbourhood and its pendant bridge inhabits the original settlement site on the Riachuelo, which eventually became the jurisdictional boundary between Buenos Aires, the federal capital, and Buenos Aires, the surrounding province. The Supreme Court of Argentina, in response to a criminal denunciation by La Boca’s Assembly of Neighbors, declared the state non-compliant with Article 41 of the national constitution, which consecrates the right to a clean environment (see Federovisky 2007). In 2007, it was declared one the world’s “Dirty Thirty” most polluted places (Blacksmith Institute 2007). Despite this, it has remained a key urban crossing to and from the rural south since the sixteenth century. Buenos Aires sits on a vast plain with its back to the Plate River Basin. The Sweet Sea that fourteen Spanish vessels sailed into in the early sixteenth century is an ancient gulf whose surface covers more than three million square kilometres and whose form is shaped by four thousand years of sediments brought in by Atlantic Ocean tides and some of the world’s largest freshwater rivers (the Paraná, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Plate). The Paraná alone discharges more than sixteen thousand cubic metres of water per second and runs along a depression tens of kilometres wide. With a very small slope and a depth of between two and six metres, it is a shallow sheet of water with a powerful hydraulic push (Oldani 1994). The flowing expanses of the Plate and Paraná have inspired the powerful myth that their waters will carry away and dissolve all detritus that enters them. This myth perpetuates behaviour by institutions and the general populace that flies in the face of undeniable evidence that there is a limit to the amount of feces, plastic-laden garbage, and diverse chemical and radioactive poisons that aquatic ecologies can absorb. The myth obscures a troubling reality: rivers flow out to sea, but tides and winds flow rhythmically back. Sediment carried down in highland torrents clog navigation channels in the basin. Even with constant dredging, the main channel is so narrow that it can handle only three vessels at a time. A dark edge of contamination hugs the urban coast. It flows from industrialized and marginalized streams and riversides in the conurbation into the Reconquista River, which forms the boundary on the northern edge between city and province and is the Riachuelo’s contaminated twin (Figure

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 219 10.1). The water-capture site for the city centre—two shacks shading pumps and tanks—is 1.2 kilometres offshore (AySA n.d.). At one walled-off end of the cavernous General San Martín treatment plant, men sit watching video feeds of the intake site. Chief Engineer Stella Miyagi explains that they also have surveillance boats trawling key aquatic interchanges, taking samples and carrying sniffer dogs on the look-out for approaching toxic flows. Water capture can be halted when necessary. The management of this mythic contradiction between freshness and contamination focuses only on the visibility of the most major, irregular streams of contamination. Once captured and pumped to the station, the water is subject to expensive industrial-strength chemical treatment to meet international standards of potability (although most of the people I met drink bottled water from elsewhere—if they can afford to). There are also centralized drainage and sewage systems, which collect and carry rain and human waste into offshore currents. As the Plate flows past the city, northwest to southeast, it carries pollution from the Reconquista. By the time its waters enter Puerto Madero’s canals, however, the Plate’s contamination is sufficiently diluted that it does not trigger unpleasant visual or olfactory sensations. But just around the bend from Madero, La Boca sits right in the stinking mouth of another tributary, the Riachuelo, and gets hit directly with the effluent of over three thousand factories that illegally dump waste, together with sewage from 55 percent of the river basin’s inhabitants, who lack connections to the centralized sewage infrastructure (Comité Ejecutor del Plan de Gestión Ambiental y Manejo de la Cuenca Hídrica Matanza-Riachuelo 2003). The myth and reality of the Plate’s great cleansing power cannot help La Boca. However, La Boca hosts popular tourist attractions, despite the degraded status of its waterfront and its crowded tenements. In any case, the difference between innocuousand disgusting-looking water helps explain the swift redevelopment and promotion of Puerto Madero as an international tourist destination and elite residential and office complex, as well as the delayed development of La Boca. Direct connections between the two waterfronts have also been delayed, such as legislative proposals to link them with a tourist train (Asociación Civil por la Reserva, n.d.). The comparison of the sites’ potentials for urban waterfront development has much to tell us about the fi xities and flows of decay, capital investment, and cultural performance.

PUERTO MADERO Puerto Madero is an example of how an obsolete shipping terrain can be converted into a profitable combination of restaurants, hotels, corporate headquarters, deluxe condos, and lofts. In this instance, the remake includes a yacht club, which highlights the way that the water surface continues to function as a central element in the area’s revised design and

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operations. Puerto Madero’s former function as a harbour, with its loading and unloading zone, gave way to a recreational panorama that draws affluent people to the relative spaciousness of its riverine infrastructure. In its new form, city boosters imagine the development itself as “A River of Life for Buenos Aires”. Navigation nostalgia narrates pedestrians’ romance with shipping history. Semi-contaminated, brownish river waters are sufficiently contained and distanced by stonework to render any remaining whiff of pollution inoffensive. Recognition of the need for the port that would become Madero grew as overseas trade expanded in the mid-nineteenth century (Corporacio Antiguo Puerto Madero S.A. [CAPM], n.d.). Between 1861 and 1882, a series of designs were proposed for the underdeveloped riverside area closest to the city centre (Puerto Buenos Aires, n.d.). All the proposals involved linking the future port to the old domestic port in the Riachuelo. Most notably, a design from a group led by engineer Luis Huergo proposed a solution of open and parallel inner harbours that would allow the port to grow northward along the coast. His group’s basic design would eventually be adopted to build Puerto Nuevo in the early twentieth century, but not before Eduardo Madero got congressional and executive authorization for his closed design in 1882, despite strong criticism against it. Madero was “an important man involved in commercial and port activities, [and had] the support of [then president] General Roca” (Puerto Buenos Aires, n.d.). Construction of Madero’s design began in 1887 and was completed in 1897. As Huergo predicted and tried to prevent, Madero’s closed design was doomed. The fi rst ship entered on 28 January 1889, and by 1907, only eighteen years later, the national government officially declared it inadequate to meet the sudden increase in vessel tonnage from four to ten and then twenty million tonnes (CAPM, n.d.). Puerto Madero spent most of the twentieth century without being designated an official shipping zone, although several proposals were put forth for integrating the wide area between the city centre and the river-front. Among the proposed designs is one by Le Corbusier, who toured the capitals of Latin America in 1929 and designed a plan for Puerto Madero during World War II. Le Corbusier sensed a great travesty of urban design, writing: “Oh! Buenos Aires has given its back to the river, never sees it, does not know it exists” (CAPM, n.d.). His correction involved demolishing Puerto Madero, creating a huge park connecting the central Plaza de Mayo to the river, and consolidating the coastal front as emblematic of Buenos Aires by building a causeway to an artificial island, upon which would sit an avantgarde set of buildings forming the Financial District. The plan did not fly. It may have been not only the wrong moment, but also the wrong idea. Porteños prefer, it seems, to orient towards the land, not the river, with its waves of mosquitoes in warm weather and winter’s bitter winds. Madero’s revitalization would not begin until the 1990s, in the extravagant post-dictatorship privatization give-away days spearheaded by Carlos

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 221 Menem’s presidency. In 1989, the city of Buenos Aires, sharing authority with the national government, developed a strategic redevelopment plan. Inspired by and in cooperation with Barcelona’s City Hall, Buenos Aires held a national design contest (the Barcelona design was inspired in turn by Baltimore; see Breen and Rigby 1996). Water, sewage, and drainage infrastructure were expanded, connecting new residential and commercial buildings to the main city systems (CAPM, n.d.; Busquets 1993). In an apparent concession to environmentalists, the plan designated the land between the piers and the River Plate, which was filled in the 1960s with the less toxic sediments of channel dredging, as a nature reserve. The extent to which the military dictatorship used this section of the river’s edge as a dumping ground for toxic construction waste and the fact that the marsh had been established on top of the toxic foundation have only recently received public attention. Legal challenges are just beginning (Skartveit 2009; Mardones 2008). Examining the resolutions put forth to the legislature regarding development, I can see the struggle over what counts as culture and heritage in Madero (Asociación Civil por la Reserva, n.d.). The three casinos that inhabited the port area during its ‘official obsolescence’ were destroyed without fuss. In contrast, a giant silo, icon of Argentina’s standing as “the Granary of the World”, remains (Larco 2006; Asociación Civil por la Reserva, n.d.). A small community kitchen sits amidst the splendour, the large sign atop it announcing: “We struggle for an Argentina where the dogs of the rich stop being better fed than the children of the poor” (author’s translation). While expanses of water and sky afford a welcome respite from narrow city streets, contemporary urban architecture preserves the feeling of pedestrians walking inside their world, protected like ships’ crews in harbour. On the map, Puerto Madero links the city centre and coast, but once the visitor comes into the waterfront development site, their experience focuses on a wide pedestrian enclosure composed of piers that face one another and that are separated by rectilinear segments of a diverted river. The fi xities of steel and glass architecture, emboldened by repainted cranes, dance delightfully with the moving clouds on the water’s surface.

LA BOCA At fi rst glance, La Boca’s stretch of harbour has the feel of a European village, with Mondrian’s pallet of primary colors adorning tin house-facings. This style stems from the port’s early nineteenth-century history. In its heyday, La Boca (‘the Mouth’) received boatloads of immigrants, many from Genoa, who settled in the adjacent neighbourhood. During this period, when Puerto Madero was just a muddy river-front through which watercarriers (aguaderos) came with their horses and buggies, wading through the garbage and dead animals to collect water for sale and distribution to city residents, La Boca had been developing its port and its potable water

222 Stephanie C. Kane infrastructure. When the fi rst city system for pumping and treating river water was brought on line in 1869, between the 1867 cholera and 1870 yellow fever epidemics, La Boca and adjacent Barracas were the only two neighbourhoods to be included outside the 960 blocks of the city centre. The tenements (coventillos) that housed the Italian immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century now house the post-1960s generation of immigrants flowing in from Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay (Sarlo 2008). As I fi nd no record to suggest otherwise, I assume that tenement residents rely, at least in part, on the original infrastructure. Currently, a flourishing plastic arts and café-restaurant scene enlivens the bygone cabotage port, where listless cargo ships tarry too long at the high cement piers. Someone collected chunks of floating garbage, which lie encircled in plastic nets; the decomposing scars lap beside rusting hulls awaiting removal. Paintings, bas reliefs, and sculptures reside in creative tension with the effluents and detritus of an industrial past, provoking a tense, stinking, and compelling littoral aesthetic. The state occasionally presides with media fanfare over the scene of its criminal dysfunctionality; raising sunken ships only to let them sink back again after the performance (Alberti 2007). Perhaps La Boca is being subjected to the practice of intentionally hiding waterscape treasures behind a semiotic curtain of garbage and disrepair, an example of what Stoler (2008, 192) describes as the debris of dispossession that joins “colonial pasts and imperial presence”. Guano (2003) analyzes the role of art in integrating the first immigrant generation, how art forms challenged primitive stereotypes thrust upon them. She also argues that the artistic generation currently functions to distinguish Europeans from more recent South American immigrants. She poetically captures the mundane pervasiveness of inadequate infrastructure in her description of the neighbourhood, depicting variations in the river’s tangible effects: Just ten minutes away from the presidential Plaza de Mayo and the Buenos Aries city center crowded with banks and upscale businesses, you will fi nd yourself in a different world: a world of three-story Italianate buildings turned gray by smog and age; a world of strangely tall sidewalks built to protect the houses from the recurrent floods of the Riachuelo River; a world that will strive to sink you deep into your five senses. The fi rst impression you get as you approach La Boca is that of its pungent smells: whiffs of sewage and chemical waste exhale from the Riachuelo River, only moderately corrected by the scent of hot bread and pastry emanating from the local bakeries, or by the smell of fruit and vegetables displayed in front of the small grocery shops. Climb up and down the sidewalks surrounding each block, and you will fi nd yourself splashing in the mud: puddles of brown Riachuelo water exude from cracks and crevices in the irregular plaster. Whenever the sudestada [southeasterly winds] blows, the Riachuelo rises to plague the neighborhood. Till now, no physical obstacle has been able

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 223 to contain the floods: the river does not flow in from the ribera [riverside], people say. It gurgles directly into your house through the sewage system, and nothing can stop it. (Guano 2003, 360) There is a rumour circulating that La Boca may be slated for revitalization (Raffo 2007). Any harbourfront plan will meet great social and engineering obstacles, such as visual and olfactory evidence of continuing pollution, inadequate infrastructure, sunken ships, and moribund harbour operations.

BRIDGES AND FLOWS The metropolitan area of Buenos Aires sits within polluted aquatic flows; each waterfront neighbourhood is subject to specific hydraulic geometries, industrial pressures, and infrastructural constraints. In this hydro-geography, the fi xity is the flow, or better said, the existential problems and opportunities that the flows present do not disappear, though they may change in character and intensity. For example, one basic aspect of nature doesn’t change: prevailing currents move northwest to southeast, out with the flow of the river but back with the tides. These daily rhythms are not infrequently punctuated by sudestadas (southeasterlies)—short-term hydro-meteorological phenomena that produce a “hydraulic plug”, preventing the normal drainage of the watercourses in the Plate River Estuary (Pizarro et al. 2007). The history of La Boca is punctuated with sudestadas that transformed the Riachuelo into terrifying rapids and swells, sinking buildings, bridges, houses, and ships in its wake (Asociación de Vecinos La Boca, n.d.). In contrast, Puerto Madero’s protected, closed harbour is relatively calm, enabling its contemporary transformation from dereliction to revitalization. The bridges of La Boca and Puerto Madero are part of the Porteño struggle to render riverine flows and their effects more predictable, adapting them to urban desires and identities. Encoding cultural and environmental histories, bridges are “technologies and technological visions” that rely on, and are limited by, the social fabric; bridges emerge from the interaction of social structure, ideology, and patterns of technological development (Kranakis 1997). Like other technology, the bridge is “not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order” (Winner 1980, 127). Bridges artfully shape and site materials of nature, and when functioning properly, express the dynamics of forces in equilibrium in bridge design and engineering (Pollalis 1999). They may nevertheless symbolize human victory over nature (Trachtenberg 1979). Bridges overcome the riverine obstacles in a networked span of territory within the city, and between city and hinterlands; hence their “inherent relational quality” (Cleary 2007, 26–27). The outdoor neighbourhood map/ mural illustrates the relationship between La Boca and the rural province extending beyond the Riachuelo’s opposite bank (Figure 10.2).

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Figure 10.2 La Boca’s rural connections (Photograph S.C. Kane).

THE PENDANT BRIDGE AS ICON OF TECHNOLOGICAL AUTHENTICITY For almost six centuries, to move between city and province, people had to cross the Riachuelo. Initially they crossed with rowboats and rafts, as they still do, and eventually also across bridges by foot, cars, and trucks. Indeed, various bridges were repeatedly built, destroyed by sudestadas, rebuilt, and renamed. The pendant bridge is a central character on the waterfront stage in La Boca’s story. Its silhouette beautifully captures the unique character of place on an industrial scale. It is everything that the bridge spanning the canals in Puerto Madero is not. And the contrast between the whys and hows of their respective beauties helps us understand the power of technological authenticity at the heart of the struggle between creation and destruction in post-industrial urban landscapes. Irrespective of its foreign origin, the pendant bridge integrated the people of the city and province as they constructed the modern nation. It was part of ‘real’ history, the people’s history, and its style represents pure function. The structure that looks like a bridge was actually once a shuttle that carried people, merchandise, and vehicles across the riverbed. Hanging from an iron framework, a motorized system of cables and wheels pulled

Figure 10.3 Pendant Bridge (Photograph S.C. Kane).

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a wagon back and forth. Ordered from the manufacturer in 1908 and inaugurated in 1914, this engineering rarity is one of twenty built in the world. Its parts were forged in England and assembled at the river’s mouth. Quinquela Martín immortalized the bridge in paintings of world renown, and many artists and photographers followed his lead. The bridge is the central image of La Boca, and through postcards, the Internet, and books, it entered into the global imagination as an icon of Buenos Aires. In classically incorrigible La Boca style, the bridge’s claim to fame is that it is one of eight in the world left standing, but the only one in disrepair (Clarin. com, n.d.). It stopped functioning in 1960, at which time it was replaced by a modern vehicular bridge. In 1990, the neighbourhood association successfully protested against its demolition, preferring to let this giant sleep, “black and beautiful, strung over the stream that also awaits its opportunity” (Asociación de Vecinos La Boca, n.d.). I suggest here that both the need to cross the river and the engineered response that enabled crossing created characteristic coherences in cultural orientation that orient the production and reproduction of the material structures and socio-cultural practices—the fixities—that define and shape flows. In short, coherences of cultural orientation mobilize certain possibilities and immobilize others, such that the discursive space in which decisions regarding bridge design, placement, and recuperation are made and contested will change with technology and the zeitgeist, but change in patterned ways. Intergenerational engagements between city dwellers and their aquatic habitats have given rise to both apprehension and action. The stubborn and inventive ways that Porteños overcome disasters, natural and political, are part of habitus, which are dispositions and habits that in their very instrumentality are the source of deepest meanings (Bourdieu 1985). Porteño’s habitus, which has arisen out of centuries of river struggle, is then a touchstone for envisioning meaningful waterfront development. My research suggests that habitus sustains the passions of neighbourhood activists tirelessly trying to force the government to implement anti-pollution laws for industry, and of plastic artists who turn the dead waterscape into a sort of wonderland.

THE SO-CALLED BRIDGE OF WOMANKIND The port history of Puerto Madero is largely confi ned to the short period of time during which it actually operated as a port. Located between La Boca to the south and Puerto Nuevo to the north, the port was officially defunct between 1920 and 1989. I can imagine abandoned piers and warehouses, and water-bearers, laundresses, homeless persons, gamblers, and otherwise marginal people, or people engaged in marginal activities who used the mudflats, during this period; but they have not written their history in easily discoverable forms. However, there is an attempt to reinvent history in the shape of a graceful footbridge designed by Santiago Calatrava with

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 227

Figure 10.4 Womankind Bridge and silo (Photograph S.C. Kane).

a central section that rotates to allow passage of yachts. This is indeed a troubled space. Brian Holmes (2007) captures the uneasiness of Porteños: The visitor wandering down the quay is greeted by the sight of an elegant white suspension bridge with a single cantilevered support, signed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava: a must for any waterfront

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Stephanie C. Kane redevelopment project. A memorial plaque informs us that this Puente de la Mujer, or “Bridge of Womankind,” was inaugurated on December 20, 2001. But that’s impossible—because that was the second day of the Argentinean revolt against the consequences of neoliberal globalization, and the city’s elites were in no position to do any celebrating. . . . With its postmodern historicism and its grandiose dream of participation in the information economy, Puerto Madero appears as a speculation, in all the senses of the word, on the prospects—and the profits—of a total erasure of memory.

Holmes focuses on Argentina’s counter-memorists who do political street theatre and art as a way to struggle against Puerto Madero’s architecture with its “clear intention to make sure that nothing whatsoever will be remembered” (Holmes 2007). I too documented a deep suspicion among water activists not only about Puerto Madero but about all projects arising out of the neoliberal economic order, popularly understood to be the negotiated outcome of the dictatorship of 1976–1983. For many, the elites and the military have always been in cahoots. They represent fi xity of social and political control and an obstacle to participatory democracy. In this interpretive frame, in counterpoint to the salvaged silo, the bridge arises from revitalized space as a beautiful but inauthentic celebration of national unity and progress. This is not to say that Porteño’s performing artists will not eventually remake the bridge in the image of the people.

CONCLUSIONS The visual contrast between the La Boca and Puerto Madero waterfronts might be ordered according to a market-based binary logic of dereliction and development; the former devalued and the latter value-producing. This split encourages an impulse to do with La Boca what has been done with Puerto Madero, to similarly activate La Boca as a site in the global economy. But this logic is faulty. It suggests that these two places are independent, and that while La Boca’s harbour may be terribly polluted, with sufficient resources this technical problem can be solved. This logic disguises the relationship between degradation and development: that is, that La Boca’s degradation is held in place by those for whom Puerto Madero represents success. The elites and multinationals that benefit from investment in Madero are also dependent on the impunity of polluters upstream. The slaughterhouses and tanneries still spew toxic flows as they did in days of yore; they have been joined today by the uncurbed growth of paper mills, petrochemical plants, and GMO soy producers. The binary logic gives rise to fi xities in which an ideology is embedded that is supported by a tentative democracy but always threatened by police and military forces. These fi xities, inspired by a troubled binary logic, disguise the flow of pollution that

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 229 poisons La Boca residents even as it fills the foreign bank accounts of those who own and enjoy Madero. Meanwhile, La Boca’s artists have transformed a space of dereliction into a fascinating habitat of the surreal. Within this ruined post-industrial waterscape, sculptures and paintings create a bizarre, dream-like state in which a visitor who dares to walk the piers beyond the tourist blocks can experience a universe where disgust and beauty collide. The Pendant Bridge towers over the neighbourhood, while its painted image appears inside and outside the tourist zones, as if daring witnesses to declare that the scenes before them, and post-industrial landscapes more generally, are without value. Although the riverine myth of infinite cleansing power is abolished here, artists stave off the forces that would declare the place unoccupied. There is a standoff: art interposes its images on the boundary between dereliction and development. The visual field aesthetically activates and enhances the political work of neighbourhood assemblies fighting for a clean environment in the courts and in the streets (see, for example, PROA Fundacion, n.d.). For those who lived through Argentina’s troubled history, memories will not vanish in the face of Puerto Madero’s architectural optimism. Nor will the devastation of the aquatic ecology be alleviated by situating new waterfront developments in semi-protected isolation. The fi rst closed canal design of Puerto Madero failed because it did not allow for growth in trade and ship size; notwithstanding Calatrava’s footbridge, the success of its redesign must be qualified by its failure to engage constructively with the larger riverine context. Having side-stepped that struggle, Puerto Madero sits like a tiny, unsustainable comfort zone in an increasingly poisoned coastal city. This is a potentially transformative moment in coastal management: even the Dutch are questioning their reliance on the fixities of dikes for flood defence and turning toward the restoration of natural flows and the repair of vulnerable estuaries (Meyer 2008). If fi nancial investors, planners, designers, architects, engineers, and ecologists have the courage to put their development models in dialogue with each other, and most importantly, with the struggle for social and environmental justice in Buenos Aires, La Boca and the coastal plain might retain their vitality as they bear the brunt of revitalization.

NOTES 1. Fulbright Hays funded the ethnographic field research behind this chapter, and a sabbatical from Indiana University provided time to think and write. Thanks to the people of Buenos Aires and C. Jason Dotson, project videographer and research partner. Special thanks to Gustavo Diaz Ciarlo of the National University of Lujan and his wife, Silvia, for their welcoming waterfront tour, and to the neighbourhood assembly of the Delta for including me in their activities. Thanks also to the volume’s editors, the International Network of Urban Waterfront Research, and to HafenCity University.

230 Stephanie C. Kane REFERENCES Alberti, Alfredo. 2007. Representative of Asociación de Vecinos La Boca at conference on “Water is a Right”. Presented at Auditoria General de la Nación (AGN), Buenos Aires, 3 July. Almansi, Florencia, Ana Hardoy, Gustavo Pandiella, Ricardo Schusterman, Gaston Urquiza, and Eric Gutierrez. 2003. Everyday water struggles in Buenos Aires: The problem of land tenure in the expansion of potable water and sanitation service to informal settlements. London: WaterAid. Asociación Civil por la Reserva. n.d. Accessed 26 October 2009. Asociación de Vecinos La Boca. n.d. Accessed 26 October 2009. AySA. n.d. Planta Potabilizadora gral. San Martín: Información General. Buenos Aires: AySA. Barragán Muñoz, Juan, José Dadon, Silvia Matteucci, Jorge Morello, Claudia Baxendale, and Andrea Rodríguez. 2003. Preliminary basis for an integrated management program for the coastal zone of Argentina. Coastal Management 31:55–77. Blacksmith Institute. 2007. The world’s worst polluted places: The top ten (of the dirty thirty). New York. Accessed June 23, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breen, Ann and Dick Rigby. 1996. The new waterfront: A worldwide urban success story. New York: McGraw-Hill. Busquests, Joan. 1993. Planning the Antiguo Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires. In Waterfronts: A new frontier for cities on water, ed. Rinio Bruttomesso. Venice: International Centre Cities on Water. Caldeira, Teresa P.R. 2000. City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Clarin.com. n.d. El transbordador Nicolás Avellaneda. Accessed 26 October 2009. Cleary, Richard L. 2007. Bridges. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Comité Ejecutor del Plan de Gestión Ambiental y Manejo de la Cuenca Hídrica Matanza-Riachuelo. 2003. El Riachuelo: Plan de Gestion Ambiental 1998– 2003. Buenos Aires: Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires. Cooper, Alan. 2006. Bridges, law and power in medieval England 700–1400. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. Corporacio Antiguo Puerto Madero S.A. n.d. <www.puertomadero.com> Accessed 26 October 2009. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. New York and London: Routledge. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evernden, Neil. 1992. The social creation of nature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Federovisky, Sergio. 2007. El Medio Ambiente: No Le Importa a Nadie Bestialidades Ecológicas en la Argentina: del Riachuelo a las Papeleras. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Visibility and Contamination on the Buenos Aires Waterfront 231 Guano, Emanuela. 2003. A stroll though La Boca: The politics and poetics of spatial experience in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. Space and Culture 6(4): 356–376. Guth, David W. 2008. The Bay Bridge metonymy: How Maryland newspapers interpreted the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. American Journalism 25(2): 57–83. Harvey, David. 1990. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. . 2006. Spaces of global capitalism: Towards a theory of uneven geographical development. New York: Verso. Holmes, Brian. 2007. Remember the present. Accessed June 23, 2010. Hoyle, Brian. 1988. Development dynamics at the port-city interface. In Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment, eds. B. S. Hoyle, D. S. Pinder and M. S. Husain. London: Belhaven Press. Kranakis, Eda. 1997. Constructing a bridge: An exploration of engineering culture, design, and research in nineteenth-century France and America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Larco, Nico. 2006. Puerto Madero: An emerging neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Conference abstract. Accessed December 1, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. 2007. The production of space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Marcus, George E., ed. 1999. Critical anthropology now: Unexpected contexts, shifting constituencies, changing agendas. Santa Fe, NM: School for American Research Press. Mardones, Claudio. 2008. Denuncia de una ONG Ambientalista: El debate de la basura ya llegó a la Justicia. Crítica de la Argentina. 8 July. Accessed June 23, 2010. Meyer, Han. 2008. The Dutch delta: Looking for a new fusion of urbanism and hydraulic engineering. In Water and urban development paradigms: Towards an integration of engineering, design and management, eds. J. Feyen and K. Shannon. London: Taylor and Francis. Oldani, Norberto O. 1994. General considerations on productivity of fish in the Paraná River. In Environmental and social dimensions of reservoir development and management in the la Plata River Basin. United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) Research Report Series, No. 4. Nagoya, Japan: UNCRD. Pampa Fértil, S.A., ed. 2006. Plano de Buenos Aires y Recorridos de Colectivos. Pampa Fértil. Pink, Sarah. 2001. Visual ethnography: Images, media, and representation in research. London: Sage. Pizarro, Haydée, Patricia Rodríguez, Stella Maris Bonaventura, Inés O’Farrell, and Irina Izaguirre. 2007. The sudestadas: A hydro-meteorological phenomenon that affects river pollution (River Luján, South America). Hydrological Sciences Journal 52(4): 702–712. Pollalis, Spiro, N. 1999. What is a bridge: The making of Calatrava’s Bridge in Seville. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. PROA Fundacion. n.d. Luces en el Puente. Accessed 26 October 2009. Puerto Buenos Aires. n.d. Accessed 26 October 2009. Raffo, Ana. 2007. Personal communication, Buenos Aires.

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Sarlo, Beatriz. 2008. Cultural landscapes: Buenos Aires from integration to fracture. In Other cities, other worlds: Urban imaginaries in a globalizing age, ed. Andreas Huyssen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory-authority-rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. New York: Routledge. Skartveit, Hanna. 2009. Personal communication, Bergen, Norway. Steinberg, Philip E. 2001. The social construction of the ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination. Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 191–219. Trachtenberg, Alan. 1979. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and symbol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. United Nations. 2003. Water for people, water for life: The United Nations Development Report. New York: UNESCO and Berghahn Books. Winner, Langdon. 1980. Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109(1): 121–136.

Part IV

New Practices of Property-Led Development

11 The German ‘City Beach’ as a New Approach to Waterfront Development Quentin Stevens1

Formerly industrial waterfronts in many German cities are, as in other developed countries, being revitalized with the typical range of large-scale cultural institutions, office and housing complexes, public promenades, and green spaces (Hölzer et al. 2008). A parallel and much more distinctive trend is the rapid emergence and diffusion throughout the country of hundreds of small, temporary artificial beaches on inner-urban waterfronts. The expression ‘city beach’ is difficult to defi ne comprehensively, as the characteristics of the many schemes that go by that name are varied and changing. The key physical attributes of a city beach are an urban location, a large volume of sand spread on an open space (a site cleared by demolition, a railway easement, a parking lot, or a public park), a view of the waterfront (sometimes with access to the water), and the inclusion of thematic objects commonly associated with beach environments, such as deckchairs, beach umbrellas, palm trees, thatched huts, and tropical cocktails (Figure 11.1). The artifice of simply spreading these materials around on an existing urban site sets these schemes apart from beaches that are part of natural or renaturalized riverbanks and lakeshores. The informality of this material artifice is complemented by the relaxed use of these city beaches for informal socializing and play, sports, small-scale programmed cultural events, and casual drinking and dining. Another defi ning characteristic of city beach developments is that they are temporary and mobile. Most only operate in the warmer months, and many are removed from site and put in storage during the winter. The fi rst city beach in contemporary times was created in France in 1996 in the main square of the provincial capital, St. Quentin. After the 2002 opening of a similar project, Paris Plage, received world-wide media attention, the phenomenon of temporary artificial city beaches spread rapidly to major city centres throughout Europe and in North America and Australia. Germany’s fi rst such project opened in Berlin in the summer of 2002. As of 2010, there were over 250 such beaches spread across more than one hundred different German cities; twenty cities have three or more beaches, and Berlin has over fifty.

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Figure 11.1 Strand Pauli, Hamburg, 2007 (Photograph courtesy of Juriaan Simonis).

Germany provides a particularly fertile milieu for examining city beaches as a form of waterfront development. The majority of German city beaches are located on under-utilized waterfront land that previously had industrial or port-related functions. These schemes illustrate that deindustrialized, ‘unfi xed’ waterfronts provide spaces that a diverse range of new ideas, users, and activities can flow into. But city beaches also show that urban waterfronts may have a distinctive and relatively fi xed character, in terms of their physical landscape, meanings, and urbanized context, which can constrain and shape future development. As a new and atypically fluid mode of urban development, city beaches illustrate several different kinds of flows and flexibilities that might change our thinking about how to plan and manage waterfront change: they are an example of how new spaces and new functions can be ‘plugged into’ brownfield waterfront sites; they involve a certain amount of ‘unplanning’ and deregulation to loosen up the existing waterfront landscape; they contain many loose elements; they include significant investments in changing services and event programs rather than relying solely on major fi xed physical investments; they react to seasonal flows of tides and customers; and the users and behaviours in these waterfront spaces are particularly relaxed, playful, and diverse. This chapter begins with an examination of the changing social, economic, and land development conditions under which city beaches have

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emerged in Germany, providing an overview of where and why they have been created and of the flexible planning, fi nancial, and managerial processes through which they have been produced. This exploration draws upon the limited existing academic literature on the city beach phenomenon, as well as a broader literature on temporary uses of waterfronts and other deindustrialized landscapes. The subsequent section considers the new user groups, playful behaviours, social relations, and ambiences that city beaches introduce into urban waterfront areas, which lend the urban waterfront a new and fluid identity, enhancing its dynamism. A preliminary empirical account is provided of city beaches as built and used, focusing on the geographical diffusion of the concept, the diversity of sites, and how they have addressed the fi nancial, management, and regulatory challenges of reusing the industrial waterfront. Information about the location, design, and management of city beaches throughout Germany has been collated from the many websites of city beach entrepreneurs, as well as those of the hospitality industry and city marketing agencies, and from media reportage. This has fed into a preliminary mapping of the spatial distribution of the beaches across Germany as well as within individual cities. These fi ndings have been supplemented by participant observation of the design and everyday use of several city beach sites in Berlin. The chapter concludes with an examination of the implications of city beaches for thinking about waterfront development more generally.

OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM OF WATERFRONT MASTERPLANNING As a reflection of wider economic and political forces, German city beaches provide a contrast to the internationally famous examples of inner-urban waterfront regeneration (see Marshall 2001; Breen and Rigby 1996). City beaches illustrate very different processes of development and operation with different aims; as outcomes they also have a very different appearance and include different contents. The well-known cases of waterfront development, such as London Docklands, Hamburg HafenCity, and New York’s Battery Park City, are generally undertaken at a relatively large scale and over a long time span. Their master-planning and physical development are often driven by public/private partnerships such as those found in urban development corporations, and they feature signature buildings designed by international ‘starchitects’. The primary aim of such regeneration is to attract international investment capital and highly mobile international knowledge workers and tourists. The public sector often provides infrastructure and subsidies to encourage flows of private capital into development (Dovey 2005; Desfor and Jørgensen 2004; Malone 1996).

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City beaches tend to arise on waterfronts precisely when and where these major flows of power, fi nance, and attention are lacking. They thus illustrate a distinctive and important alternative mode of reusing and redeveloping urban waterfronts. In comparison with internationally famous landmark projects, and with most of the development schemes discussed in this volume, city beaches are relatively unfi xed: they involve short-term investments in temporary, mobile facilities, and frequent changes in locations and uses. Most of these projects are initiated and run at low cost by individual entrepreneurs with a small amount of private capital. Rather than fi xing a new development pattern, city beaches depend upon temporary loosening-up of land-use regulations, construction standards, and licensing requirements. In physical terms, they are loose, informal arrangements of mass-produced objects and scrounged materials. City beaches generally do not require major political commitments, new planning schemes, governance arrangements, major fi nancial underwriting, engineering or infrastructure works, or environmental cleanups. City beaches are also not deeply embedded in the existing cultural and historical context of a waterfront area. Rather than attempting to draw upon a local sense of place, these places consciously set themselves apart as exotic and escapist. What city beaches exemplify is new, very small-scale flexibility and creativity in all these respects. These city beaches are thus part of the flow of ongoing urban waterfront change. As temporary uses, they figure as part of the development process rather than as a defi nitive and enduring outcome. All these aspects of city beaches suggest that they are a ‘post-industrial’ mode of urban waterfront development.

The Post-Fordist Production of the Urban Landscape The emergence of city beaches as a temporary use of waterfronts should be seen within the broader context of the transformation of formerly industrial inner-city areas into landscapes of spectacular consumption. In many older cities in the developed world, government policy has shifted away from industrial growth to focus instead around the marketing of general quality of life and leisure opportunities for potential residents and tourists (Judd and Fainstein 2002). To this end, contemporary urban development emphasizes public investment in new infrastructure and cultural grand projets, as a form of city marketing and as incentives to private investment in new housing, retail, and entertainment facilities (Dovey 1999; Ward 1998). The obsolescence and decline of inner-city waterfront industrial areas, their distinctive natural and heritage assets, and their high visibility within the cityscape have made them prime targets for such reinvention (Dovey 2005; Malone 1996; Hoyle, Pinder, and Husain 1988). Waterfronts that were previously dominated by large-scale, integrated, ‘fordist’ industrial production have been broken up and replaced by consumption facilities and activities (Schubert 2001; Meyer 1999; Norcliffe, Bassett, and Hoare 1996).

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This transition is not tidy, complete or permanently fi xed. At all stages of development, the post-industrial urban landscape remains fragmentary, with ‘gaps’ and marginal spaces that are ill-defined, underdeveloped, and less regulated. With the breaking- up of the rationalized landscape of production, the inner city has become increasingly heterotopic, providing spatial opportunities for different, non-conforming groups and activities (Franck and Stevens 2007; Shields 1991). Campo (2002, 188–189) describes the informal, unplanned uses of areas along Brooklyn’s deindustrialized waterfront that had not yet been designated for public leisure use: The spaces and uses in these areas are under-utilized; they lack unity and permanence, support economically marginal uses and are subject to relatively rapid changes in use and form. The vernacular and non-intensive use of these sites (many of which were once bustling centres of modern industrial production and commerce) often defies conventional conceptions of urban land use, with its pre-occupation of single function spaces and permanence. City beaches too often involve the appropriation and reconfiguration of derelict, unused or underutilized pieces of urban waterfronts, whether industrial brownfields, other sites undergoing regeneration, vacant public land, or unnoticed, ill-defi ned, intermediate spaces. Increases in the spatial flexibility and diversity of urban waterfront areas have been accompanied by a shift in the temporal flows of their use. This shift is linked to the explosive growth in outdoor dining and hospitality venues and the “night time economy” (Bianchini 1995), and also reflects the increasing importance of planned special events for city development and marketing. The complexity of political, fi nancial, environmental, and managerial factors shaping post-industrial waterfronts tends to break up the temporal flow of their physical development, such that there are spurts of growth, periods of stagnation, and difficulties of phasing and coordination (Carmona 2009; Gordon 1996). City beaches are just one among a wide range of temporary urban uses that occupy land in the time between abandonment and new formal development projects (Urban Catalyst 2007; Haydn and Temel 2006; Misselwitz, Oswalt, and Overmeyer 2003). The production process of city beaches illustrates a post-fordist response to the demands and opportunities just outlined. Although city beaches in Germany are primarily targeted to locals rather than outsiders, they fit well into the description presented in the emerging literature on post-fordist tourist development. Gertler (1988) defines post-fordist production generally in terms of the high flexibility and continuous innovation with which groups of producers bring labour, capital, and ideas together to meet market demands that are diverse and constantly changing. Post-fordism also describes a way of producing the landscape itself, so that it can be consumed; Ioannides and Debbage (1997) describe thus the tourist industry’s efforts to overcome the fixities of mass-produced ‘package’ tourism. From the producer perspective, the

240 Quentin Stevens post-fordist tourist industry uses outsourcing to bypass traditional, vertically integrated production processes; a myriad of small entrepreneurial businesses engage in highly specialized small-scale production. Production is instead integrated horizontally, through temporary, flexible networks of people, skills, resources, and processes. These arrangements require complex logistics: the formation of short-term strategic alliances (including those with government), through contracts, incentives, and waivers. Such flexible forms of production arise to meet the diverse and volatile demands of the tourist market, with its insatiable demand for novelty. These production arrangements facilitate the differentiation of goods and services, rapid innovation, customization to user needs, and ‘just-in-time’ production in small volume. In short, post-fordism means bringing together supply and demand factors in a short-term ‘fix’. Within the context of urban planning, where many investments are made to last for one hundred years or more, the five or six years during which city beaches have occupied waterfront land must be seen as a very shortterm investment, a ‘just-in-time’ model of open space provision that seeks to optimize the use of a distinctive spatial resource before the next cycle of large-scale reinvestment. In contrast to the long-term fi xity of most rebuilt waterfront landscapes, city beaches are extremely flexible in location, scale, and duration. They are a landscaping solution that can be spread around on a given site at short notice. They offer a new model of fluidity in the ‘development’ of waterfronts; they develop patronage, activity, and ideas without the need for major physical development. Post-fordist production methods change the nature of goods and services and the way they are supplied. The post-fordist tourist industry facilitates the transportation of light and portable products to the consumer; a ‘mediatization’ of the thing consumed, which Gale (2009) argues curbs the need for consumer travel. In this context, the escapism of artificial city beaches is a substitute for ‘real’ tourism: the local waterfront ‘replaces’ more exotic waterfronts farther away. In the context of the global economic downturn, this substitute is more affordable and accessible to both the urban poor and “those urbanites who are cash-rich but time-poor” (Gale 2009, 125; Connolly 2004). A key aspect of the mediatization of post-fordist tourism, as part of producers’ drive towards differentiation of their products, is a pronounced focus of investment and management on specialized content (services, events, experiences, and branding) rather than on more durable form. The production of content includes ‘themeing’, lending ‘atmosphere’ to the tourist landscape—as discussed further in the following. In the case of Germany’s city beaches, such intangible differentiation arises through the close links many beach projects have to the local arts and creative industries.2 The popularity of city beaches suggests that waterfronts in general can enhance the social and cultural diversity of their users by concentrating on the labour-intensive, ‘soft’ infrastructure of events, programming, and services, rather than tying up large amounts of capital by investing in large, inflexible buildings, expensive landscaping, and physical infrastructure. City beaches make the most out of very low-value sites

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and materials by maximizing the input of intangible resources, in particular the imagination and skills of operators and of users themselves. A second way in which post-fordist tourism seeks to differentiate the product is by harnessing the consumers’ own creativity, by providing them with active roles: through participatory events, production and consumption are blurred in the ‘co-production’ of individualized experiences (Richards and Wilson 2006). In this context, a city beach “would be nothing without the presence and actions of its visitors . . . whether soaking up the sun or playing pétanque . . . those who participate in this spectacle are performing the beach” (Gale 2009, 126). This leads us to a consideration of exactly what it is about the design and management of city beaches that makes them so attractive as spaces for playful behaviour.

ENJOYING THE LOOSENESS OF THE URBAN WATERFRONT From the perspective of consumers, city beaches exemplify many of the general characteristics of post-industrial urban waterfronts that have made them popular sites for public leisure. Because of their former functions, deindustrialized waterfronts tend to be marginal zones physically segregated from the remainder of the cityscape, often with restricted access points. They are places of isolation in the midst of the city’s density; places where rules and enforcement are relaxed (Campo 2002). They thus offer a respite from the regular built form and activity patterns of the working city, where people can escape from and forget the fixed roles and the tensions and responsibilities of work and the domestic sphere (Stevens 2007). The sense of freedom and possibility that the urban waterfront presents is linked to its physical ‘between’ condition, the ‘edginess’ of its mediation between the fixities of the cityscape and the constant flows of the water (Dovey 2005). This liminal spatial condition helps stimulate escapist, exploratory, playful, and transgressive behaviours (Stevens 2007; Shields 1991). Dovey (2005, 17) suggests that “many of the pleasures of the city are linked to different forms of spatial practice and experience that are possible in marginal and interstitial spaces such as the beach and waterfront which, to some degree, escape the instrumentalization of the market”. Many of the playful uses of waterfront public spaces are not captured by the commercial forms of consumption that are designed into large-scale, long-term waterfront developments. Such unsanctioned activities often find their place in the under-designed, underdetermined ‘cracks’ within the consumption spectacle of the wider waterfront (Stevens and Dovey 2004), such as artificial beaches. In spite of its separation and difference, the popularity of the urban waterfront for informal, playful uses also depends on its visual and functional links to other existing nearby attractions. Large-scale demolition and views across the water lend deindustrialized waterfronts an openness and visibility unrivalled in the inner city. These features make waterfronts excellent settings for contemporary leisure activities centred on seeing and being seen

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(Stevens 2006). Waterfront open spaces are secondary uses; they are not major attractions in themselves. Like many other kinds of informal social settings, they need to be tightly linked into existing circuits of urban activity, and in particular to other inner-urban leisure uses (Stevens 2006). Many informal uses of the waterfront for public play depend on flows of people to and from the waterfront, which lead to the intermingling of a diversity of actors and activities (Franck and Stevens 2007). Thus, connectivity to public transport is important, as are connections along the waterfront. The water’s edge offers particular environmental comforts for users that cannot easily be found in other inner-urban sites, such as excellent solar exposure, especially on the north embankment of rivers, which is where the majority of German beaches are located. The water brings relatively cool, moist breezes into the site and moderates the ambient temperature. Waterfronts are relatively quiet locations because there is often no adjacent development or road traffic on the waterfront side (Figure 11.2). Campo (2002, 171) foregrounds the specific looseness and lack of regulation of ‘unkempt’ waterfronts, which have been abandoned but not yet been redeveloped, contrasting them with the typical plans for “waterfront as tourist destination . . . as extension of financial district . . . as new residential district . . . [which] are expensive, time consuming, often difficult to implement . . . and not always in keeping with the needs or desires of local residents”. He draws attention to the broad and unique scope of uses and users on ‘vernacular’ waterfronts such as Brooklyn’s, including many beach-related activities on an ‘informal’ beach formed there through the erosion of the industrial landscape.

Figure 11.2 Sandburg Cologne, 2009 (Photograph courtesy of 2o.9).

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The specific design characteristics of city beaches provide additional stimuli that make people feel different and encourage them to behave differently. These stimuli allow visitors a sense of escape both from the everyday city and from the choreographed spectacle of the contemporary global waterfront development model. Most obvious is the stark contrast to typical urban waterfronts in terms of physical materials and forms. Sand is very comfortable underfoot, to sit, lie, or play sport on. Comfort is improved by the potential that a soft, sandy surface offers for play without risk. Sand can also be playfully sculpted (Stevens 2009). Sand is a messy, disorderly, unfi xed material that encourages initiative and creativity in its use (Franck and Stevens 2007). The city beach is an unfi xed waterfront; its surface cannot easily be tightened up through planning or management. Children’s playful use with buckets and spades demonstrates that the city beach is a ‘do-it-yourself’ landscape, always being transformed. Sand is only one of the loose elements that make the city beach landscape readily adaptable to different tastes and activities. The producers of city beaches situate potted trees, cocktail huts, tables, and volleyball nets. Users freely relocate deck-chairs, umbrellas, and towels according to desired social arrangements, views, and the angle and intensity of the sun. All elements can be readily relocated according to changing needs, or even removed entirely. Here we see at the most minute scale a post-fordist ‘co-production’ of a comfortable leisure environment and leisure experience (Richards and Wilson 2006). People are encouraged to be active and not simply passively observe the waterfront landscape. The waterfront’s sun, water, and breezes, combined with city beaches’ sand and shade, provide multisensory triggers which stimulate playful, carefree actions such as lying down, running, digging, and idly dragging fingers or toes through the sand. These beaches are also loose spaces in the sense that their openness; their softness and their furnishings allow and encourage unconstrained bodily movements and postures so that people can physically ‘stretch out’ and relax (Franck and Stevens 2007). Dovey (2005) argues that, as a landscape type, the beach exemplifies leisure. It is a metonym of conditions of free accessibility, physical openness, and publicness; its “uninterrupted prospect and exposure to the elements” make it “a ‘smooth’ space where the strictures of urban life are escaped to some degree” (Dovey 2005, 230, 241). In social terms, the beach is permissive, a setting “where everyday taboos regarding modes of dress or the justification for interacting with strangers are generously relaxed” (Franck and Stevens 2007, 25). The escapist atmosphere of city beaches is greatly enhanced by their deliberate artificiality and exoticism. City beaches illustrate particularly well the widespread ‘thematization’ of urban leisure areas such as waterfronts to stimulate consumption (Dovey 1999; Hannigan 1998; Gottdiener 1997; Harvey 1989) but they take this thematization to new levels of refinement and fluidity. Elements such as music and tropical cocktails add to the beaches’ direct stimulus on the bodies of visitors, relaxing minds and bodies and prompting actions such as dancing. In combination with other themed elements such as

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palm trees, thatched ‘island’ huts, artworks, and performances by ‘tropical’ dancers, these props also stimulate moods and memories that can help people forget the everyday, make them open to new experiences, and stimulate the imagination (Stevens 2009). On the city beach, the themed environment is encountered up close. It is not just a spectacle passively experienced; “it becomes a theatrical production acted out by its visitors . . . in front of an audience of spectators” (Gale 2009, 126–127). While some of the staff at city beaches serve food and drink, many others are engaged in the post-fordist production of content, providing changing schedules of entertainment such as music and films, ‘public viewing’ of live sporting events, live theatre, readings, dance and exercise classes, and sand castle competitions. The constant flow of themed events, their often participatory nature, and annual changes in the themeing of entire beaches all provide novelty, which keeps visitors interested in coming back to the location (Gale 2009). The temporariness of any given event or aesthetic theme, the general temporariness of a city beach environment, and the forced relocation of some city beach projects from one site to another all intensify its fantastic, liminal nature as an escapist environment where people want to behave differently (Cohen and Taylor 1978). From a management perspective, themes and events also help to differentiate one city beach from the increasing number of competing sites that are in purely physical terms quite similar. One danger for city beaches, as for post-industrial waterfronts generally, is that if they do not link the experiences they offer to specific, unique, relatively fi xed characteristics of place, they may not retain the loyalty of the local residents and local governments on which their fi nancial and regulatory security ultimately depend. The very fluidity and temporariness that makes city beaches such exciting places also puts them at risk of rapid obsolescence in a fast-moving competition of tourist attention: [I]n subverting the rule of spatial fi xity in tourism, whereby the supply of tourist experiences tends to be fi xed to particular places and slow to respond to changing economic and socio-cultural conditions, installations such as Paris Plage that have only weak, if any, ties to a physical place are even more vulnerable to reproduction in the short- to medium-term, compared to the places they mimic. It seems, judging by the number of places that now boast an urban beach, that what began as an innovative experiment in setting Paris apart from other world cities in terms of its tourist product is now, potentially, yet another example of the ‘serial reproduction of culture’ in tourism. (Gale 2009, 127–128, citing Richards and Wilson 2006)

SPREADING SAND AROUND Since July 2002, Paris’ city beach prototype has undergone extremely rapid geographical diffusion. Despite some commonalities, the extensive evolution

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and variegation of the concept within Germany defies any simple conception of ‘serial reproduction’. The spread of the city beach concept from Paris to Berlin and the rest of Germany highlights significant differences in their siting and design, underpinned by localized economic and political differences. Paris Plages became a possibility after the Socialist Bertrand Delanoë was elected mayor of Paris in March 2001 on a platform of reducing automobile use and making the city more livable for its residents. One of his fi rst initiatives was to close the Pompidou Expressway alongside the Seine for a month in summer 2001. The fi rst beach in 2002, on the same site, had free admission, made possible by €2 million in funding from the mayor’s office and private sponsorship. Delanoë’s aim was “to give the riverside back to Parisians”, to provide “a nice hangout [where] people, with their differences, will mingle”, especially poor suburbanites “who never leave [Paris] on vacation” (Delanoë quoted in La Pradelle and Lallement 2004, 135). The city beach thus appears to originate in a strategy linked to place: the landscape type ‘flows’ to the consumers, in a post-fordist mode. Gale (2009) highlights, however, that Paris Plages also served as city marketing to tourists and to support Paris’ bid for the 2012 Olympics, and became a chic, gentrified, carefully managed consumption venue. The initial geographical spread of the city beach concept within Europe was to other major cities, fi rst to Berlin in 2002 and Hamburg in 2003. In Germany the siting of city beaches was quite different from that of Paris. Several of Berlin’s fi rst beaches were in the city’s central district, Mitte. This area was part of the former border zone between Berlin’s east and west; there were thus numerous underdeveloped sites adjacent to the Spree River in between the major new and rejuvenated governmental and cultural landmarks: the Reichstag and new parliamentary precinct, the ‘Museum Island’, and the new main train station. Berlin’s fi rst city beach, Strandbar Mitte (Figure 11.3), occupied one corner of a public park that was awaiting large-scale renovation. The city beaches in these high-profi le locations took advantage of existing flows of tourists and provided a model for later developments elsewhere, many of which took shape under very different economic, spatial and tenure conditions. Berlin has been a particularly popular location for city beach projects. The relatively recent large-scale collapse of state-owned enterprises following the city’s reunification had left many sites idle. In Berlin, many of the city beach sites are not obtained through the conventional commercial property market. Instead, federal government agencies, who own a substantial amount of property, provide tenure at nominal rents. For example, there are numerous city beaches alongside the Spree in the former death strip behind the Berlin Wall. The last major section of the Wall, the East Side Gallery, encloses a strip of river-front land only fi fty metres wide. Because of this protected landmark, the land behind has very restricted access and poor visibility. This strip of land may never be viable for major development, but is a prime site for city beaches. City beaches have also opened in Berlin on empty lots behind supermarkets, and on the rooftops

246 Quentin Stevens

Figure 11.3 Strandbar Mitte, Berlin, 2005 (Photograph courtesy of Axel Kuhlmann/www.abbilder.com).

of multi-storey parking garages. The marked artificiality of these beaches illustrates that the creation of a pleasant waterfront atmosphere, through sand, palm trees, deck-chairs, and cocktails, is more important than the quality of water views and access. Waterfront-inspired landscape ideas can also flow to inland sites. In Hamburg, a string of city beaches opened on the north bank of the Elbe River in St. Pauli, the historical port frontage that had long ago been superseded by larger-scale shipping operations elsewhere. Because it was subject to off-season flooding, this area had escaped redevelopment. These beaches benefited from their location close to Hamburg’s dense city centre and to entertainment venues near the Reeperbahn, the city’s wellknown nightlife area. The next artificial beaches to appear in German cities were, similarly, in the now-deindustrialized, older port areas of other large cities including Cologne, Frankfurt, and Bremen. These inner-city waterfront areas fall within “the zone of transition” (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925): they are cheaply available, relatively marginal sites that lie outside of but are conveniently adjacent to the cities’ established commercial districts. Uses and land values in this urban zone are constantly in flux and this favours temporary uses such as city beaches, which are typically seen by city officials, planners, and landowners as an interim use of empty sites, useful until some more substantial investment in development materializes. Many of Germany’s large cities are inland river ports, and city beaches are particularly numerous in the west of the country, along the upper Rhine (Figure 11.4) and its heavily industrialized tributaries,

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Figure 11.4 Rheinstrand, Mainz, 2008 (Photograph courtesy of Matthias G. Barth).

the Ruhr, Main, and Neckar Rivers. The large population in this area lives far away from the real beaches on the country’s relatively short, cold coastline (Stolz 2009). The economic and spatial conditions for city beaches vary greatly between cities and between regions in Germany: the availability of relatively cheap waterfront sites in Berlin and the deindustrialized Ruhr can be contrasted with the much more prosperous southern state capitals, Stuttgart and Munich, where there are fewer underdeveloped inner-urban sites. In Munich, there simply is no old industrial waterfront land near the centre; most of the Isar River is a protected green space corridor and potential city beach operators have to obtain permits to put down sand in existing public squares. Stuttgart’s only city beach is on the roof of a parking garage. Haydn and Temel (2006) point out that under the highly competitive property market conditions in these southern cities, uses like city beaches are not temporary by choice: they are frequently and rapidly displaced from their sites by larger-scale investments. This has also been the case on the deindustrialized waterfronts of Hamburg, Cologne, and Berlin: city beach operators have had to fi nd new sites to relocate their businesses once long-range development plans began construction. Some beach operators have had to relocate several times, although such relocations are invariably localized, to maintain links with existing clientele and with service providers.

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Although the city beach has attracted much international attention and influenced numerous waterfront development projects, in Germany the city beach is not fundamentally a global spectacle; it does not involve attracting big new flows of foreign investment capital or foreign tourist consumption. City beaches show how local space and local lifestyles develop dialectically in the context of international images and trends. In their small scale they are localized initiatives.

PRODUCING THE BEACH Understanding the city beach as a development approach requires more than looking at the built form as a fi nished product; it also necessitates examining the various actors, roles, and development processes involved. It is astonishing that the city beach concept has spread in Germany with such rapidity, even though there is almost no formal coordination of knowledge or production. These schemes generally bypass the much lauded but rarely followed ‘rational planning process’ for long-range public-sector investments and waterfront development. They illustrate a new approach that is relevant to marginal spaces and contemporary economic conditions. City beaches demonstrate low-cost solutions for the construction and maintenance of waterfront open space, using minimal amounts of start-up and operational capital. In contrast to the waterfront development literature’s frequent mentions of the impact of big multinational corporations and architecture fi rms (see Marshall 2001; Breen and Rigby 1996), city beaches are almost always designed, built, and run by small-scale local entrepreneurs, with little involvement from design professionals. Rather than employing the latest high-technology materials and sophisticated construction techniques and equipment, they use simple materials and tools that are often borrowed, self-built, or obtained second-hand, such as ordinary concrete-making sand from construction fi rms or donated sand left over after the world beach volleyball championships (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin 2007). City beaches require significant investments of ‘sweat equity’: labour from the operators themselves and their friends. Websites for city beaches in Berlin, Magdeburg, Mainz, and Trier proudly illustrate this construction process. The self-build approach is facilitated by their small scale, their temporary nature, and the need for flexibility of arrangement, which requires that most of the beach’s elements are easily demountable and transportable. The sand, potted plants, deck-chairs, and portable cabins that constitute city beaches are low cost but high impact, in terms of both appearance and use. These elements can also later be rearranged and re-used in other kinds of projects on other sites. The cost of sites is also minimal. Land is sometimes provided at nominal rent because there is an agreement between owner and tenant to allow use of a site until a viable investor is found for it, or the operators agree

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to undertake necessary site repairs or remediation, or to accept public indemnity costs (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin 2007). City beaches illustrate entrepreneurial forms of risk-sharing among parties, rather than one party assuming fi xed long-term ownership of all property rights and responsibilities. Under normal local planning guidelines in Germany, city beaches usually require many permits because they involve complex arrangements for land rental, public access, waterways, land-use changes, construction of buildings, liquor licensing, and insurance liabilities (Herold 2007). However, the senate of the state of Berlin recently published a new planning policy (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin 2007) in which they propose to waive some permit requirements and to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for all necessary licensing arrangements as well as facilitating the issuance of more temporary permits. This new permissive regime reflects a pragmatic shift toward encouraging and coordinating private enterprise. Such temporary uses also provide investment, employment, and amenities for local residents, in contrast to large, planned projects that may never materialize. The production relationships among private- and public-sector actors in city beaches, as small-scale, short-term projects, generally appear to be project-centred rather than permanent. They nonetheless help the various participants to develop the working relationships, knowledge, and skills to pursue new and durable strategies for open space fi nancing, construction, operation, and programming.

BEACH AS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY Only a small number of city beach operators are fi nanced as an integral part of large-scale, long-range development of waterfront areas, as with Sommerwelt, a beach-like boardwalk installed next to an existing pond within Berlin’s mixed-use Potsdamer Platz complex. Here a private-sector landowner had a beach installed as a means of promoting their wider business. The majority of German city beaches are essentially short-term bar and restaurant ventures by independent entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the low rents, attractive views, and distinctive atmosphere offered by former waterfront industrial sites during the years preceding the decontamination of these sites and their large-scale, planned mixed-use development for apartments, offices, and retailing (Figure 11.5). Their fluid, small-scale, bottom-up mode of economic development is often at odds with large-scale, long-term fi xing of waterfronts through plans, regulations, and investments. Many city beaches in Germany receive some kind of local government support, whether through grants, loans, rent-free land, free services, streamlined licensing approvals, or tax reductions. Although most privately run city beaches are not technically public spaces, local governments

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are generally supportive and often provide publicly owned sites at low rents because, through their system of free entry, these ventures provide public access to sites that would otherwise not be available for use, diversifying the forms and amenities of open space that the general public is able to enjoy. As small-scale interventions, Germany’s city beaches are easily ‘plugged in’ amongst other flexible and innovative inner-city waterfront functions and populations. They demonstrate flexibility and innovation in terms of their spatial, behavioural, and economic interrelations with the surrounding waterfront and the wider cityscape. Many city beaches include or adjoin commercial recreational facilities such as rock-climbing walls, volleyball courts, and kayaking areas. City beaches also benefit from operational synergies with a surrounding creative milieu in the arts and creative industries. There are beaches situated adjacent to large indoor performance venues in Berlin and Frankfurt, and next to Cologne’s Messe (congress and exhibition centre). Many other beaches are in former port areas where communities of artists occupy low-rent warehouses. Some city beaches are themselves constructed primarily as venues for cultural events, such as Berlin beach YAAM, which focuses specifically on young African art and music. The concept of a ‘creative milieu’ emphasizes two distinctive features of the development process where waterfronts in general can learn from city beaches in particular. First, the production

Figure 11.5 Traumstrand, Berlin, adjacent to the city’s new central railway station, 2009 (Photograph courtesy of Claire Colomb).

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and operation of city beaches is strongly based on the provision of a regular program of events and services, not just on landscaping. This is the reverse of many waterfront developments, which are typically led by international signature architecture. Second, city beaches tend to have significant involvement from people working in small-scale creative businesses (Urban Catalyst 2007). The operational overheads and cash-flow needs of city beaches are generally very low. Operators cover their costs through the sale of drinks and through corporate sponsorships, which means they are sometimes closed to the public for promotional events. Low overheads allow operators to forego charging admission, which means that using the ‘beach’ is often free. One popular cost-recovery system is to require visitors to purchase a voucher to enter, the value of which can then be used towards purchases of food or drinks (Weindl 2004). The simplicity, low initial overheads, and fl exibility of the city beach model allows entrepreneurs ready expansion, duplication, or modification of their businesses as spaces and resources allow. Within six months of opening Berlin’s fi rst beach in 2002, for example, the operator of Strandbar Mitte had applied to the city to double the size of the project. With profits from the fi rst year, in 2003 he also opened an additional, larger beach, Oststrand, behind the remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall near Ostbahnhof (Figure 11.6). By 2004, Strandbar Mitte was also fi nancing the operations of the adjacent theatre that its manager had run since 1999 (Weindl 2004; Rolff 2004). In 2006, he was able to move the entire landscape of Strandbar Mitte several metres to one side to allow reconstruction of a pedestrian bridge linking the surrounding park to the Museumsinsel across the river. In 2008 the beach site was replaced by a paved waterfront promenade, yet Strandbar Mitte continued operating, without sand. When the city published an open tender in 2009 for a concession on the site, the same entrepreneur beat out six competitors to continue operations. As a pioneering use, this particular beach reveals the potential of a waterfront area, attracting new kinds of users and both stimulating and acting as a prototype to later waterfront development on the site and elsewhere (Urban Catalyst 2007). Strandbar Mitte has become an increasingly permanent fi xture of the area. The spread and success of the city beach phenomenon has also led to the emergence of chain operators who manage several beaches. ‘Freiluftrebellen’ (‘open air rebels’) run two beaches in Berlin; their third was forced to close in 2009. Their website notes that they are constantly looking to enter into potential partnerships on new sites and concepts (Freiluftrebellen n.d.). ‘Leschin Event’ operate three beaches near the Rhine River industrial port of Mannheim; a fourth also closed down in 2009 (Leschin Event n.d.). ‘Skybeach’ operate beaches on the roofs of parking garages in Cologne and Stuttgart; they have also sold a branch in Hannover and will open a new venue in Dortmund in 2010 (Stadtengel GmbH n.d.).

252 Quentin Stevens

Figure 11.6 Oststrand, Berlin, 2009. Remaining section of Berlin Wall visible top left (Photograph Quentin Stevens).

LEARNING FROM THE BEACH-MAKING PROCESS Waterfront redevelopment in post-industrial cities often continues to use old-fashioned, ‘rational’ managerial approaches to land development and use, albeit through partial privatization. These approaches engender new fi xities of form, program, ownership, and control. Solutions focus too tightly on long-range master-planning, durable landscaping solutions, and maximizing private investment (Dovey 2005). Germany’s city beaches suggest other ways forward that may seem more outlandish and frivolous, yet are actually more modest and commercially more viable because they are dynamic, accepting the inevitability of flow and change. The conclusions from German city beach experiences relate more to planning and decision-making processes than they do to design outcomes. While the form of city beaches is unique but not everywhere useful, the thinking and practice underpinning them provide options for waterfront development that can have much wider application. Indeed, city beaches have an analogue in the physically more substantial ‘Entertainment Zones’ examined by Campo and Ryan (2008). In sharp contrast to the urban ‘megaproject’ approach, which is often used for waterfronts and “is characterized by substantial outlays and blending of public and private capital, long and sometimes contested public review processes, long build out periods and the need for large plots of land and standardized development formats”, Campo and Ryan (2008, 305) observe that small-scale leisure precincts develop incrementally and without a coordinated, unifying plan, through a myriad of individual actions. These ‘everyday spaces’ focus on improving the vitality and use of existing built contexts, and on messy, continual evolution rather than fi xed formal design solutions (Crawford 1999). Similarly, Germany’s city beaches are post-industrial landscapes, not just in terms of their land uses and user groups, but also in terms of the ways in which their development occurs. The wide variety of beach examples

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demonstrates the flexibility of this approach to adapt to local circumstances, and to make adjustments to particular built spaces over time so as to better suit user needs, sites, and changing market conditions. The flexibility of city beaches rests on loose physical elements and is underpinned by careful events programming: ‘software’ that is itself diverse and variable. Whether fordist or entrepreneurial, the state is one of the main fi xities of the urban waterfront that can hinder flows of new ideas, materials, forms, and activities. City beaches, as collaborative, fluid projects, present an argument against continued centralized control of urban waterfronts by special-purpose port authorities, which lack flexibility in both goals and means, and in favour of government acting as a coordinator and creative facilitator of a wider range of small, new, and flexible solutions, pursued by combinations of actors from the private and non-profit sectors and from a range of government agencies. Indeed, the city beach may be a harbinger of a more deregulated waterfront. The public approval and support processes for city beach projects test at a small scale a different kind of planning regime, one that is more proactive, responsive, and dynamic. Rather than merely regulating private development to ensure minimum standards, it suggests the need for government to help discover, market, and exploit opportunities (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin 2007). Campo and Ryan (2008, 311–312) suggest two general strategies for urban development that can nurture the continuous informal evolution of urban social space: fi rst, to “reconceptualize and reduce the scale of new urban development”, which will “permit local entrepreneurs to have a stake in new development, adding to [its] variety . . . and to . . . creativity and uniqueness”; and, second, to “consider designating ‘free zones’ or ‘free moments’ within the city” that can “spur local entrepreneurship, generate a sense of place and add to, rather than subtract from local character”. As an approach to urban waterfront development, city beaches exemplify these strategies. Campo’s (2002) examination of waterfront sites that are relatively unplanned, undeveloped, and ‘unfi xed’ suggests that such opportunities “occur in so few places throughout the more rationalized spaces of the city as to warrant more formalized recognition, legitimacy and perhaps a mechanism to protect these spaces from conventional development” (2002, 173). He argues that something will be lost if every section of a city’s waterfront is developed in conventional, fi xed ways. But this does not mean that city beaches themselves must be preserved as new permanent features of the waterfront. It is in part the temporariness of city beaches that overcomes the resistance to change and novelty that can hinder more permanent proposals; risks are reduced because the built consequences of city beaches can easily be changed or removed. As with the case of Germany’s oldest city beach, Strandbar Mitte, an unexpected temporary use that became part of a permanent development scheme, the longer-term legacy and influence of city beaches on waterfront design and development can be played out over the longer term, rather than

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being fixed in advance into permanent plans and contracts. City beaches are by their nature an interim solution, even though in Berlin, twenty years after the fall of the Wall, it is clear such an interregnum can itself last a long time. To fix artificial beaches to waterfront sites and make them completely official is to lose some of their qualities. We need also turn our attention to what might come next; where these beach settings themselves can flow to and what might arrive on the waterfront after them.

NOTES 1. Quentin Stevens’s work on this book was supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He would also like to thank his hosts in the Cultural Geography Department of the Geographical Institute at Humboldt University Berlin, and Amanda Claremont for research assistance on his chapter. The author would also like to thank the talented photographers whose work appears in the chapter. 2. On the Spree River near Berlin’s Ostbahnhof, there is an interesting contradiction where the government-driven planning of MediaSpree, a waterfront office park for international corporate media, is leading to the displacement of several city beaches, and thus of an important element of the post-fordist production milieu in which innovations in the media industry actually occur.

REFERENCES Bianchini, Franco. 1995. Night cultures, night economies. Planning Practice and Research 10(2): 121–126. Breen, Anne and Dick Rigby. 1996. The new waterfront: A worldwide urban success story. London: Thames and Hudson. Campo, Daniel. 2002. Brooklyn’s vernacular waterfront. Journal of Urban Design 7(2): 171–199. Campo, Daniel and Brent Ryan. 2008. The entertainment zone: Unplanned nightlife and the revitalization of the American downtown. Journal of Urban Design 13(3): 291–315. Carmona, Matthew. 2009. The Isle of Dogs: Four development waves, five planning models, twelve plans, thirty-five years, and a renaissance . . . of sorts. Progress in Planning 71(3): 87–151. Cohen, Stanley and Laurie Taylor. 1978. Escape attempts: The theory and practice of resistance to everyday life. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Connolly, Kate. 2004. Germans get taste of tropics an hour’s drive from Berlin. Daily Telegraph, 21 December. Crawford, Margaret. 1999. Introduction. In Everyday urbanism, eds. John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kalisky. New York: Monacelli Press. Desfor, Gene and John Jørgensen. 2004. Flexible urban governance: The case of Copenhagen’s recent waterfront development. European Planning Studies 12(4): 479–496. Dovey, Kim. 1999. Framing places: Mediating power in built form. London: Routledge. . 2005. Fluid city: Transforming Melbourne’s urban waterfront. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Franck, Karen and Quentin Stevens. 2007. Tying down loose space. In Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life, eds. Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens. Abingdon: Routledge. Freiluftrebellen. n.d. Accessed 1 December 2009. Gale, Tim. 2009. Urban beaches, virtual worlds and ‘The End of Tourism’. Mobilities 4(1): 119–138. Gertler, Meric. 1988. The limits of flexibility: Comments on the post-fordist vision of production and its geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13(4): 419–432. Gordon, D. 1996. Planning, design and managing change in urban waterfront development. Town Planning and Review 67: 261–290. Gottdiener, Mark. 1997. The theming of America: Dreams, visions and commercial spaces. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hannigan, John. 1998. Fantasy city: Pleasure and profit in the postmodern metropolis. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell. Haydn, Florian and Robert Temel, eds. 2006. Temporary urban spaces: Concepts for the use of city spaces. Basel: Birkhäuser. Herold, Matthais. 2007. Mit Leidenschaft für den Sommer in Berlin. Mittendrin 4:5. Hölzer, Christoph, Tobias Hundt, Carolin Lüke, and Oliver G. Hamm, eds. 2008. Riverscapes: Designing urban embankments. Basel: Birkhäuser. Hoyle, Brian, David Pinder, and M.S. Husain, eds. 1988. Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment. London: Belhaven. Ioannides, Dimitri and Keith Debbage. 1997. Post-Fordism and flexibility: The travel industry polyglot. Tourist Management 18(4): 229–241. Judd, Dennis and Susan Fainstein, eds. 1992. The tourist city. New Haven: Yale University Press. La Pradelle, Michèle and Emmanuelle Lallement. 2004. Paris Plage: ‘The city is ours’. The ANNALS of the America Academy of Political and Social Science 595(1): 134–145. Leschin Event. n.d. Accessed 1 December 2009. Malone, Patrick, ed. 1996. City, capital and water. London: Routledge. Marshall, Richard, ed. 2001. Waterfronts in post-industrial cities. London: Spon. Meyer, Han. 1999. City and port: Urban planning as a cultural venture in London, Barcelona, New York and Rotterdam. Utrecht: International Books. Misselwitz, Philipp, Philipp Oswalt, and Klaus Overmeyer, eds. 2003. Urban catalysts: Strategies for temporary uses. Berlin: Urban Catalyst. Norcliffe, Glen, Keith Bassett, and Tony Hoare. 1996. The emergence of postmodernism on the urban waterfront: Geographical perspectives on changing relationships. Journal of Transport Geography 4(2): 123–134. Park, Robert, Ernest Burgess, and Roderic McKenzie. 1925. The city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richards, Greg and Julie Wilson. 2006. Developing creativity in tourist experiences: A solution to the serial reproduction of culture? Tourism Management 27:1209–1223. Rolff, Marten. 2004. Sonne, Sand, Caipi—nur in München nicht. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18 August. Schubert, Dirk, ed. 2001. Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel: Analysen und Planungen zur Revitalisierung der Waterfront in Hafenstädten. Berlin: Leue. Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin, ed. 2007. Urban pioneers: Temporary use and urban development in Berlin. Berlin: Jovis.

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Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. London: Routledge. Stadtengel GmbH. n.d. Accessed 1 December 2009. Stevens, Quentin. 2006. The design of urban waterfronts: A critique of two Australian Southbanks. Town Planning Review 77:173–203. . 2007. The ludic city: Exploring the potential of public spaces. Abingdon: Routledge. . 2009. Artificial waterfronts. Urban Design International 14(1): 3–21. Stevens, Quentin and Kim Dovey. 2004. Appropriating the spectacle: Play and politics in a leisure landscape. Journal of Urban Design 9:351–365. Stolz, Matthais. 2009. Deutchlandkarte: Stadtstraende. Zeit Magazin 10 (June): 8. Urban Catalyst. 2007. Patterns of the unplanned. In Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life, eds. Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens. Abingdon: Routledge. Ward, Stephen. 1998. Selling places: The marketing and promotion of towns and cities 1850–2000. London: Spon. Weindl, Fridolin. 2004. Rimini ist überall. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 August.

12 Exploring Innovative Instruments for Socially Sustainable Waterfront Regeneration in Antwerp and Rotterdam Tuna Taşan-Kok and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz1

Waterfronts have frequently become places where high-income households and high-end urban facilities have located. While these areas have become the number one urban marketing strategy (Desfor and Jørgensen 2004), they are also illustrative of elite-dominated decision-making mechanisms, social polarization, and spatial fragmentation (Taşan-Kok 2009; Wakefield 2007; Desfor and Jørgensen 2004; Jacobs 2004; Swyngedouw et al. 2002). Two processes underlie this trend in waterfronts: a shift towards neoliberal economic policy, which has brought about property-led urban development in particular, and an emergence of market-based entrepreneurial governance regimes—in terms of the interests, roles, and power-sharing arrangements of various actors in the public and private sectors (Raco 2005; Swyngedouw et al. 2002). Entrepreneurial governance fostered a competitive environment, where local administrations moved away from centrally coordinated welfare and social policies, and where propertydevelopment actors adopted more aggressive roles in urban development. The literature identifies this trend as the privatization of urban governance (Swyngedouw 2005; Swyngedouw et al. 2002; Moulaert 2000). Although social cohesion and sustainability have, in the early twenty-fi rst century, been at the heart of new urban agendas at a macro level in EU countries (Raco and Taşan-Kok 2009), at a local policy and project level, targets for achieving social sustainability have been relaxed, while those enhancing profitability have been given high priority. As a result, a need for social innovation is growing throughout Europe. Stren and Polese (2000, 15–16) defi ne social sustainability as follows: development (and/or growth) that is compatible with the harmonious evolution of civil society, fostering an environment conducive to the compatible cohabilitation of culturally and socially diverse groups while at the same time encouraging social integration, with improvements in the quality of life for all segments of the population.

258 Tuna Taşan-Kok and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz They also identify the reduction of social inequality and social discontinuity as the most important policy targets for achieving social sustainability. We do not argue that policies for achieving these goals are totally absent from waterfront developments, because some local governments have achieved social sustainability by providing affordable or social housing, by improving public services, and by enabling local democratic participation. However, we do claim that these policies may have effects that are not long term. As long as the main drive for these projects is city marketing, social responsibilities (for example, providing affordable housing, creating employment opportunities, and enabling participation) can be readily manipulated by developers and their supporters in local government to satisfy regulatory requirements and to take advantage of market conditions. In most cases, social inequality in and around the newly regenerated waterfront project area increases and social discontinuity is experienced because of the dominance of highend land use and high-income residents. This appears to be a recurring issue around the globe. Stren and Polese (2000) collected diverse cases of social exclusion, inequality, and discontinuity in the waterfronts of Montreal, Toronto, Miami, Baltimore, Rotterdam, Geneva, Sao Paolo, San Salvador, Nairobi, and Cape Town. All these cases show that the outcome of these projects is not usually socially sustainable for everyone living in and around the area, even if the projects do boost the local economy. This chapter examines the social sustainability of waterfront regeneration projects in the two West European cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam. Less than one hundred kilometres apart, Antwerp and Rotterdam are particularly interesting because both are major European port cities that went through a similar entrepreneurial waterfront regeneration process based on large-scale commercial-property-led development. In addition, both cities approached the social dimension of development in their own particular ways and within their particular institutional frameworks. Although Rotterdam seems to consider the social aspects of regeneration in a more sustainable way than Antwerp, social sustainability is, in both cases, not the main target. Selected projects seem to have had similar starting conditions but achieved different degrees of success. The Kop van Zuid has visibly changed the urban landscape and has influenced the socio-economic prospects for Rotterdam, whereas Het Eilandje in Antwerp has remained a modest, partially implemented, and fragmented project. While analyzing social sustainability in these two cities, we also introduce two socially innovative instruments, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), which may impart social sustainability in waterfront development projects. In discussing the notion of socially innovative instruments, Moulaert et al. (2007) identify the following characteristics: bottom-up mobilizations strongly

Exploring Innovative Instruments 259 embedded in the logic and practice of social struggle; movements that challenge the status quo or the move towards further commodification of public use values; involvment with citizen participation at a fundamental level; and an institutionalization of long-term relationships, including social sustainability. In the North American context, CLTs and CBAs provide socially equitable urban redevelopment; but they will undoubtedly have to be adapted to a European institutional context. A CLT is a private, non-profit organization established to hold title to land to sustain its long-term use for affordable housing and other community purposes. CLTs are used in the United States mainly to provide permanently affordable owner-occupied housing. CLTs have increased in number and are now found throughout the U.S., as more non-profit organizations and local governments have embraced the concept as a way of providing permanently affordable housing. There are currently approximately two hundred CLTs in the U.S. (Sungu-Eryilmaz and Greenstein 2007). CBAs are enforceable legal contracts, signed by community groups and a developer. They have been used to mitigate the effects of large-scale property-led development projects such as sports stadiums, entertainment arenas, office parks, retail outlets, and high-income residential projects. This chapter addresses an important dimension in the fi xity and flow of urban waterfront change. While analyzing the dynamism and complex interconnectedness of relations in waterfronts, we also examine how urban policies and planning practices in Rotterdam and Antwerp have or have not taken into account the interests of various groups and look at the extent to which these actions are fi xed in a socially responsible outcome. The chapter not only benefited from various research activities undertaken by the authors over the past five years that dealt with land development processes in waterfront cities, but also from semi-structured interviews with port authorities, development agencies, and city and planning authorities as the main sources of information.

WATERFRONT REGENERATION IN ANTWERP AND ROTTERDAM In waterfront projects in Antwerp and Rotterdam, the roles and powers of various public actors (mainly the port authority and the municipality) have changed in line with increasing entrepreneurialism. The port authorities in particular began to play an essential role in the organization of waterfront governance, and in property and land development. Antwerp and Rotterdam follow different governance approaches based on their particular policy-making traditions. In the Netherlands, the participation of private-sector actors in urban development is organized at the level of national and local governments and seemingly has a better balance between public-sector and private-sector interests than

260 Tuna Taşan-Kok and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz the fragmented governance system of Belgium, where a complex hierarchical urban government structure limits the bottom-up participation of diverse stakeholders (see Table 12.1). These peculiarities in Antwerp mean that cooperation between public authorities (namely the port and the city authorities) is problematic and private-sector initiative is limited, while in Rotterdam local and/or national governments control and integrate responsibilities of public agents and market parties. In addition to these differences, the relationship between the Port Authority and the city is quite different. Fragmented and project-led development activities are dominant in Antwerp, while in Rotterdam the port and city authorities designed and implemented large projects. In Rotterdam, this is possible because of clear task defi nitions and close cooperation despite the physical and organizational separation of the port from the city. A large-scale redevelopment project, Het Eilandje, has been underway in Antwerp since the mid-1990s. The Antwerp Port Authority is the most powerful actor in this area and owns most of the land and property. In the 1980s, many port activities shifted to the north and Het Eilandje fell into decay. This derelict area was known for its empty warehouses, low-income housing, some light industry and storage facilities, and for its illegal activities and prostitution. A complex hierarchical local administration and overlapping jurisdictional responsibilities, combined with a fragmented political tradition in the city, all greatly influenced the redevelopment project (Taşan-Kok 2010). During the 1990s, the city designed new plans such as Stad aan de Stroom—City on the Stream (approved in 1993)—and Mens en Ruimte— People and Space (approved in 1999). These plans were largely designoriented, and lacked innovative economic and social policies as well as implementation instruments. As a result, the area has been partially developed through sporadic activities by various actors, and neither its initial design-oriented approach nor later versions with more marketoriented concepts provided any social perspective. In the early 1990s, the Antwerp Port Authority was in a deep fi nancial crisis and was unable to pay the pensions of its port workers. The municipal government decided to give the Antwerp Port Authority ownership rights to the Het Eilandje area so it could use the land as a basis for generating profit and thereby improve its fi nancial situation. The Antwerp Port Authority was able to sell individual properties to private-sector developers instead of participating in a more comprehensive development plan and investment process. Because the regulatory arrangements were slow, the Port Authority announced a tender for the sale of three large plots of land and property to private-sector developers without waiting for the fi nalization of the legal landownership rights transfer procedures. Though the legal owner of the land was not clear, a tendering process was undertaken while private parties and the Port Authority were still in the negotiation phase. The conditions of the land sale remained unclear until late 2008 because the city and

Exploring Innovative Instruments 261 Table 12.1

Logic and Institutional Context of Waterfront Development in Antwerp and Rotterdam

Development Logic

Local Institutional Context

Local Context of Large-Scale Development-Led Approach Social Dimension

Antwerp Het-Eilandje project

Problematic Complex hierarPlan-led development chical urban gov- cooperation ernment structure between the (fragmented public authoriand overlapping governance ties, limited responsibilities. approach) private-sector Semi-independent initiative. public agencies Project-led develwith limited opment instead power. of an integrated Despite many approach. planning activities limited and fragmented implementation.

Separated social and spatial tasks.Mixed land use and social-mix as instrument for integration approach.

Rotterdam Kop van Zuid project

Shifting developBottom-up from Plan-led development top-down gover- ment power from the city nance approach. (top-down to the port in from the waterfront bottom-up areas. governance approach)

Changing social strategy along with the portdominated activities.

City Ports project

Attracting young Active lease Integrated areapopulation to strategy of the based approach work in the port port replacing with shared the property-led and high-inresponsibilities come groups to and city marbetween public keting targeted live in the regenagents and conerated neighapproach of trolled involvebourhoods. the city with ment of the Increasing the a relocation market parties. spatial quality. of businesses Clear task definiMaking the approach. tions and close area attractive Highlighted cooperation for the city to despite the physi- port economy become more cal and organiza- compared to tional separation the highlighted attractive. urban competiof the port from tiveness. the city. High-income housing as a tool for revitalization.

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the Port Authority had not agreed on the landownership rights. Eventually, in January 2009, the city and the Antwerp Port Authority fi nally settled on the conditions of the transfer protocol to give ownership of the land back to the city of Antwerp. In 2002, the city approved a more realistic plan called Buro 5 Maastricht, a ‘Provincial Spatial Structure Plan’ aimed to physically, economically, and socially regenerate the declining urban waterfront. This plan imposed a public/private partnership (PPP) structure that linked public authorities with private parties to implement the project. With this plan, a start was made on regenerating the area although, instead of an integrated approach, a project-led development strategy was followed. Social innovations to address the needs of different groups and to generate equal opportunities were limited in the project. First, the plan suggested mainly high-end luxurious apartment buildings, excluding other income groups living in and around the area. Second, the plan did not provide for any social and/or affordable housing. Moreover, the plan did not anticipate a need for commercial and cultural facilities for the use of diverse income, age, and/or ethnic groups or social facilities to increase employment opportunities. The plan simply provided housing and entertainment for well-paid, upper-middle-class professionals, excluding diverse income, social, and/or ethnic groups. Thus, the plan did not include social policies such as increasing participation and the integration of diverse groups living in the city, or using the development to trigger new employment opportunities. The Kop van Zuid project, initiated in the mid-1980s, was part of a larger plan to revitalize Rotterdam and create a new urban image that would be helpful for marketing the city. The Ministry of Economy, and the Ministry of Transport, Rivers and Sea, with the participation of the city of Rotterdam, initiated a top-down development program. They introduced a set of strategies at the beginning of the 1990s intended to increase the economic competitiveness and attractiveness of the city in local and global networks. This brought about a set of changes, including large urban regeneration projects in the inner city to create urban spaces for new economic activities in response to the needs of new urban classes. Kop van Zuid was the key project that envisioned a high-quality, mixed-use area, with striking architecture and a lively and bustling waterfront to initiate the large-scale regeneration activities in the city. The goal was not only to upgrade neighbourhoods and replace old port functions with new land-use activities, but also to connect the area directly to the city centre and open up the entire south side of the city. The principal strategy of the project, most of which has been implemented, is to promote local and regional economic redevelopment by attracting high-income residents and prestigious fi rms from outside the project area and its immediate surroundings (Miedema et al. 2002). The Kop van Zuid has succeeded in linking socially, economically, and physically separate parts of the city. Shortly after the end of World War

Exploring Innovative Instruments 263 II, the Port of Rotterdam began to expand towards the west and has since become the largest port in Europe. This development spatially disconnected the port and the city. Parallel with the spatial separation, the Port of Rotterdam also moved away from the political control of the city, and in September 2004 became a publicly owned limited company. Despite sometimes-conflicting approaches, the city and the Port of Rotterdam cooperated to develop a new plan—‘Port Vision 2020’, which the city of Rotterdam approved in 2004. The plan’s most important priorities are to extend the port further into the sea (Maasvlakte II) and to connect the port with transport facilities, housing and the city ports (Stadshavens) area, which is located to the southwest of the city on both banks of the River Maas. Unlike the Kop van Zuid project, the aim of the city ports project is to maintain vital port functions by relocating them across the river. The project also aimed at immediate actions to prevent slow dereliction rather than waiting until the areas become completely rundown. By encouraging port-related companies to move out to the other parts of the port, the Port Authority is initiating the development of the new area before it becomes completely devalued. The plan calls for new office buildings, one of which the port itself will develop to encourage market interest. Once the relocation is complete, urban functions and selected business activities will be able to use the newly reclaimed land. The developers aim to attract high-end uses. Despite having different development visions and approaches, both the Kop van Zuid and the city ports projects highlight inner-city urban functions along the waterfront of Rotterdam.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROVISION IN HET EILANDJE AND KOP VAN ZUID As mentioned earlier, the dispute over landownership between the Antwerp Port Authority and the city led to serious disagreements about land-use decisions and to fragmented developments that the Antwerp Port Authority had initiated without the approval of the city. Because of this fragmented approach, the project has been only partially implemented and has not adopted socially sustainable policies. Even today, the amount of affordable housing is limited and community participation is negligible. Only recently did the municipality take an active role in introducing affordable housing to the eastern side of the area, Cadixwijk, by transferring affordable housing in small building-block packages. The Antwerp Port Authority built the fi rst housing units in the area to serve upmarket clientele on the site of the former royal warehouses. The new residential towers currently under construction are also geared to higher income groups. Housing in Belgium, we note, is developed mainly on private land, unlike the centrally controlled and public-led housing market in the Netherlands.

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In Rotterdam, the owners of new houses may only lease (and thus cannot purchase) the land because of public landownership. This means that both the body that makes decisions about the future use of land and the landowner are public (The Port Authority and the city). Consequently, city authorities have the power to be more socially responsible in terms of creating sustainable neighbourhoods with integrated affordable and social housing. Although the Kop van Zuid project provides for some social and affordable housing (30 percent of total housing), mainly in the Zuidkade zone and the recently developing ParkStad zone (see Figure 12.1), these housing units are not integrated into the neighbourhoods with social, cultural, and commercial facilities to create a continuous communication and dialogue between diverse groups. However, a recent study (Doucet and van Kempen 2009) argues that not only low-income residents in the Kop van Zuid project, but also residents in adjacent poor neighbourhoods, such as Afrikaanderwijk, believe that the Kop van Zuid project is beneficial for their neighbourhoods’ needs.

Figure 12.1 Planning zones in Kop van Zuid (Map T. Taşan-Kok, digitalized by OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies).

Exploring Innovative Instruments 265 In Antwerp, on the other hand, fragmented and project-led activities have led to the creation of high-end housing on privately owned land. The city could, and should, have suggested constructing affordable housing in the areas where they own land and where they could therefore control developments. Thus, fragmented management has prevented the integration of different land uses, and affordable housing will be isolated in some neighbourhoods. In both cases, although to a lesser extent in Rotterdam, public authorities did not use their landownership powers to the benefit of lower-income groups, although they did fulfill marketing targets for commercial developments. In the case of Het Eilandje in Antwerp, the city and the Antwerp Port Authority had different interests and approaches to development. The city’s property-led approach, embodied in its master plan, divided the project into two phases and defi ned the principles for development. These principles are: that the plan should emphasize the special, historical identity of the area; that cultural activities should connect elements of the plan; that high-quality architecture and public spaces should be provided; and that historical monuments should be protected. The city wanted to redevelop the area for public use while protecting the former structure of the old ports. The Antwerp Port Authority, however, wanted the redevelopment to generate as much profit as possible in order to alleviate its fi nancial problems (that is, being able to pay its workers’ pensions). The only area where the city introduced social elements (social housing, affordable housing, etc.) is in Cadixwijk (see Figure 12.2), as mentioned earlier. The city adopted a new approach for this area in 2009 to transfer building-blocks to socially affordable housing in small package projects. A semi-public organization, VESPA AG, 2 will begin working on the development of the housing projects in this eastern area. With the revenues generated by VESPA’s developments, the AG Stadsplanning (Antwerp City’s urban planning department) will begin to construct public infrastructure such as roads, sewers, etc. While urban management struggled in Antwerp, Rotterdam had drawn up plans to redevelop the port area for social housing and to improve a number of rundown neighbourhoods south of the River Maas. The fi rst plans in the early 1980s failed due to confl icts of interest between private port enterprises and city authorities (Miedema et al. 2002). However, in the two years since the Port Authority was separated from the city, these conflicts were resolved as management roles and responsibilities are now more clearly defined and embodied in ‘Port Vision 2020’. The general objectives of the new strategy are to strengthen economic competitiveness and to improve the social and employment conditions in some neighbourhoods (such as Rijn and Maashaven, Merwe and Vierhaven), which are now divided between urban and port activities, and to boost economic activities by reorganizing urban spatial patterns and infrastructure. The Kop van Zuid project did provide some social housing, though developers did not welcome its proximity to nearby higher-income housing areas. Because earlier programs (cases in which the city invests in an

266

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Figure 12.2 Planning zones in Het Eilandje (Map T. Taşan-Kok, digitalized by OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies).

area to increase its attractiveness to private-sector investment by providing such amenities as road or public transport infrastructure, environmental clean up, or clearing of existing buildings) do not exist in Rotterdam, the city and the Port Authority had to fi nd instruments to support a mix of high-end functions.

EXPLORING THE USE OF COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS (CLTS) FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN WATERFRONT REGENERATION PROJECTS Although the CLT model has not been specifically implemented in waterfront areas, this approach to landownership has been used in both advancing and declining neighbourhoods and cities in the U.S. As waterfront

Exploring Innovative Instruments 267 regeneration projects have a tendency to create enclaves of affluent residents, the CLT model could meet individual needs for affordable housing, mitigate land value increase, foster community participation, and protect the public interest in land and in long-term affordability. In fact, most (79 percent) of the CLT organizations in the United States reported that increasing housing prices within their geographic target area played a major role in the early formation of their CLTs (Sungu-Eryilmaz and Greenstein 2007). For example, the Figueroa Corridor Community Land Trust was established in 2005 to combat slum housing, increasing real estate values, gentrification, and displacement in Figueroa Corridor in Los Angeles. The land trust area is adjacent to downtown and the Staples Center, and includes the University of Southern California. Large investments in the area such as the Staples Center have contributed to increasing housing values, displacement, and gentrification. There are three building-blocks of the CLT model: dual ownership, shared equity homeownership, and community control. Dual ownership is the separate ownership of land and the improvements on that land (that is, to buildings). A private, non-profit corporation owns land parcels in their target geographic area and retains ownership of these parcels in perpetuity. The non-profit organization provides for the private use of the land through a long-term ground lease. The leaseholders may own their houses or other improvements on the leased land, but resale restrictions apply (Institute for Community Economics 1996). In this sense, the community land trust is an institutional mechanism to recapture publicly generated land values for public benefit. The second building-block, shared equity homeownership, limits the appreciation that an owner may keep when selling the house, while acknowledging an individual’s right to equity in initial investment and improvement. The house therefore remains affordable for the house’s subsequent owners (Davis 2006). The third concept, community control, emphasizes balancing the interests of the leaseholder and those of the community. Usually, two-thirds of a CLT’s board of directors comprise either people who live on the CLT’s land or people who live within the CLT’s target community but do not live on the CLT’s land. One-third may be made up of public officials, local funders, non-profit providers of housing or social services, and other individuals who, it is presumed, speak for the public interest (Institute for Community Economics 1996). This governance structure reflects the multiple claims on a piece of property, even privately owned property. In this sense, the CLT model combines aspects of public and private ownership (Geisler and Daneker 2000). Individual homeowners and the non-profit corporation share the rights, responsibilities, and benefits of the residential property that represent the interests of its leaseholders and a larger community. In addition, the owner is placed within a community-based support system that can mitigate the risks of homeownership,

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potentially increasing the benefits of homeownership both for the owner and the neighbourhood in which the owner lives (Sungu-Eryilmaz and Greenstein 2009).

PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN HET EILANDJE AND KOP VAN ZUID Civil society participation has been limited in the two waterfront development projects examined in this chapter. In some cases, this was because the waterfront areas to be developed were not densely populated in the project area, but in other cases property developers thought that community involvement would hamper the prospects for development. Compared with Het Eilandje, the Kop van Zuid project has had good practices in terms of bottom-up civil society approaches, although they have not always been very effective. Civil society organizations in Antwerp were involved in plans for regenerating deprived neighbourhoods in the 1990s (for example, the BOM initiative3), though the approach of urban policy shifted towards city-marketing-oriented renewal in the early 2000s (Christiaens et al. 2007). Het Eilandje did not benefit from these kinds of civil society initiatives, but in Kop van Zuid a Mutual Benefit (Wederzijds Profi jt) Program was intended to create more jobs for project area residents. In addition, a ‘Cleaner, Safer, Greener’ program (Opzoomeren) was put in place to encourage residents to take responsibility for their own streets (URBED 2006). Originally called the ‘Social Return’ program, Rotterdam City commissioned each company within the Mutual Benefit framework to investigate possibilities for hiring unemployed people from the surrounding neighbourhoods for the development of Kop van Zuid. Small and medium-sized businesses were also encouraged within the framework of this program to generate new employment and increase public safety (Miedema et al. 2002). Unfortunately, this initiative did not provide long-term employment in these neighbourhoods because the jobs were based on short-term contracts. Initially, a long-term employment program was not successful because city authorities could not force developers to hire unemployed people. Moreover, a Job Centre, which trained unemployed people, was not successful in generating large numbers of jobs for its graduates (Miedema et al. 2002). The strategy later shifted towards a plan for long-term employment to attract the unemployed from adjacent districts. However, the impact of this move has also been insignificant (Miedema et al. 2002). Community participation in Het Eilandje is rather politicized and fragmented, and consequently participatory processes were not high on the city’s agenda. Community participation seems to be planned in a one-sided way wherein the city (in the form of AG Stadsplanning) maintains the initiative and the power, and the Antwerp Port Authority gives up its property rights, allowing community planning or participation to

Exploring Innovative Instruments 269 go its own way. During the early years of this century, AG Stadsplanning realized the importance of the lack of social integration in the Het Eilandje area and began emphasizing that the development of Cadixwijk should be a socially mixed neighbourhood with a mix of land uses. AG Stadsplanning also aimed to increase integration and communication between groups through its diverse social and land-use mix. The Cadixwijk plan anticipated building a new tramline that would connect this rather remote area with the city centre to prevent its social isolation from the rest of the central city and neighbouring areas. However, the city’s attempt to create and increase participation was limited to a recently conducted survey by AG Stadsplanning. The aim of the survey is to understand the main expectations of current residents of Cadixwijk and their reactions to current plans to create an affordable housing area in this zone. Unfortunately, at the time of preparing this chapter, the results of this survey had not been released. However, the planning system provides neither the institutional framework nor the vision for more concrete strategic instruments that would promote social integration in these waterfront areas.

EXPLORING COMMUNITY BENEFITS AGREEMENTS (CBAS) FOR WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT A CBA is an enforceable legal contract between community groups and a developer. These types of agreements have been established in the U.S. over the last decade. They have been used in large projects such as sports stadiums, entertainment arenas, office parks, retail outlets, and highincome residential projects (Gross et al. 2005). Similarly, CBAs can be used in waterfront regeneration projects to identify a range of community benefits that a developer would agree to provide. Developers use CBAs to help get government approval for their development agreements and community support for their projects (Gross et al. 2005). The fi rst negotiated CBA was for the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California (Lander and Wolf-Powers 2007). Currently, CBAs have been negotiated and used in various other cities, including San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Milwaukee, and New Haven (Lander and Wolf-Powers 2007). Different kinds of benefits have been negotiated depending on the community’s needs, the size and type of the proposed development, and the relative bargaining power of the community groups and the developer (Lander and Wolf-Powers 2007; Gross et al. 2005). These benefits include: project design, scale and mix of uses; job training and living wage requirements for workers employed in the development; job opportunities for residents of low-income neighbourhoods; neighbourhood services such as child-care centres, parks, and recreational facilities; community input in selection of tenants of

270 Tuna Taşan-Kok and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz the development; construction of affordable housing; and mitigation of environmental impacts. A CBA is the result of a negotiation process between a developer and a coordinated coalition of representatives from affected communities. Such coalitions may include not only resident groups but also labour unions, environmental groups, affordable housing groups, school districts, faithbased organizations, or other community-based organizations. In cases of successful coalition building, CBAs can be used as instruments and processes to enable affected communities to participate in the development projects, including waterfront regeneration. Of course, a coalition’s success at both negotiating and implementing a CBA is directly related to its capacity to build and maintain coalitions, and to the amount of power this coalition then has. Poorly organized grassroots organizations may have little leverage over developers and governmental agencies (Gross et al. 2005).

CONCLUSIONS The primary conclusion from the analysis in this chapter is that property-led waterfront developments have lacked clear social sustainability policies to address inequality, discontinuity, and exclusion. These development projects have not been integrated into broader urban or regional social-sustainability policies and have not been instruments for social integration. We have identifi ed three main reasons for this tendency in Antwerp and Rotterdam. First, large-scale property development projects facilitate regeneration processes outside the close control of the public sector. Second, large infrastructure investments are required, but public authorities sometimes do not adequately provide them. And fi nally, the social returns and benefits from investing in waterfront development projects, especially for disadvantaged groups, have been questionable. The main socio-spatial consequence of these waterfront projects has been the disintegration or fragmentation of the city and the emergence of elite islands that have not been integrated into the surrounding areas. Local governments have attempted to make waterfront areas in both Rotterdam and Antwerp attractive for higher-income groups as a way to diminish existing or potential social problems. For that reason, city governments have wanted to develop high-end housing (for example, lofts in old brick buildings with spectacular views of the waterfront that would appeal to high-income professionals, or larger, luxurious housing units for families with children). Moreover, public authorities, who usually own waterfront areas, have not been able to agree on the best land uses for the waterfront. Port and city authorities have not agreed on how best to use waterfront lands where residential and commercial developments can be highly profitable. These disagreements reflect the competing interests

Exploring Innovative Instruments 271 of public stakeholders. If cities insist on using property-led approaches, the public sector will need to seek alternative instruments that are able to improve social conditions in large cities. We have explored two possible instruments—CLTs to assist with affordable housing, and CBAs to improve community participation. In Kop van Zuid, as opposed to Het Eilandje, innovative instruments for achieving social sustainability existed, such as the Mutual Benefit Program. However, many of these programs were not effective. Moreover, some local retailers suffered from competition with new supermarkets that went up as part of the project (Miedema et al. 2002). As a result, the projects led to social polarization. We do not see the success of any innovative instruments in that respect. As Rotterdam’s top-down approach demonstrates, macro-scale policies for achieving social sustainability are necessary for success in creating social integration in cities. Would Het Eilandje neighbourhoods in Antwerp be so fragmented and disintegrated if legally enforceable instruments had been used as part of a social integration policy? Such policies would have been designed to create benefits for the community and force public authorities to go beyond just designing spaces. Would Kop van Zuid be such an isolated area if community needs had been considered as part of a general social integration plan for the city? We believe that new policies and innovative, long-term implementation instruments need to be identifi ed and adopted, to require local governments to go beyond simply providing a few social housing blocks and fi lling up the rest of the area with port functions, high-end housing, and creative industries. We began the chapter by defi ning the main characteristics of social sustainability as social cohesion, cohabitation of diverse social groups, social integration, and continuity. We have found that on Rotterdam and Antwerp’s waterfronts, a complex web of social relations ‘fi xes’ in place flows of capital as urban land and property developments. We believe that these ‘fi xes’ provide opportunities to fulfi ll social responsibilities for creating equity both for particular neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

NOTES 1. The authors would like to thank the OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies for the maps of Kop van Zuid and Het Eilandje, as well as Gene Desfor and Dirk Schubert, who reviewed the earlier drafts and provided valuable comments and recommendations. 2. Autonomous Municipality for Property and Urban Projects, Antwerp, which was established in the early 2000s to manage the property owned by Antwerp City and to make and apply urban policy on the basis of strategic urban regeneration projects carried out through PPP arrangements.

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3. BOM was a neighbourhood development association established in 1990 and closed down in 2005.

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Exploring Innovative Instruments 273 . 2009. The role of community based organizations in foreclosure prevention and intervention. Paper presented at annual meeting of Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Oct 1–4, Crystal City, VA. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2005. A new urbanity? The ambiguous politics of large-scale urban development projects in European cities. In Amsterdam Zuidas European space, eds. W. Salet and S. Majoor. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Swyngedouw, Erik, Frank Moulaert, and Arantxa Rodriguez. 2002. Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode 34(3): 542–575. Taşan-Kok, Tuna. 2010. Entrepreneurial governance: Challenges of large-scale property-led urban regeneration projects. Journal of Economic and Social Geography 100(2): 126–149. URBED (Urban and Economic Development) Ltd. 2006. Making Connections: Draft Report: Kop van Zuid Case Study. London: URBED. Accessed April 5, 2007. Wakefield, Sara. 2007. Great expectations: Waterfront redevelopment and the Hamilton Harbour Waterfront Trail. Cities 24(4): 298–310.

13 Flows of Capital and Fixity of Bricks in the Built Environment of Boston Property-Led Development in Urban Planning? Susanne Heeg

In the last ten to twenty years we have seen a proliferation of literature on waterfront development (e.g., Pries 2008; Schubert 2001; Hoyle 1990, 1988). In this literature, waterfront development is often presented as a way of bringing new uses into the city. It is argued that waterfront redevelopment projects open up formerly inaccessible industrial areas to the city (Priebs 1992). The fl agship developments and outstanding architecture that can be realized on these new waterfronts are seen as an opportunity to increase the international recognition of a city. This is all true for the South Boston Waterfront, which was previously an industrial harbour and has for more than twenty years been in the sights of urban planners, who would like to rebuild it as an attractive urban district (Boston Redevelopment Authority [BRA] 1999). In this chapter I will use the South Boston Waterfront—a large-scale waterfront redevelopment project1—as a case study to connect waterfront redevelopment to a broader context of urban strategies that use the built environment as a linchpin for preparing cities for urban competition. For policymakers, encouragement of real estate development is increasingly regarded as a way of dealing with economic and social problems of unemployment and slow economic growth. It seems that adapting the built environment to new infrastructural and socio-economic requirements holds the prospect of fostering growth by attracting investments, fi rms, and households. In the academic literature, the emphasis on the built environment in urban politics is seen as an attempt to shape urban images in order to make cities more attractive to external investors (De Frantz 2005; Jessop 1997; Boyle and Hughes 1994; Zukin 1993). However, my argument is that the focus on the built environment comprises more than providing visible signs, urban spectacle, fl agship developments, design, and images. It is fi rst and foremost about facilitating constant change in the urban landscape to meet new economic requirements. The objective is to create the infrastructural conditions necessary for enhanced economic growth: flows of capital should help in fi xing the

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built environment according to economic requirements, which should in turn encourage further flows of capital. As a by-product, a qualitative transformation is triggered in the relationship between urban planners, local politicians, and the private real estate sector (project developers, investors, and owners). The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the role of the built environment as a policy tool for generating socio-economic growth, which, it is argued, results in strategies of “property-led development”. A reshaping of the built environment is seen as a precondition for attracting investments and creating jobs. This strategy is accompanied by an integration of private real estate actors and their interests into urban planning, in order to facilitate new developments. The aim of this chapter is not to question the existence or absence of economic benefits from property-led development, but to look at the quality of the relationships between urban planners, local governmental actors, real estate actors, and non-governmental stakeholders, including residents, in the context of property-led development. My thesis is that in this context, real estate interests are empowered. The development of the built environment is made strongly dependent on economic cycles and flows of capital. What this ultimately precipitates is a destabilization of the fi xity of uses, by privileging unconstrained flows of capital. The chapter begins by defi ning “property-led development”, and analyzing its goals and qualities. In order to test the hypothesis, property-led development and its consequences are then analyzed for the case of the South Boston Waterfront. The concluding section addresses the question of what an analysis of property-led development efforts offers for current debates in urban geography.

PROPERTY-LED DEVELOPMENT The built environment has long been a major policy fi eld in cities. But how this fi eld had been organized has changed considerably, due to a shift in the way North American and Western European cities are governed. Harvey (1989) has dubbed this a shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. In contrast to managerial urban politics, entrepreneurial urban politics is concerned less with the provision of welfare, services, and collective consumption than with the mobilizing of local resources in an increasingly deregulated competitive market (see also Leitner et al. 2007; Michel 2005; Jessop 1998; Hall and Hubbard 1996; Ambrose 1994). In relation to the built environment, managerial urban politics centred on the idea that the built environment should improve mobility and provide basic infrastructure for local residents (Ward 2002; Gottdiener 1997; Pagano and Bowman 1995). In contrast to contemporary

276 Susanne Heeg urban governance, the main political actors were public and the urban planning approaches were overwhelmingly state-led. Many cities established their own housing companies—often with fi nancial support from state agencies—and were able to build up an extensive local housing stock. Public-sector planners established the guidelines for the development of the urban fabric (industrial sites, housing, transportation systems, and so on). This rested on an understanding that state-run urban planning guarantees objective, neutral solutions in the best interest of the population (Oertzen 1993). State-run planning was possible because of outstanding economic prosperity in the postwar years: tax monies went into the fi nancing of extensive infrastructure programs and attempts to improve and equalize living conditions in urban areas (Ward 2002; Logan and Molotch 1987; Hirsch and Roth 1986). With the shift to entrepreneurialism and a neoliberal agenda, the political context vis-à-vis the urban built environment has changed completely. Harvey (1989) summarizes the essence of entrepreneurial politics as the use of local government powers to try to attract external sources of funding, new direct investments, or new employment sources. Actors are now from the private as well as the public sector; the aim is to fi nance most of the reshaping and reconstruction of the built environment through private investments. This implies a qualitative change: private-sector interests become paramount due to their central role in project development and fi nancing (Desfor and Jørgensen 2004; Breitbach and Mitchell 2003). The role of the public sector is reduced to facilitation of the functioning of the real estate market; “a healthy real estate market is necessary in order to motivate fi rms to stay in the region and to attract new enterprises . . . Only if the local economic development agency manages to offer appropriate sites and buildings will the municipality be capable of emerging victorious from urban competition” (Markert and Zacharias 2006, 122; author’s translation). In this context, the main aim of applying property-led development approaches is to assist in economic development, by enabling the renewal of industrial and commercial premises and buildings for different uses (Breitbach and Mitchell 2003; Solesbury 1990). It is assumed that a missing “hardware” of building structures works as a hindrance to cumulative regional agglomeration effects. Gornig and Spars (2006, 569; author’s translation) claim that: the real estate and construction sector has a key position in facilitating economic growth because of its ability to overcome agglomeration impediments. Particularly important is the far-sighted planning and ‘storage’ of real estate supply according to the development of demand. This will stem possible price increases in rent and land caused by conditions of scarcity in metropolitan regions.

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According to Gornig and Spars, it is necessary to ensure the supply of sufficient appropriate sites and buildings in order to enable increasing returns for local industries. The built environment is supposed to provide physical and spatial inputs to meet the requirements of new and changing production processes. Breitbach and Mitchell (2003, 223) also address the idea of the built environment as a precondition of economic growth in a critical assessment of the Sioux Falls Development Foundation, the property development agency of Sioux Falls (U.S.): The Foundation makes clear that its goal is to create a cycle—hopefully unbroken—of accumulation. This cycle is one that begins with the development of property; such development attracts new capital; new capital creates new jobs, which in turn attracts an in-coming labour force; but it also creates tax and development pressures on surrounding farmland, which have the effect of making farming in the region an evermore marginal enterprise. In this respect, waterfront developments are not different from other urban development projects; rather waterfronts fit quite well into this planning and economic context (Pries 2008). The relationship between economic regeneration and property development is summarized in Table 13.1, from a short- and long-term perspective as well as in both site-specific and areawide terms. The objective of property-led development is, in this context, to adapt the industrial city to post-industrial needs. Although this might also be achieved with state-led development, as it was in fordist times, today the emphasis is on minimizing state intervention and refraining from direct state support. The task of adapting the city to post-industrial needs is not

Table 13.1 Property Development’s Influences on Economic Regeneration Construction activity

Indigenous growth

Inward investment

Jobs and income Buildings Property resulting from accommodate attracts building-related expanding and houses activity firms relocating firms

Neighbourhood Local economic revitalization restructuring Physical improvement makes places attractive to live and invest in

Widespread redevelopment and economic diversification

Spatial Scale Site-specific

Area-wide

Duration of impact Immediate Source: Derived from Turok (1992, 364).

Longer-term

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one that ends with the successful shift to the post-industrial or serviceoriented city; rather, it is a never-ending task to adapt the built environment to changing socio-economic demands and dynamics (Harvey 1985). However, even if remodeling the urban built environment is followed by economic growth, such growth cannot necessarily be attributed to the built environment. Economic growth may have many causes—market dynamics, changing production structures, or innovation—but it is impossible to isolate these influences. It seems that property-led development becomes important as a lastditch attempt to shape and mobilize urban potentials when there is a limited scope for endogenous, independent strategies within an increasingly deregulated global market. However, property-led development challenges the existing balance between private property interests and wider urban planning objectives and, in order to get property owners to develop the built environment according to urban plans, it is necessary to persuade them of the plans’ advantages (Breitbach and Mitchell 2003; MacLaran and Laverny-Rafter 2003; Adrian 1998). In this context, the urban geography literature acknowledges an increasing tendency toward concessions for property owners. Discussions about the fl exibilization of urban planning occupy a prominent position in this debate (Mayer 2004; Heeg 2003). The major argument is that a shift has taken place towards a more flexible, liberal, less regulated planning, in order to stimulate economic growth and innovation. Desfor and Jørgensen (2004), analyzing waterfront redevelopment in Copenhagen, argue that planning for core waterfront areas has taken place outside existing planning law and practice: the “Vision Group”— responsible for waterfront redevelopment—asserted that a comprehensive harbour plan for that city was not appropriate due to the particular character and signifi cant differences of the waterfront redevelopment sites vis-à-vis the rest of the city. In the authors’ view, what was emphasized was the need for fl exibility in planning and for creating a developerfriendly planning process. Swyngedouw et al. (2002, 215) note similar developments: “Against the crisis of the comprehensive Plan—the classic policy instrument of the fordist age—the large, emblematic Project has emerged as a viable alternative, allegedly combining the advantages of fl exibility and targeted actions with a tremendous symbolic capacity.” Similarly, MacLaran and Laverny-Rafter (2003, 109) analyze the rejuvenation of downtown Minneapolis as a process in which urban planning was adapted to the interests of the private sector: “For the planning authorities, to ensure a high probability of plans being fulfi lled by private-sector agents meant that public-sector goals become tailored to private-sector requirements.” Property-based urban regeneration strategies are widely used in urban renewal (McGuirk and MacLaran 2001; Newman and Thornley 1996; Deakin and Edwards 1993; Turok 1992; Healey et al. 1992). Fainstein

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(2001) acknowledges a tendency toward offering developers direct and indirect incentives and subsidies to induce them to realize private project developments. The price for property-led development seems to be high: in order to get developers to build, planning is deregulated and incentives are widely granted. Large-scale projects in particular seem to develop a life of their own: in terms of design, social, and economic structure, many are scarcely integrated into their surrounding neighbourhoods. For urban planning, project-oriented planning is accompanied by problems of legitimation as well as administrative friction (Mayer 2004). Property-led development also often implies instability in terms of flows and fi xity in the built environment. Due to the real estate and business cycle, the flow of capital into the built environment is unstable: money is not invested during economic crises, but is overinvested in boom periods. In that sense, fi xing urban development through property-led development is far from guaranteed; it implies speculative tendencies. During periods of boom, the development of upscale housing and office space is overwhelmingly strong because it offers the highest profits—even though housing demand from low-income households is particularly pressing in these times. During economic downturns, however, project development is usually reduced to a point where big projects are halted by a lack of capital and a lack of demand. Flows are not followed by fi xity; real estate cycles undermine the prospect of stability. The sections that follow discuss property-led development and fi xity and flows in the built environment in Boston. In the next section, the location and the central actors in the South Boston Waterfront redevelopment project will be characterized. The subsequent section provides an analysis of property-led development in the South Boston Waterfront and of negotiations between the interests of urban planning, real estate, and local neighbourhood residents.

SOUTH BOSTON WATERFRONT AS A LARGE-SCALE REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT The South Boston Waterfront is an area that was previously an industrial harbour, but lost its economic functions through the reorganization of logistics. The area of 1,025 acres (415 hectares) was landfi ll created to serve industrial needs. It has subsequently changed its face several times. The area now consists of several districts that are the result of its historical development and former industrial use (Figure 13.1). Each district has distinctive characteristics that make it suited to different real estate developments. The Industrial Port and Industrial South Boston area accommodates the only remaining industrial uses on the Boston waterfront, consisting mainly of fish processing and, recently, life science and biotechnology. Housing is

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not intended for this area, which is owned by the BRA and the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport). The BRA is the quasi-public agency for economic development and urban planning in Boston, with far-reaching responsibilities. It is only accountable to the mayor and has its own budget independent of city fi nances. Massport is an agency of the state of Massachusetts that has as its main task the management of the harbour, Logan International Airport, and the tunnels in Boston. As a state agency, it is not obliged to follow urban plans. The Fort Point Waterfront is composed of large warehouses, vacant sites, and the headquarters of the Gillette Corporation as well as a razor production facility. Other property owners include the U.S. Postal Service and investment funds. In the 1980s, artists began to rehabilitate some of the old warehouses as studios and homes. Today a mix of uses can be found in this area, particularly fi nancial services, architecture, engineering, graphic design, photography, and computer fi rms. The Inner Harbor was previously occupied by harbour industry, rail yards, and docks, but these uses and their infrastructure have been cleared away. The area is currently comprised of mostly vacant land that is used as surface parking for commuters to the nearby Financial District. The most important owners in the area are Massport and development alliances underwritten by Boston-based developers and North American fi nancial services companies. The Convention Center and Enhancement Zone is the location of the new, enlarged Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, which is supposed to work as catalyst for a wide range of related uses and activities. It is expected to create demand for new hotels, retail activities, tourism, and hospitality uses. The owner is the city of Boston.2 It is important to note that with some exceptions, the South Boston Waterfront is predominantly privately owned. Nonetheless, the area was created through state intervention and investments that contributed in the second half of the nineteenth century to a well-equipped area for industrial uses and transportation. Up until the end of the twentieth century, parcels of land were sold to private investors, but since 2000, when the formerly state-owned Boston Wharf Company sold large tracts of land and houses to fi nancial investors, the majority of the South Boston Waterfront has been privately owned. Since then, numerous changes in ownership have taken place, particularly during economic downturns. The Fort Point Waterfront and The Inner Harbor are the most attractive districts for new development activities. They are close to the Financial Center and are easily accessible (see Figure 13.2). It is possible to walk in under ten minutes from the Financial Center to the South Boston Waterfront. With the Ted Williams Tunnel, the area has direct access to the freeway system and Logan International Airport, which can be reached by car in five minutes. From a real estate perspective, the prospects of the area are great: due to its location it offers scope as an extension of the Financial

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Figure 13.1 South Boston Waterfront and its sub-districts (Map S. Heeg).

District and as an upscale neighbourhood and tourist location. There is significant potential for future rent and land value increases. Massive public investment has contributed to the attractiveness of the South Boston Waterfront in several ways. The ‘Harbor Cleanup’ converted the waterfront from a neglected industrial site to a highly valued residential area. The Central Artery ‘Big Dig’, as the tunnelization project was called, moved Interstate 93 below-ground. The I-93 had previously run as an elevated highway through the CBD and separated the waterfront from the rest of the city. The Ted Williams Tunnel and the ‘Silver Line’—a bus service

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Figure 13.2 South Boston Waterfront and Boston CBD (Map S. Heeg).

that is connected to the subway system—provide private and public transport links between the waterfront, the CBD, and the airport. These infrastructure developments and environmental improvements made a considerable contribution to an increase in the value of private landholdings, and through that to an increase in flows of financing into property development, mediated by Wall Street. The public investments have improved the use value of the area, and have thereby enhanced its exchange value. These investments are perceived as incentives to investors and developers (McGourthy 2005).

PROPERTY-LED DEVELOPMENT IN BOSTON Continued commercial growth in Boston . . . appears to demand that two paths are pursued. The first is to take advantage of any re-development opportunities inside the downtown core and to re-build on obsolete or under-utilized sites as they become available. The second is to be alert for

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opportunities for commercial growth outside downtown—whether in the Seaport District [officially renamed South Boston Waterfront in 1999] or elsewhere—when appropriate. Continued efficient commercial land use is crucial to the continued growth of the city, the continued increase in jobs, and the continued interplay between residents, workers, shoppers, and those seeking entertainment that make Boston such a vibrant place to live, work and visit. (Perez et al. 2003, 9–10) According to this BRA publication, the objectives for land use in Boston are clearly growth-oriented.3 It is assumed that by providing land and different types of accommodation it is possible to contribute to commercial growth in Boston. Both planning documents and interviews emphasize that the major development goals for the South Boston Waterfront follow this logic (Berman 2005; McGourthy 2005; Boston Herald 2003; Boston Globe 1998a, 1997, 1995). The South Boston Waterfront is discussed as an ‘instrument’ for highlighting Boston’s image as tourist magnet, as a major economic hub on the East Coast, and as an accessible and open-minded city in terms of culture and lifestyle. This is intended to be realized through a variety of strategies. First, a new neighbourhood will be created by combining historical structures, in the form of the old warehouses, with new innovative architecture and landmarks. Flagships will contribute to a positive image of the South Boston Waterfront as a diverse, dynamic, and inspiring place. Second, middle-class households will be attracted by supporting residential developments and retail uses. Third, new economic perspectives will be opened up in tourism and life sciences. Tourism is perceived as a particularly feasible option. The northwestern waterfront already offers a broad spectrum of tourist attractions. By extending infrastructure into the South Boston Waterfront, more tourists are supposed to be drawn. Finally, the Financial District will extend into the South Boston Waterfront, with the intention of creating new jobs for people living there. Scope for extension of the Financial District exists only in the waterfront. Unlike downtown Boston, where the urban texture and its uses are to a large extent fixed, the South Boston Waterfront has large tracts of vacant land that are currently used as commuter parking lots. Other areas to the north, west, and south of the CBD are densely populated neighbourhoods; an extension into these areas would meet with resistance (BRA 1999). An additional aim, which fits less well into the publicly communicated objectives of creating a vibrant, mixed-use, “24/7” neighbourhood, is to stabilize the budget of the city of Boston with property tax revenues earned from the South Boston Waterfront. As with other U.S. cities, Boston is heavily dependent upon property tax revenues; this explains the strong interest in real estate development. In Boston, the share of property tax in the public budget increased from 50.3 percent in 1999 to 58.9 percent in 2006 (Boston Municipal Research Bureau 2006). In the state of Massachusetts, property owners must pay a yearly property tax of 2.5 percent on the value of buildings and land. As a consequence, Boston, like many other U.S. local governments, has

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been seeking to use land as a revenue-generating device (Chapman and Facer II 2005, 6): the more property is developed, the higher the tax revenue of the city will be. Public revenues would be considerably increased by the conversion of parking lots in the Inner Harbor to commercial and residential land use and the intensification of physical development in the Fort Point Waterfront. There has been a large degree of agreement with the aforementioned development goals, as they were written down in the Seaport Public Realm Plan (BRA 1999), from the South Boston Waterfront community as well as from non-governmental organizations engaged in the development of the area. Activists from the neighbourhood initiative Seaport Alliance for Neighborhood Design (SAND) have stressed the need to balance different uses in the area, as has the interim director of the Boston Harbor Association, a non-governmental organization concerned with balancing ecological and social challenges along the intensively used coastline. A broad consensus exists around the SPRP’s proposals for the development of office buildings along with housing and leisure facilities. Differences of opinion between urban planners, community organizations, and property interests have developed around density and height issues, as well as the percentage and quality of open spaces and housing. The starting point for redevelopment was the real estate boom that occurred in the second half of the 1990s.4 Speculative developments surged, due to a strong demand from offices in the Financial Center wanting to move into the waterfront where land was available for development. In order to control this development, the BRA and Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, drafted planning goals. Comparing these goals with the status of the waterfront in 2005 demonstrates that real estate interests have been dominant in the development (see Table 13.2).

Table 13.2 Comparison of Boston’s Planning Goals in 1996–1999 with Approved/Existing Developments in 2004–2005 Initial Planning Goals and Assumptions

At Completion of Waterfront Projects

Condition of Real Estate Market

1996/1997: booming

2004: declining 2005: underachieving

Number of Residential Units

1999: 6,000–8,000 units

Jan 2005: 2,920 units

Building Heights

1998: Mayor Menino Eleven buildings were taller states that waterfront than had been proposed should have “reasonable scale”

Industrial Port Uses

1998: Port-related industrial activity

Massport: Business services and high-end condos

Source: Interviews by author, Boston Globe, BRA, SAND, and others.

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In 1997–1998, when planning objectives for the South Boston Waterfront were discussed for the fi rst time, the Boston Society of Architects, together with other non-governmental organizations, called for ten to fifteen thousand residential units as a crucial number to create a lively neighbourhood (Boston Globe 1998a). However, due to a booming office market, project proposals submitted by private landowners and project developers were predominantly for office developments. It became clear that the aim of ten thousand units would be impossible to maintain (Boston Business Journal 1998). Mayor Menino reacted and declared that six to eight thousand residential units would be a desirable aim (Boston Globe 1999b). Although the office market had fallen into recession around the year 2000 and the residential market had begun to prosper, the number of residential units has not increased considerably. At the beginning of 2005, only 2,920 units either existed or had been approved for construction. The neighbourhood organization SAND calculated that only one thousand additional units could be realized on the residual land, falling well short of the objective (SAND 2005a). One reason for the gap between planned and realized units is that the individual units are bigger than originally planned. This has to do with the anticipated future purchasers and tenants: they are supposed to be employed in business services and therefore well-off (Drew 2005). Another reason is that the potential returns from office developments—if the market exists—are considerably bigger. Consequently, as long as office development is favourable (and allowed), there will be a tendency for residential development to lag behind—not only in the South Boston Waterfront but in many locations. Even when the office market is declining, developers hesitate to build housing and thereby give away the potential profit from office development. This is particularly true for the South Boston Waterfront, as the last major unbuilt expanse near the CBD. At the end of 2008, several project developers managed to negotiate with the city to permit rooftop and court-infill additions, which will add more office space in a neighbourhood where 85 percent of existing built space is already used for offices. As these buildings were prepared for the additions, ninety-one artists and several galleries were displaced. In the period from 2000 to 2008, approximately three hundred artists were displaced as developers transformed studios into offices and condominiums (Bleitgen 2009). What has mostly occurred up to 2009 is the conversion of warehouses into office space, with some apartments and condominiums. The majority of existing condominium apartments in the area are priced above U.S.$500,000 (Boston Globe 2005). Apart from one project with approximately 465 apartments, on land owned by Massport, there have been no new housing structures completed in the South Boston Waterfront since 2005. However, a substantial number of new housing units are being promised as part of a project that seeks approval for several large office blocks and hotels at Inner Harbor (see Figure 13.2). While the landowners—Gale International, Morgan Stanley, and WS Development—seek to realize the

286 Susanne Heeg office and hotel projects soon, the housing projects will materialize at some unknown future date on currently vacant parcels (SAND 2009). A similar gap between aims and realization is visible in regard to building heights in the Inner Harbour. Mayor Menino declared in 1998 that the South Boston Waterfront should not resemble Battery Park in New York City (New York Times 1998) but instead should develop as a lively neighbourhood with a reasonable scale. This statement referred both to the heights of the projects and to the number of residential units. However in the Inner Harbor, the area where the majority of new development projects will take place, eleven out of thirteen new buildings that had been approved up to 2005 were taller than the limits proposed in 1998 (Boston Globe 2000a; SAND 2005b). A similar situation has become apparent in the Fort Point Waterfront. Property owners have claimed that significant variances from zoning are required to make project development profitable. In spite of massive protest from the neighbourhood initiative SAND, up until now the BRA has allowed increases in heights for property owners in exchange for funding of infrastructure costs for sidewalks, (privately owned) streets, and maintenance of park space. Similar concessions for developers are visible in relation to green space. In 1999, the SPRP was published as a result of the concerted planning activities of a variety of stakeholders—residents, non-governmental organizations, the neighbourhood organization, property owners, and the BRA (BRA 1999). A cornerstone of the SPRP was a recreational park in the form of a corridor extending from the Fort Point Channel, four hundred metres to the east. The neighbourhood organization and other non-governmental organizations regarded this as a crucial feature, because it offered the ability to establish a signature park similar to the Boston Common and to improve the attractiveness and vitality of the neighbourhood. However, after private meetings with property owners, in May 2005 the BRA presented a Memorandum of Understanding in which the recreational park was reduced: close to the Fort Point Channel, the plan was to locate two office buildings in the park corridor.5 As a consequence, the park was cut into two pieces. According to the BRA, this concession was necessary to guarantee the cooperation of the landowners. The justification for this agreement was that the crucial actors were the property owners—not the neighbourhood.6 But after considerable and persistent protest from the Fort Point community, in January 2006 the BRA presented a new agreement with the landowners. The corridor-shaped recreational park was restored, to serve the interests of the neighbourhood, but the heights and density of the adjoining buildings were increased to comply with the interests of landowners. This agreement went into the “100 Acres Master Plan”, which is the guideline for the Fort Point Waterfront. Whereas the Seaport Public Realm Plan is the point of reference and predecessor of the detailed 100 Acres Master Plan that followed (as well as of other master plans in the South Boston Waterfront such as the Municipal Harbor Plan), it has no mandatory status, in contrast to the 100

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Acres Master Plan, which is statutory and cancels or modifies the Boston Zoning Code for the area. The disparate powers of the actors to influence the planning discussion are well illustrated in the case of Fan Pier—the most attractive site on the South Boston Waterfront. It is located directly at the water’s edge, with a view of the skyscrapers of the Financial District. Due to its privileged location, the BRA attempted to use Fan Pier to get development started. For this purpose Fan Pier was institutionalized as a so-called Planned Development Area (PDA). A PDA is an overlay district that establishes special zoning controls for large or complex projects. These zoning controls are specified in a development plan for each PDA, and they allow buildings to diverge from the general zoning regulations that otherwise apply in the area. This instrument has introduced flexibility into planning, with the aim of motivating investors to realize a project by increasing their prospective returns on the site. The downside is that PDAs limit the opportunities for communities to influence the planning process: doubts about planning projects can only be voiced through so-called Impact Advisory Groups (IAGs). An IAG consists of stakeholders (residents, property owners, non-governmental organizations, and so forth) who are appointed by the mayor. Its function is to advise the BRA, but an IAG does not have the right to demand the realization or discussion of its proposals: the BRA has the final say (Boston Globe 2000b). As a result, as with all PDAs, important decisions at Fan Pier regarding heights, density, and so on, were reached through exclusive negotiations between the BRA and the site owner (Boston Globe 2000a, 1999a, 1999c, 1999d). In spite of massive and long-lasting protests from residents and environmental groups, the waterfront buildings were allowed to exceed the upper limits set by the State of Massachusetts. Even though planning concessions were given, the owner did not start the development, but sold the site during the economic recession at the end of 2005. Although the land in the South Boston Waterfront is overwhelmingly privately owned, it does not have to be at the mercy of property owners. The agreement of property owners is not a precondition to apply for zoning permission or to develop a master plan that regulates heights, uses, infrastructure, and open space. The BRA has the competence to develop regulations and impose them on property owners and the neighbourhood. However, this could result in the problem of landowners not developing their land or realizing projects, particularly during periods of low demand in the property market. From the standpoint of the BRA and the city, this is the worst case: if an area is not developed, it is not possible to facilitate growth dynamics through it. In order to prevent this situation, incentives have been offered to landowners and other property interests. Incentives include concessions regarding heights, uses, and density as well as tax abatements. In 2005–2006, new tax tools were discussed. Each tool is based on the idea that the city and the state would use future property and income taxes resulting from new buildings

288 Susanne Heeg and jobs established in the new development to pay off the bonds that underwrote the basic infrastructure (Boston Globe 2006). Whereas the tool linking jobs with bonds for new infrastructure is still in discussion, ‘district increment financing’ (DIF) that allows local states to commit the use of projected property tax revenue to sell and pay off bonds is already being applied. It is ironic that this tool, which is meant to be applied in ‘blighted’ areas, should be adopted in the South Boston Waterfront. The South Boston Waterfront is one of the most attractive and highly prized locations on the East Coast. It seems that Rachel Weber (2002, 187) is correct in noting that U.S. cities have used DIF “primarily for large-scale downtown redevelopment projects and in gentrifying neighborhoods, bypassing the slow-turnover parts of cities where there is little hope of generating additional property taxes”.

CONCLUSIONS FOR URBAN GEOGRAPHY According to the waterfront stakeholders who were interviewed for this research, the role of planning seems to be clear: it is regarded as a mediating factor between actors endowed with different amounts of power and influence. However, there are contrasting perceptions about the ways in which urban planning fulfi lls its task. Property developers emphasize that the urban planning agency BRA is an objective mediating factor, while neighbourhood organizations claim that the BRA is acting in the interests of property owners and the real estate industry. The aim in this conclusion is to address the following questions: in this context, how can the role of urban planning be conceptualized, and what is the importance of property-led development? The South Boston Waterfront is not a unique case in respect to property-led development; it is in line with many other waterfront developments and large-scale urban projects. That is why this concluding section attempts to generalize the fi ndings for the urban built environment. Is it feasible to fi x urban economic and social development through property-led development of large-scale projects? And how does the flow of capital influence the development process? Harvey (1985) stresses the autonomy of local policy and the progressive tradition of planning, while also claiming that both autonomy and the progressive tradition work in a certain context that is structured by a capitalist social order (MacLaran and McGuirk 2003). This limits the potential autonomy and progressiveness of urban planning. Harvey’s analysis offers insights into the role of planning and the challenges that result from strategies of property-led development. Harvey argues that each urban region has the autonomy to pursue whatever course it will, but in the end the urban strategy remains contingent upon processes of capital accumulation and the circulation of associated revenues in space and time. Urban politics, in this respect, has to coordinate investments and revenues in such a way that the reproduction of economic and social activities in a city is guaranteed.

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Following this idea, the task of planning can be defi ned as ensuring that the built environment comprises necessary physical infrastructures for production, reproduction, circulation, exchange, and consumption. So, planning is progressive as well as regressive; it is enabling as well as confi ning. Which role it takes depends on temporally and spatially specific dynamics of accumulation (Harvey 1985). Urban regime theory offers similar insights, although the starting point is different: the emphasis is on political negotiations instead of economic conditions. According to urban regime theory, the autonomy of urban policy is contingent upon political processes. It is assumed “that the effectiveness of local government depends greatly on the cooperation of nongovernmental actors and on the combination of state capacity with nongovernmental resources” (Stone 1993, 6). The act of governing—including planning—requires cooperation with private actors and the mobilization of private resources. This can be seen in case of the South Boston Waterfront. As the responsible planning agency, the BRA enjoys far-reaching political autonomy. Yet this autonomy is limited by its goal of supporting and enabling economic growth, because meeting this goal relies on the property owners’ and investors’ consent to build. According to Fainstein (1990), political forces enjoy considerable autonomy, but the urban political agenda remains closely tied to the economy, which creates values and income. Nevertheless, urban politics follows neither a fi xed pattern nor fi xed trajectories. To summarize the arguments from urban regime theory and from Harvey: urban planning has to bridge the tensions between different actors and between supporting economic growth and stabilizing social reproduction. The direction planning takes depends on economic development and on political struggles. And it depends on the relentlessness of urban competition. Urban competition, in conjunction with the attempt to secure jobs, living conditions, and revenues, is the background for property-led development: creating built environments and images for urban success stories is seen as a precondition for stabilizing regional coherence within the context of a rescaling of national states. Property-led development establishes a special relation between the real estate industry and urban planning. The economic calculations and perceptions of the private actors are accepted and integrated into urban planning concepts. This includes the intensification of land use and the loosening up of planning constraints in order to increase the probability of higher returns for the private sector. Additionally, in order to guarantee the involvement of the movers and shakers of the real estate industry, local states quite often feel pressured to offer incentives to get projects off the ground. In Boston this can be seen in the way office developments are accepted by the BRA without enforcing established requirements for the incorporation of housing units. In this regard, the local state and urban planning are not so much mediators between contrasting interests, but involved parties with a certain set of contingent interests. In the era of urban competition, urban politics reveals an emphasis

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on activating and mobilizing private actors and capital. Urban planning seems to adopt the logic of the real estate actors. What is it then that makes property-led development such an attractive approach these days? Turok (1992) has argued that the positive effects of property-led development are difficult to assess. It is far from clear that property-led development will result in city-wide socio-economic advantages. The ‘advantages’ of this development approach have a particular character: property-led development has the capacity to stimulate the cooperation of private actors. In this respect it carries the promise of mobilizing crucial assets for steering local dynamics in the context of global competition. In addition, urban development projects must be realized in actual places; this is thus a policy field that can be performed and shaped on a local level. Technology, labour markets, and monetary policies are predominantly shaped on political scales wider than the urban. In order to formulate and apply, for example, technology policies, it is necessary to have large amounts of capital at one’s disposal. Normally, cities do not have this capital. In that sense, strategies of property-led development encompass tools that seem to be particularly pliable and applicable at the local level. It is obviously not feasible to fi x urban economic and social development through property-led development. Because of concession-making with investors and owners, and due to the time constraints of the real estate cycle, it is not possible to fi x—in the sense of repairing—built environments and urban development. However, it is also not appropriate to assume that the built environment is fi xed, or stable, in spite of business cycles. Along with real estate and business cycles, the built environment and the uses of land, buildings, and infrastructure are constantly changing. Economic downturns are probably not altogether negative, because it is in the problematic economic context of 2009 that a thirty-one-storey mixed-use project is about to be realized close to the South Boston Waterfront. This project not only includes retail space and 450,000 to 750,000 square feet of office space, but also sixty-five units of housing and five thousand square feet of artist workspace (Boston Business Journal 2009). Although investment activities seem to freeze during economic downturns, it appears to be the right time for pressing for housing and artist workspace. This has to do with the instability of market conditions. Nevertheless, the capacity of market-oriented urban planning to coordinate and command is uncertain, because of the ups and downs of market conditions; flows of capital and the fi xity of bricks form an uneasy relationship. This applies to large urban projects in general and to waterfront developments in particular. NOTES 1. Research in Boston was conducted in 2005 through twenty interviews with stakeholders in the South Boston Waterfront area: urban planners, investors, project developers, and representatives of economic development agencies,

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3.

4. 5. 6.

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consulting agencies, neighbourhood organizations, and non-governmental organizations. In addition, a newspaper analysis covered important local and national newspapers from 1994 to 2008, and policy papers from state and non-governmental organizations and the BRA were analyzed. Sources of the information are interviews with the policy director of the BRA, the vice and assistant vice director of Spaulding & Slye Collier (an international real estate adviser in charge of a big project in the South Boston Waterfront. It was bought in 2005 by Jones Lang LaSalle), the major project developers (Fallen Company, Drew Company), and an investment company. This is not only true for the South Boston Waterfront but might also be applied to earlier developments such as the Fanieul Hall/Quincy Market next to the Government Center, which were redeveloped in the 1980s (Frieden and Sagalyn 1990; Sagalyn 1989) and set off the massive redevelopments efforts along the extensive waterfront in Boston. The fi rst office development, however, took place in the second half of the 1980s. Boston’s World Trade Center was the only development up until the second half of the 1990s. The author took part in two meetings in the South Boston Waterfront organized by the BRA in summer 2005 in order to make public the results of the negotiations. As the planner responsible emphasized in a public meeting in July 2005, it is not important whether the neighbourhood accepts or dismisses the master plan. What is crucial is a contract between the BRA and the landowners in order to get the development going.

REFERENCES Adrian, Hanns. 1998. Wer gestaltet die Stadt? In Stadt der Zukunft—Zukunft der Stadt, eds. D. Sauberzweig and W. Laitenberger. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Ambrose, Peter. 1994. Urban process and power. London and New York: Routledge. Berman, Bruce. 2005. Interview with the communications director of Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, 9 September. Bleitgen, C. 2009. Stadtmarketing und Gentrification am Beispiel von drei Nachbarschaften in Boston (USA). Diplomarbeit am Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Frankfurt: Goethe-University. Boston Business Journal. 1998. Caution on the waterfront. 29 May. . 2009: Boston properties recasting Russia Wharf plan amid outcry. 17 September. Boston Globe. 1995. Boston mapping new plan for growth. 7 August. . 1997. Plan would change S. Boston waterfront; City’s proposal calls for hotels, housing, stores, and more to draw tourists and residents to district. 1 December. . 1998a. MIT study sees gains from a new waterfront. 27 March. . 1998b. The new Seaport District could be the centrepiece of the harbour revival. 25 October. . 1999a. A better Fan Pier plan. 14 June. . 1999b. Planners focus on Seaport details. 1 March. . 1999c. Stick to the plan. 24 November. . 1999d. The waterfront view: rough around edges. 26 June. . 2000a. Mayor backs the plans of developers for waterfront heights. 1 October.

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. 2000b. Who divvies up big project goodies? 19 October. . 2005. Modestly priced condos grew rare. 20 August. . 2006. Mayor: Let state fund Fort Point infrastructure. 17 February. Boston Herald. 2003. Getting the breaks; Hub wheeler-dealers get property tax breaks. 9 February. Boston Municipal Research Bureau. 2006. Special Report, No. 06–2. Boston: BMRB. Boston Redevelopment Authority. 1999. The Seaport Public Realm Plan. Boston: City of Boston and BRA. Boyle, Mark and George Hughes. 1994. The politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasglow. Geoforum 25(4): 453–470. Breitbach, Carrie and Don Mitchell. 2003. Growth machines and growth pains: The contradictions of property development and landscape in Sioux Falls South Dakota. In Making space: Property development and urban planning, ed. Andrew MacLaran. London: Arnold. Chapman, Jeffrey and Rex L. Facer II. 2005. Connections between economic development and land taxation. Land Lines: Newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 17(4): 6–8. De Frantz, Monika. 2005. From cultural regeneration to discursive governance: Constructing the flagship of the ‘Museumsquartier Vienna’ as a plural symbol of change. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(1): 50–66. Deakin, Nicholas and John Edwards. 1993. The enterprise culture and the inner city. London: Routledge. Desfor, Gene and John Jørgensen. 2004. Flexible urban governance: The case of Copenhagen’s recent waterfront development. European Planning Studies 12(4): 479–496. Drew, John. 2005. Personal interview with John Drew, president of the Drew Company, 20 July. Fainstein, Susan S. 1990. Economics, politics, and development policy. In Beyond the city limits, eds. John R. Logan and Tim Swanstrom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. . 2001. The city builders: Property development in New York and London, 1980–2000. Oxford: Blackwell. Frieden, Bernard J. and Lynne B. Sagalyn. 1990. Downtown Inc.: How America rebuilds cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gornig, Martin and Guido Spars. 2006. Bedeutung der Bau- und Immobilienwirtschaft für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Städten und Regionen. Informationen zur Raumentwicklung 10:567–574. Gottdiener, Mark. 1997. The theming of America: Dreams, visions, and commercial spaces. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard. 1996. The entrepreneurial city: New urban politics, new urban geographies? Progress in Human Geography 20(2): 153–174. Harvey, David. 1985. Urbanization of capital. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografi ska Annaler B 71:3–18. Healey, Patsy, Simin Davoudi, Mo O’Toole, David Usher, and Solmaz Tavsanoglu, eds. 1992. Rebuilding the city: Property-led urban regeneration. London: Spon. Heeg, Susanne. 2003. Städtische Flächenentwicklung vor dem Hintergrund von Veränderungen in der Immobilienwirtschaft. Raumforschung und Raumordnung 5:334–344. Hirsch, Joachim and Roland Roth. 1986. Das neue Gesicht des Kapitalismus. Vom Fordismus zum Postfordismus. Hamburg: VSA. Hoyle, Brian S. 1988. Development dynamics at the port-city interface. In Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment,

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eds. Brian S. Hoyle, David A. Pinder, and M.S. Husain. Chichester: Belhaven Press. , ed. 1990. Port cities in context: The impact of waterfront regeneration. Southampton: Institute of British Geographers. Jessop, Bob. 1997. The entrepreneurial city: Re-imaging localities, redesigning economic governance, or restructuring capital? In Transforming cities: Contested governance and new spatial divisions, eds. N. Jewson and S. MacGregor. London: Routledge. . 1998. Place marketing and the entrepreneurial city. In The entrepreneurial city, eds. Tim Hall and Phil Hubbard. Chichester: Wiley. Leitner, Helga, Eric S. Sheppard, Kristin Sziarto, and Anant Maringanti. 2007. Contesting urban futures: Decentering neoliberalism. In Contesting neoliberalism: Urban frontiers, eds. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. New York and London: Guilford Press. Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacLaran, Andrew and David Laverny-Rafter. 2003. The rejuvenation of downtown Minneapolis: Urban planning as a creature of private-sector interests. In Making space: Property development and urban planning, ed. Andrew MacLaran. London: Arnold. MacLaran, Andrew and Pauline McGuirk. 2003. Planning the city. In Making space: Property development and urban planning, ed. Andrew MacLaran. London: Arnold. Markert, Christoph and Thomas Zacharias. 2006. Wirtschaftsförderung und Immobilienwirtschaft. Partner in der operativen Stadtentwicklung. Standort 3:118–122. Mayer, Hans-Norbert. 2004. Projekte in der Stadtentwicklung—Chancen und Risiken einer projektorientierten Planung. In Jahrbuch StadtRegion 2003. Schwerpunkt: Urbane Regionen, eds. N. Gestring, H. Glasauer, C. Hannemann, W. Petrowsky, and J. Pohlan. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. McGourthy, Timothy. 2005. Personal interview with the policy director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, 22 August. McGuirk, Pauline and Andrew MacLaran. 2001. Changing approaches to urban planning in an ‘entrepreneurial city’: The case of Dublin. European Planning Studies 9(4): 437–457. Michel, Boris. 2005. Stadt und Gouvernementalität. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Newman, Peter and Andy Thornley. 1996. Urban planning in Europe. London: Routledge. New York Times. 1998. Boston leading a renewal of old northern cities. 3 November. Oertzen, S.V. 1993. Planung im entzauberten Staat. Zur neueren Staatsdebatte in den Politikwissenschaften. RaumPlanung 61:104–111. Pagano, Michael A. and Ann O.M. Bowman. 1995. Cityscapes and capital: The politics of urban de velopment. Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Perez, Yolanda, John Vaults, Jim Vrabel, and Jim Alberque. 2003. Commercial land use in Boston. Boston: Boston Redevelopment Authority. Priebs, Axel. 1992. Hafenbereiche im Umbruch. Revitalisierungsstrategien in Kopenhagen, Göteborg und Oslo. Geographische Rundschau 44:647–652. Pries, Martin. 2008. Waterfronts im Wandel. Baltimore und New York. Hamburg: Geographische Gesellschaft in Hamburg. Sagalyn, Lynne B. 1989. Measuring fi nancial returns when the city acts as an investor: Boston and Faneuil Hall market place. Real Estate Issues 14(2): 2–15.

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Schubert, Dirk, ed. 2001. Hafen- und Uferzonen im Wandel. Berlin: Leune. Seaport Alliance for a Neighborhood Design. 2005a. <www.bostonseaport.com/ SAND/Archive/050128housing.html> Accessed September 10, 2005. . 2005b. Update. <www.bostonseaport.com/SAND/Archive/050108fortpoint. html> Accessed April 28, 2005. . 2009. Update 3.24/08. <www.seaportalliance.org/SAND/Archive/ 050128housing.html> Accessed October 2, 2009. Solesbury, W. 1990. Property development and urban regeneration. In Land and Property Development in a Changing Context, eds. Patsy Healy and Rupert Nabarro. Aldershot, UK: Gower. Stone, Clarence N. 1993. Urban regimes and the capacity to govern: A political economy approach. Journal of Urban Affairs 15(1): 1–28. Swyngedouw, Erik, Frank Moulaert, and Arantxa Rodriguez. 2002. Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. In Spaces of neoliberalism, eds. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Turok, Ivan. 1992. Property-led regeneration: Panacea or placebo? In: Environment and Planning A 24:361–379. Ward, Stephen V. 2002. Planning the twentieth-century city: The advanced capitalist world. Chicester: Wiley. Weber, Rachel. 2002. Extracting value from the city: Neoliberalism and urban redevelopment. In Spaces of neoliberalism, eds. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Zukin, Sharon. 1993. Landscapes of power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Conclusion Patterns of Persistence, Trajectories of Change Quentin Stevens

The contributions in this collection examine the ongoing development of waterfronts in urban areas from the tropics to the cool temperate regions, both north and south, from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Caribbean and on the Great Lakes, as well as along rivers both large and small. The developmental contexts range from incipient industrialization to decline and through one or more cycles of reinvestment. It remains in this conclusion to identify what common themes and concerns flow through these chapters, and to discern the social, economic, political, and urbanistic variation within those themes. The section immediately following summarizes the kinds of fi xities and flows that have captured the interest of our contributors. While the chapters themselves provide the detail of why and how specific waterfronts become fi xed or are brought in flow, the focus of the remaining synopsis is on three interlinked variables through which the contributors try to understand the fi xities and flows of waterfront change, and the problems therein: the where, when, and who. The question of where reflects the varying scales and directions of waterfront development and governance. To address when requires charting different histories of growth, stagnation, and decline. The subject of who involves the scope of actors who shape waterfront change, as well as those affected by it, and the divergent interests they pursue. Because the question of who is always political, this conclusion also explores the diverse political and governance structures and processes that give shape to waterfront development, and in particular the recent popularity of neoliberalism as an approach to both developing and critiquing waterfronts, to see how this philosophy is actually manifested on particular waterfronts and in specific fi xities and flows. Each of these thematic sections draws upon the detail of the contributors’ case studies and theorizations to illustrate commonalities and diversities in waterfront change under differing circumstances, to critically compare a range of actions and outcomes, and to identify persistent problems that still require practical resolution. The fi nal section of this conclusion reflects upon the concepts and methodologies through which the contributors have interpreted waterfront change, and highlights several distinct directions and questions that these studies

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and fi ndings suggest for future research into urban waterfronts within the social sciences.

WHAT IS FLOWING AND WHAT IS FIXED? The contributions in this book do not only study the physical space of the waterfront, and do not treat this space as a fi xed given. They examine what moves through the space and what makes the space itself change: goods, people, and vehicles; information, money, and political power. But which aspects are fi xed and which flow? The contributors critically prise open the question of whether any dimensions of waterfronts and their development are defi nitively permanent or transient. The land itself is not necessarily fi xed. It is created and removed, contaminated and rectified, by human intervention but also by tides and floods. Much of the waterfront is liminal, a ‘both-and’ margin between land and water: floodway, flood-plain, marsh, swamp, or beach. It can be concreted or renaturalized, although generally not forever. The legal tenure of waterfront land is also often in flux, and this is not only true of informal settlements. Land can sometimes be sold to investors by agencies that do not technically own it, private railroad companies struggle with public port authorities for dominance of freight transport, and even large government authorities that control entire port regions are dissolved, created, or replaced. The ‘fi xing’ of urban waterfronts through planning and construction does not always mean their spatial reintegration into cities or economic security for everyone: in London, Dublin, Antwerp, and Port of Spain we see new fragmentation, whether through exclusionary intentions or inadvertently through the multiplicity of governance arrangements. Enhancing flows of global trade often involves building fences, walls, and uncrossable roadways that restrict access to waterfronts. Ports themselves move, historically flowing away from the cities to which they were previously fi xed, usually downstream toward the river mouth, onto land that was less stable and harder to ‘fi x’. Some people, equipment, and investment move with them. Some things are left behind: communities, memories, buildings, contaminants. In those cases where a waterfront environment does remain fi xed, one has to ask whether this is due to political success or merely neglect. Fixity does not always mean power; in Vancouver, Fort-de-France, and still-industrial Brooklyn it has meant disconnection. When ports move, their former links to inner-city commerce and residents are transformed. Wonneberger observes that redevelopment also threatens the wider social capital that has been built up over time in communal institutions such as the church, community centres, and informal social venues. Gidel and Kane both question who it is that defi nes and preserves particular identities for waterfront areas, and to what ends.

Conclusion 297 New people and activities continue flowing into waterfronts. In the Caribbean, the poorer residential populations who now resist change have themselves not always been so fi xed in place; they are part of a continuing rural-to-urban drift. Similarly, those who were once blue-collar immigrants to an industrializing Seattle now struggle against an influx of apparently more skilled ‘creative’ workers. Some people are more mobile and less fi xed to place than others. This can be seen positively as ‘cosmopolitan’ or negatively as ‘nomadic’. But is there social mobility upward on the waterfront? Despite all the physical, economic, and social changes occurring there, the urban social strata generally seem to be very fi xed. Lurking behind many waterfront redevelopment proposals there seems to be a strong class consciousness, belied by the obsession with ‘world-class’ facilities. Antagonism and segregation seem endemic. Change on urban waterfronts often happens very swiftly, with new people and buildings tending to displace the old, instead of an upgrading in place. Enticing wealthier residents to Dublin’s waterfront involved the creation of gated housing enclaves, which have limited social mixing. Rotterdam illustrates attempts to defi ne a more mixed-use, mixed income, balanced waterfront community. Yet neighbourhoods inevitably continue to grow, and their demography changes. These manifold shifts highlight that the study of ‘the waterfront’ is not just about one isolated strip of land, but rather about a wide range of flows that pass across the interface between a city and its waterways. These flows often have their own complex structure and regularity, such as the standardization of shipping containers and their handling. Artificial beaches in Germany defi ne a sense of place through constant flows of services and events and movements of equipment. These waterfronts are both intangible and ephemeral; their identity is all about novelty, dynamism, and fluidity.

THE SCALE AND DIRECTION OF FIXITIES AND FLOWS Scale is a central concern for both Hall and Clark and Schubert. Restructuring continues at local, metropolitan, and regional scales. Regional changes in the economic geography of ports and port cities are driven by global forces. Gidel differentiates between colonial and regional dynamics shaping Caribbean ports. Desfor notes how the nineteenth-century growth of Toronto and its waterfront were driven by the increasing development of its hinterland and by competition with other cities and regions. In this context, it would be interesting to examine the regional landscape surrounding the other case study cities presented in this book, to consider, as Hall and Clark and Schubert do, the contrasting fixities and flows of their neighbouring ports: Puerto Nuevo near Buenos Aires, Tacoma near Seattle, Oakland near San Francisco, and New Jersey near New York—this last pair being jointly managed. Originally smaller, less urban, cheaper to develop and less widely known, these ports were often better suited to containerization as it developed in the

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1960s. As Schubert notes, these ports have grown tremendously while the waterfronts of their urban cousins have undergone redevelopment. At a much smaller scale, Gidel and Wonneberger both study disadvantaged communities who are largely excluded from waterfront economies, but who have to contend with these economies’ external impacts. In both large and small contexts, many contributors to this volume highlight the importance of broadening the research focus to examine what is adjacent to the waterfront, because there is a risk for researchers and planners, as for developers and politicians, of fetishizing the water’s edge (see Stevens 2006). As Ramsey notes of Seattle: debate concerned only one segment of roadway along Seattle’s waterfront. Focusing only on the waterfront area prompted a polarizing debate between those seeking benefits for the waterfront and those whose concerns were for impacts outside the study area. A more comprehensive consideration . . . would have avoided this conflict and could therefore have helped in building creative alliances . . . in pursuit of common goals. Researchers need to be alert to the ways that waterfronts are integrated into—or detached from—a wide variety of forces operating at differing scales. In terms of natural geography, the Plate River Basin is affected by thousands of factories illegally dumping waste into its tributaries. The construction of Toronto’s port physically expanded the city’s geography and also expanded its economic importance and power. Many contributors examine waterfronts as social geographies (neighbourhoods) and political geographies (jurisdictions). City beaches illustrate the importance of waterfronts’ links to surrounding activity patterns. In contrast, Gidel critiques waterfront schemes for their frequently ‘ad hoc’, ‘exceptional’ status: politically and economically as well as physically detached from the flows and the constraints of their urban surroundings. This ambition also perhaps underlay Margaret Thatcher’s vision of London Docklands as “an exceptional place” (Lee 1992, 7). Hall and Clark illustrate the usefulness of Cox’s (1998) distinction between ‘spaces of dependence’ and ‘spaces of engagement’: actors must engage in political processes at a variety of scales to protect or improve local waterfront spaces where they have relatively fi xed social, political, and fi nancial investments. The recurring question is whether they can. Gidel documents different scales at which changes on waterfronts are actually put into practice, depending on what decisions are made, by whom, and in whose interest, emphasizing not just shifting scales of external forces for change, but also the different links between local and global in different cases. For both shipping and post-industrial uses, the physical development of waterfronts generally continues to increase in scale and intensity. Development grows even when available space does not, and as a result intervening green spaces become smaller. Wonneberger documents many

Conclusion 299 such ‘micro-level effects’ of port construction in Dublin on the local environment, as waterfront buildings keep getting taller. In Boston’s Inner Harbor, eleven of thirteen new buildings are taller than proposed height limits. Height increases on waterfronts are even offered to leverage private investment in infrastructure—infrastructure for which this intensive development actually creates the need. This approach could be conceived as an unconstitutional selling of the state’s police power; such is the scale of the interests being negotiated. One might ask what height limits seek to protect. Gidel, Wonneberger, Rubin, and Schaller and Novy all suggest a fundamental incompatibility between high-rise development and waterfront sites: it overshadows their unique open spaces, and its construction often destroys the sensitive inter-tidal zone. On Buenos Aires’s waterfront, a giant silo remains, an icon of Argentina’s standing as “the Granary of the World”, and of an earlier, more liberal industrial era. In contrast, each of Germany’s city beaches is a very small-scale intervention, although their cumulative impact can nonetheless be substantial. The development of waterfront spaces is regulated through plans and planning approaches with differing geographical scopes and differing degrees of sensitivity and inclusivity. Planning sometimes neglects or homogenizes the waterfront’s existing diversity. In Brooklyn, zoning is too blunt a planning instrument to guarantee compatibility between existing industrial uses and intense demands for new housing and office space. In other cases, the waterfront is fragmented to maximize profits, as with Antwerp’s 1990s proposal to subdivide port land for private investment without a comprehensive plan. On marginal land along Berlin’s Spree River, fragmentation allows new, low-budget projects to fi nd a foothold and flourish. Heeg draws on Swyngedouw et al. (2002, 215) to contrast comprehensive planning of waterfronts against the contemporary focus on projects: “Against the crisis of the comprehensive Plan—the classic policy instrument of the Fordist age—the large, emblematic Project has emerged as a viable alternative, allegedly combining the advantages of flexibility and targeted actions with a tremendous symbolic capacity.” Heeg also critiques the use of Planned Development Areas that support deviation from general zoning regulations: whatever their other merits in terms of flexibility, they restrict community involvement and influence in the planning process. In most cases it is clear that policy for urban waterfront development is primarily, though not exclusively, shaped at the urban level, and thus according to the needs of urban populations that are typically large and culturally and economically diverse. Waterfronts are local spaces where a wide range of social issues and needs are concentrated, and where there is also scope for them to be addressed. In addition to examining the scale of waterfront flows and changes it is important to consider their direction. As Kane observes: “Flows are multidirectional, rivers flow out to sea, brackish tidal waters flow upstream . . . people, goods, money, music, text, and image move and settle in diverse,

300 Quentin Stevens interlinking and layered channels, networks and niches.” Regular flows can create their own niche opportunities, as when seasonal flooding in St. Pauli, Hamburg, exposes undeveloped land for summer occupation by a string of city beaches. Many contributors to this volume see the waterfront as a place of high mobility, defined by many different systems of connectivity: for ships, for vehicles, for pedestrians. Hall and Clark, Schubert, and Desfor all document shifts in the dominance of transport modes, from water to rail to truck, and shifts in competition and coordination among them. There are also changes in the direction of goods being shipped: formerly from the West, now increasingly from the East. In numerous chapters, waterfront transport infrastructure provides an important conceptual and empirical link between directional flows and fixed characteristics. In Rubin’s summation: the key characteristic of a waterfront is that it is an edge. . . . crossing it frequently requires large capital investments in wharfs, piers, quays, cranes, railroads, roads, etc. And both the use and exchange value of the water’s edge depends very much on those capital investments. Although the edge is a relatively fi xed feature, its precise location will vary as a result of both human interventions and biophysical forces. In Vancouver and Seattle, improving flows in one direction (for local residents and businesses) has a negative impact on flows in another (for port trucking). San Francisco’s elevated Embarcadero Freeway ostensibly served the latter but in reality benefited the former. Barcelona’s new pedestrian links over the vehicular flows to Port Vell predominantly foster flows of tourists and their euros. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz argue Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge to Kop van Zuid “has succeeded in linking socially, economically, and physically separate parts of the city.” More than transport infrastructure, the bridge is also a landmark that fi xes local identity. Kane brings anthropological insight to the significance of bridges for cultural identity: authenticity is reflected in the technological necessity of La Boca’s mobile industrial bridge, but absent from Calatrava’s Bridge of Womankind in Puerto Madero. In Willets Point, Brooklyn, the ‘barriers’ of heavyweight transport infrastructure are part of the character that defi nes the area, sustains its “unique auto-related industry cluster”, and separates it from pedestrian networks. In Buenos Aires, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, bridges are proud symbols of the conquest of natural divisions and flows and the creation of new connections. In London Docklands, local underinvestment in transport infrastructure parallels fluctuations in the flow of inward investment. In many cases, major waterfront transport investments are resisted, to protect relatively fi xed patterns of urban social and economic life. The rhetoric of change on waterfronts is almost always about ‘opening up’ the city to the water. This is usually linked to a metaphoric opening up

Conclusion 301 of property, trade, and governance to external markets; hence the frequent construction of International Waterfront Centres (e.g., Port of Spain), International Financial Services Centres (e.g., Dublin), and the like. This is an unassailable positivist rhetoric, in which physical expansion necessarily goes together with being outward-looking and forward-looking. Rubin writes of the expansion of San Francisco’s crowded downtown out into the water, on piers, and landfill. Proposed waterfront mega-projects showed a patent disregard for their physical and environmental context, especially the water. The result of such real estate–focused schemes is typically degradation of coastal and riverine ecologies, and reduction of public amenity and public access. Heeg notes the large-scale projects in South Boston “seem to develop a life of their own: in terms of design, social and economic structure, many are scarcely integrated into their surrounding neighbourhoods.” Desfor argues that new, solid waterfront land in Toronto was produced through social, and therefore political, processes, which thus largely reflect the interests of economically dominant groups. Reshaping of the land responds to shifting markets and also reshapes local economic fortunes.

TIME AND TIDE There is an important historical perspective to most of the changes documented here, from Desfor describing the creation of industrial ports, to Hall and Clark and Schubert examining their recent transformations. Some constructed fi xities generate new flows over long time spans, such as the Panama Canal did for Vancouver. Containerization was clearly a major shift, a long-term investment in technology that has restructured port geography. The typically large scale of waterfront changes usually means long time frames, in terms of physical developments, but also the politics and fi nancing that drive them. Brownill examines the fi xities and flows of the London Docklands development process, not its object and image. As Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz emphasize, “the focus on the built environment comprises more than providing visible signs, urban spectacle, flagship developments, design, and images. It is fi rst and foremost about facilitating constant change in the urban landscape to meet new economic requirements.” Rubin traces an extended history of struggle between the interests of capital accumulation and local community on San Francisco’s waterfront. Brownill also portrays shifting, evolving dynamics; waterfront development does not necessarily have tidy eras. Seldom do we see the planning and management of waterfronts flowing smoothly, through continuous, well-managed, and inclusive development. Schubert presents Hamburg’s ‘String of Pearls’ as a market-sensitive strategy whereby spectacular projects could proceed according to lumpy flows of fi nancing and site availability. He contrasts this with HafenCity’s phased implementation of developments in sub-districts: a fi ne solution, provided

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the public development company remains fi nancially liquid and investment flows support it. In many cases we see recurring shifts between periods of intense investment interest and periods of economic decline. Schubert highlights that these waves often reflect wider markets for housing and office space. While contemporary governance strategies are often premised on inbound flows of private capital, these flows cannot always be ensured. Periods of neglect can last for decades: not all deindustrialized urban waterfront land in Berlin and Buenos Aires has investors ready and waiting. Uneven historical development can also vary across different parts of a single waterfront, differentiated by social investments and perceptions even in cases where its underlying geography is uniform. Gidel notes that development on one waterfront site can at the same time degrade others: Port of Spain gains an international flagship, but this reduces the quality of the local environment. Schaller and Novy note that despite all the talk of spectacle and public access, much of a city’s waterfront land is unsightly, home to “waste sites, hazardous manufacturing facilities and highways”. These disparities aid subsequent revaluation of waterfront land, and thus speculative profits. Several contributors question the formulation of ‘blight requiring improvement’. Ramsey critiques the teleology of waterfront ‘development’ as ‘progress’, the belief that proposed redevelopments are inevitably technologically, socially, environmentally, and economically better than what came before. Drawing on Flyvbjerg (1998), Gidel notes that development decisions often flow more quickly than the wider logic that should sustain them. Schaller and Novy argue that not all industrial waterfronts are necessarily in need of redevelopment and changes in land uses; the small-scale industrial landscapes of Brooklyn’s Willets Point and Gowanus Canal are still economically viable, even vibrant, with low vacancy rates, and they serve the needs of immigrant groups. Waterfront planning and investment should support rather than displace them. The unevenness of waterfront development needs to be understood in terms of political, social, and environmental objectives, as well as economic ones. Economic growth cannot always be used as a justification for physical development, and it cannot always be expected as an outcome. Fortde-France, economically the poorest waterfront studied here, pursues a long-term strategy of inclusive social development. Rotterdam’s plans also involve developing the community as well as the port. Rubin highlights that San Francisco’s twenty-five years without waterfront development reflected conscious priorities, wherein a lack of commercial pressure allowed the city scope to promote “adaptive reuse, moderately scaled, contextual development, access to the water, and provision of other public amenities”. It was projects with a strong public interest component, such as fishing piers and open spaces, that eventually brought new flows of users to the waterfront. Heeg’s conclusion from South Boston is that an economic downturn may be just the time when urban governments can push forward their agendas

Conclusion 303 for housing and other social needs on waterfronts. Germany’s city beaches illustrate experimentation during an economic lull with new landscape solutions, user groups, and fi nancing. Rather than fi xing a new development pattern, these beaches depend upon short-term loosening up of landuse regulations, construction standards, and licensing requirements. There is much scope for further research focusing on such minor flows and new kinds of movements on waterfronts.

ROLES AND INTERESTS IN WATERFRONT CHANGE Wonneberger demonstrates that Dublin’s waterfront is not just a contaminated industrial brownfield, but a community, or more precisely a heterogeneous set of communities. Schubert notes that historically, urban waterfronts were defi ned by the fi xity of a centrally managed, specialized single-purpose area. Yet a scan across the chapters reveals a near-inexhaustible list of interested and affected parties who have knowledge to share and who struggle for attention on waterfronts. Politicians at national, regional, and local levels are involved in waterfront change, with their wide array of professional and bureaucratic staffs as well as relatively independent public bodies such as environmental agencies. These organs of the state themselves have tremendously varied interests. This applies as well to port officials and redevelopment agencies, such as the DDDA, LDDC, LTGUDC, BRA, and THC, which appear to often be publicly unaccountable, with their own budgets and unelected management. These organizations ostensibly represent and serve the interests of the general public, within which there are often differing interests among local residents, local workers, residents from elsewhere in the region, and visitors. Wonneberger, Gidel, and Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz draw our attention to the specific needs—often underserved—of low-income residents. Such underprivileged groups sometimes have their own skilled advocates for ‘social justice’, however defi ned. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz refer to the representation of public interest(s) undertaken by “resident groups . . . labour unions, environmental groups, affordable housing groups, school districts, faith-based organizations”. Schaller and Novy distinguish among “specific interests such as environmentalism, labour rights, affordable housing, and industrial retention”. Kane explores the involvement of a wider group of actors who bring specific expertise, including “activists and artists, scholars, and experts in universities and non-governmental organizations”. These intermediaries may or may not come from the ‘grassroots’ and seldom speak for everyone. Ramsey differentiates among activists favouring particular transportation needs and systems, highlighting the fi ne fragmentation of the public good. Private interests range from property owners, investors, and developers with their armies of professional consultants, to the wide range of tenants

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utilizing waterfront property. The scope of production uses ranges from the obvious shipping and fishing to maritime industries such as fish processing, manufacturing, and recently in Boston life sciences and biotechnology. Waterfronts are home to relocating corporate offices and new retailers, as well as existing local retailers (in Rotterdam, New York, and Seattle) who suffer from the new competition. And there are leisure uses, both entertaining and edifying, which typically serve citywide audiences. Of particular interest for researchers are the frequency and extent of vacant land on waterfronts, often disguised as parking lots, being held by speculators. These various actors’ interests in the future of waterfronts span a wide range of ecological, economic, and social agendas. In Brownill’s review of the different rationalities underpinning and coordinating these interests, she emphasizes that there can be mutually exclusive objectives. Ramsey concurs that new plans are not always ‘win-win’. But discourses are hybrid and dynamic, and it is important to examine the detail of how needs and ideas change or become embedded over time. Gidel, for example, observes formal acceptance of informal waterfront dwellings; new flows of residents are destined to become fi xed and normalized. Brownill notes that “the tensions between these different discourses played themselves out in different ways in different projects and strategies”. Having noted earlier the frequent imperative to ‘open up’ the waterfront, research should examine what is opened up, and for whom. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz, Ramsey, and Heeg all highlight that local governments have attempted to—or are compelled to—make waterfront areas attractive for higher-income groups to increase local tax revenues and thereby diminish existing or potential fiscal and social problems. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz’s critique of Antwerp’s waterfront proposals could apply to many waterfronts featured here and in earlier books: “The plan simply provided housing and entertainment for well-paid upper-middle class professionals”. Schubert suggests Barcelona’s ‘sanitizing’ approach with ‘gentrified gastronomy’ and attractive new public spaces has become a European template. Ramsey depicts the new activities Seattle’s waterfront might have to accommodate: “ambling pedestrians, sidewalk cafes, street performers, tour buses, sightseeing cruises, police surveillance, jogging”. His analysis of the rhetoric of class warfare draws our attention to the unequal distributive impacts, costs, and benefits of these transformations. Several contributors depict a central, polarized conflict between the new, ‘creative’ knowledge workers, bankers, realtors, and tourists flowing into waterfronts and blue-collar workers and underemployed residents who are staying put. The existing residents, workers, and businesses are usually expected to adapt and be flexible, whether the resources and supports for them to do this exist or not. The shift away from primary industry and manufacturing toward the service sector brings a different residential base with a very different relationship to the water. Gidel laments a “forgotten maritimity” (Desse 1996): oceans and rivers used to be a source of work, food, and income, not just

Conclusion 305 nice views. As contrast, Fort-de-France, Dublin, and San Francisco illustrate upgrading of existing housing, fi xing of minimum standards, and ‘proportionality principles’ for ensuring housing affordability, as well as improving job prospects for existing residents and sustaining local heritage. Gidel’s conclusion cautions that such upgrading can inadvertently foster gentrification. Economic development broadly defi ned remains of considerable interest to local politicians and campaigners, although it is not nearly as photogenic as property development and is of little interest to architects.

THE TURNING OF THE POLITICAL TIDE The question of who fi xes or changes the waterfront needs to be examined within a political context. Heeg notes that “transformation is triggered in the relationship between urban planners, local politicians and the private real estate sector . . . and non-governmental stakeholders, including residents”. The actors outlined in the previous section are examined throughout the book building alliances of varying durability at different scales and around different waterfront problems and ambitions. Policy and development outcomes are always a product of struggles among a great multiplicity of parties and forces. Brownill provides a useful review of how “different modes of governance and different practices and strategies have developed over time, and how these have constantly interacted, collided, repelled, and intersected with each other”. Ramsey’s analysis highlights new and unexpected alignments of interests, sometimes united by their common opposition to official plans. All the contributors’ case studies emphasize processes, rather than fetishizing the landscape as a fi xed object. Antwerp’s failings indicate the limitations of design-oriented waterfront plans that lack innovative economic and social policies and implementation instruments. Providing an historical and philosophical context to the political dimension, Desfor writes of an essentializing, state-sponsored “politics of improvement”, a belief that “what was good for the waterfront was always what was good for all of Toronto”, which short-circuits the very complex politics actually determining waterfront transformations. Seen positively, Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz believe the ‘top-down’ approach at Kop van Zuid suggests that “macro-scale policies for achieving social sustainability are necessary for success in creating social integration in cities”. In Belgium and the Netherlands, municipal ownership of land allows control in the public interest, for example, by building affordable housing. Desfor presents the case that state control allows development to proceed “gradually and economically according to plans framed in the public interest” (Bryce 1892, 4). Yet the Toronto City Commissioner’s campaign for state-led and state-managed growth for “business too important to leave to private capital” also has later echoes in the state’s top-down facilitation of private enterprise in the London Docklands in the 1980s and in

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New York City and Boston today. In this vein, Schaller and Novy suggest that plans for New York’s waterfront had to wait for a mayor with “vision and resolve”, a comprehensive and “interventionist” agenda for urban planning and economic development, a “return of urban renewal” a la Robert Moses (Fainstein 2005). Their critique is that Bloomberg’s vision was mostly linked to the extrinsic aims of bidding for the 2012 Olympics and promoting private-sector investment. Germany’s city beaches raise the question of whether waterfronts necessarily have to lurch from one kind of long-term, locked-down solution to another. Large-scale, rigid plans, designs, and management systems tend to imply state control, but whether in its fordist or entrepreneurial guise, the state is one of the fi xities that can potentially hinder flows of new ideas, materials, forms, and activities through the urban waterfront. Desfor documents the creation, expansion, and regulation of the powers available to those that implement waterfront change: “the right to raise capital, to expropriate land, and to operate largely independently of city, provincial and national governments”. Heeg and Rubin caution that even when public agencies are politically autonomous, they are often not fi nancially autonomous, either because their hands are tied on raising capital or increasing land value, or because they are beholden to private property owners and investors to actually realize anything on the ground. Desfor also highlights that the relation and accountability of port authorities to different levels of democratic government is sometimes unclear, and often contested and modified. Different case studies in this volume show port authorities that own land or only manage it, that develop it themselves or only regulate it, in different combinations, and with different kinds of successes or failures. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz critique Antwerp’s overlapping of jurisdictional responsibilities. They also highlight very different relationships between the Port Authority and the municipality in Belgium versus the Netherlands: fragmentary projects arise in the former, making it difficult to deliver on complex goals like affordable housing, whereas cooperation exists in the latter, with clear task definitions. Gidel fi nds that “coordination and cooperation between so many actors and bodies remain complicated”. Schubert notes London Docklands “had advisory committees, planning committees, interrelating committees and even discussion committees—but nothing happened” (Michael Heseltine in Thornley 1991, 181). In San Francisco, much development was stifled by regulations— perhaps representing success. In Berlin, inconsequential city beaches still require many permits and negotiations. More attention can be given in research and policy to how management arrangements relate to development outcomes, and what flexibilities are feasible. Hall and Clark identify new cleavages of political power, such as local politicians contesting the actions of regional and national governments from the same party. Scaling of governance is a complex topic, for what is rigid at one level may be up for grabs at another, and different scales

Conclusion 307 of government may fi ll the same role in different locations and different eras. On Boston’s waterfront, the state-level agency Massport is not obliged to follow urban plans. Brownill notes the trickle-down of devolved governance may only mean a shift from national to local government, without necessarily improving citizen engagement or empowerment. In London, public planning power flowed from the state to ‘quangos’ such as Urban Development Corporations—an influential model of “state investment to create land and property markets”. In Toronto, creating local special-purpose agencies did not clearly provide more accountability or serve broader interests than political bodies and legislation at the national level. In San Francisco, however, the early devolution of the Port Authority (1969) was actually driven by local campaigning; this was not a neoliberalization by higher-order government. We see a contrary shift ‘up’ to a newly conceived regional scale of waterfront governance for Vancouver, Barcelona, and London’s Thames Gateway. Sometimes this shift is in pursuit of sustainability, but often it is merely done in the service of economic competitiveness. In many chapters, institutional fi xities are contrasted against flows of new ideas, new visions of what the waterfront could be and who it could serve—“An Open Waterfront for All”. Gidel, Brownill, and Ramsey document the creation of new institutions. Brownill is skeptical, observing that “politicians have sought to move away from the past while promoting seemingly similar agendas”. In London’s Docklands she sees constant flows and modifications of institutional arrangements in ‘waves’; the pendulum swings between top-down governance and consensus—and back again. Sometimes local authorities that stand in the way of new waterfront flows are dissolved.

WHITHER NEOLIBERALISM The chapters in Part II and Part IV of this book have a common focus on a particular shift in the politics of urban waterfronts development, namely neoliberalism, and its manifestation in the field of urban planning as property-led development. Harvey’s (1989, 8) articulation of a shift from urban managerialism to entrepreneurialism is a touchstone for many contributors: since the 1970s there has been a move away from objective, rational, long-range, state-led planning in the general public interest, often accompanied by state ownership of land, to placing the interests of private-sector investors at the centre of urban policy, leading to a boosterish “speculative construction of place”, which has led to more fluidity. Rubin charts the currents of this entrepreneurial flow: deregulation and a freeing up of markets, the devolution of government functions and responsibilities to the local level, the creation of quasi-public management entities, the outsourcing of government activities to private contractors, and the privatization of public resources. As Schaller and Novy note, the scale and complexity of

308 Quentin Stevens the desired changes often engenders a ‘roll-out’ neoliberal approach, where “the state takes on a more aggressive role through the introduction of new institutions, policies and governmentalities” (see Peck and Tickell 2002). Within this agenda, Heeg provides a tighter focus on property-led development strategies, “the role of the built environment as a policy tool for generating socioeconomic growth”. In Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz’s formulation, Western cities perceive that their core problem is not producing enough of the right kinds of real estate in the right places to meet market needs, to keep rents down and facilitate growth. This is mostly because cities lack investment capital, but also because of physical, institutional, political, and social impediments to new development. Through rezonings, joint urban redevelopment ventures, and improvements to transport infrastructure and public spaces, municipalities seek to make their cities more attractive and provide fi nancial incentives to highly mobile external investors, fi rms, upper-income residents and visitors, and thereby spur economic flows to help fund their existing services and their future development aspirations. Heeg critiques such approaches as “a last-ditch attempt to shape and mobilize urban potentials when there is a limited scope for endogenous, independent strategies”. Within this context, cities often seek to create and stimulate waterfront property markets. Waterfronts, as large, highly visible areas that are politically relatively weak, are choice resources in the neoliberal transmutation of public-sector planning into city marketing. These themes of dependence on inward investment, state mediation of private profiteering, and subjugation of the local are not new. Hall and Clark, Gidel, Desfor, and Kane reveal the long and widespread legacy of colonialism and post-colonialism for New World waterfronts. As Desfor notes, “during the development of colonial capitals under mercantilism, waterfronts served as port areas where political, economic, and ecological relationships were intertwined with the sale of African slaves, the trading of natural resources, the development of cartels, and the institutionalization of colonial power”. The Emperor has new clothes. Many contributors identify the particular consequences of the neoliberal shift for waterfront development processes and outcomes. The perceived dependence of cities on global flows of fi nance capital is writ large in the expansion into former industrial waterfront areas of the Financial Districts of London, San Francisco, and Boston. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz highlight a range of consequent problems: “elite dominated decision-making mechanisms, social polarization, and spatial fragmentation”. Their observation that “social inequality in and around the newly regenerated waterfront project area increases and social discontinuity is experienced because of the dominance of high-end land-use and high-income residents” clearly applies in Antwerp, Dublin, Seattle, New York, Boston, Buenos Aires, and the Caribbean. While Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz study the integration of private real estate interests into European urban planning processes in Antwerp and Rotterdam, this tendency is strongest in the U.S.,

Conclusion 309 where cities depend primarily on the local property tax base for their own operating budgets. Such cities have a great incentive to expand revenues by expanding the amount of urban land (often into waterways) and increasing its development value through rezonings and incentives. Heeg highlights that although property-led development approaches can stimulate the cooperation of private actors, it is unclear how the ‘invisible hand’ can turn this to public advantage. Coordinating public and private interests remains problematic. Property-led initiatives generally lead to waterfronts having an undersupply of housing and other socially beneficial uses with low exchange values. Even the utilitarian trickle-down ambition is often compromised, as cities use tax abatements to provide an incentive to land developers. South Boston’s District Increment Financing means the increased tax revenues from property-led waterfront development are unavailable to democratic reallocation, being diverted to pay off the bonds that fi nanced the infrastructure that incentivized the development. Ironically, this means that a tool originally designed for improving poor neighbourhoods is being used to prevent government resource redistribution to poorer neighbourhoods. In Antwerp, the Port Authority was tasked by city government with using income from property development to fi nance pensions, not for the general public good. By contrast, San Francisco demonstrates the incremental, “intensely deliberated” development of policies and procedures to more smoothly guide the flow of investment to maximize public benefit. Rubin presents San Francisco’s waterfront planning as a relative fi xity, “a bulwark against the pressures of contemporary neoliberal urbanization”. San Francisco (and California generally) illustrates the state moving a range of social and environmental agendas forward, rather than rolling them back; “an example of the assertion of state power to restrict investment, quite contrary to devolution of responsibilities associated with neoliberalism”. San Francisco’s more equitable solutions have come through carefully steering the flow of public tax funds to authorities charged with delivering public benefits along the waterfront. The urban waterfront is shown in this and several other chapters to be an important site of resistance and struggle, and not only of accumulation. Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz identify two specific techniques through which U.S. communities redistribute the fi nancial flows from propertyled development more equitably: Community Land Trusts ensure public capture of property value increases and inclusive governance; Community Benefits Agreements are well suited to large-scale projects involving what Desfor terms “business too important to leave to private capital”. Kop van Zuid’s Mutual Benefits Program provides a European waterfront example. Both solutions involve project-specific negotiations between the developer and ‘the local community’, which builds power through ‘bottom-up mobilizations’ (Moulaert et al. 2007), addressing a very wide range of matters: project design, scale, mix of uses, local employment, community services

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and amenities, rent and tenant mix regulation, and environmental mitigation. One concern about such negotiations: they mostly occur outside of and prior to the mainstream, citywide, public planning process. Another concern noted by Wonneberger is that the social ties of community only operate locally; they cannot easily be ‘scaled up’. In any case, it is refreshing to view the U.S. as a source of solutions rather than problems. Further studies of international policy transfer in waterfront development would be welcome. Heeg notes that the development of waterfront land does not necessarily meet the neoliberal aim of driving the economic cycle forward; instead, its development becomes dependent upon those cycles, leading to a destabilization of the flow of development, due to over- and under-investment during economic booms and busts. Germany’s city beaches show that certain kinds of waterfront development still occur during periods when investment is lacking. Berlin’s support for very small-scale entrepreneurialism through grants, loans, low rents, tax reductions, free services, and streamlined licensing reflect the length of the city’s present ‘downturn’ and the small scale of its waterfront sites. The temporariness of permissions allows the waterfront to be transformed again quickly whenever investment starts to flow. The cyclical changes in waterfront development mean this book is a timely update on the work of previous decades (Malone 1996; Hoyle et al. 1988), but it also suggests the need for regular reviews and longitudinal studies. Desfor illustrates that within the realm of ‘capital’, there have long been rival interests and claims on waterfronts: Toronto’s Board of Trade, the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, and the Civic Guild of Toronto reflected “contrasting political economies” and thus developed competing visions for change. Drawing on Brenner and Theodore (2002), Rubin counsels us to look to the detail of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ on waterfronts, as they vary across locations, scales, and times. Brownill’s study of London Docklands highlights that neoliberalism in its current form will probably not always hold sway over waterfronts: history shows that over a longer time frame there are tidal shifts between increasing and decreasing state involvement and leadership in waterfront development. Schaller and Novy call for us to see waterfront development and planning under neoliberalism as inherently dynamic: “seemingly top-down development plans and projects are reworked in and through local policy environments, as well as through oppositional practices”.

INTERPRETING WATERFRONT CHANGE In addition to the thematic contents outlined thus far, much can also be learned from the diverse contributions presented here about how to study and understand the fi xities and flows of waterfront development, and urban development generally, both methodologically and conceptually.

Conclusion 311 The contributions illustrate a wide range of data-gathering and analytical methods for understanding waterfront change, involving both single case studies and wide geographical comparisons. Three main categories of data are involved. Much work involves analyzing existing documentation: historical archives, development plans, promotional literature, policy documents, economic data, and wider public discourse, both textual and graphic. Analysis of such materials ranges from political analysis of power relations and network analysis of social relations generally, to discourse analysis, to quantitative study of property values and goods traffic. Site analysis of built environments is also critical. Although Wonneberger’s approach is anthropological, she also examines the Dublin waterfront’s architectural forms and public spaces because these long-term fi xed investments make community change visible; the fi xed forms reflect the social flows and stabilize them. New building types such as museums, offices, and apartments represent changing demographics. Public spaces are linked to community activities, the development of sense of place and sense of self. Kane similarly reads a social history of activity patterns and cultural meanings through Buenos Aires’s bridges. A second type of data is fi rst-hand accounts from the people involved in and affected by waterfront change. This means interviews and detailed oral histories, but also surveys, mental mapping by users, and walking tours to visually document users’ experiences. The third distinct kind of data, which greatly enlivens and enriches the critique of waterfront change, is fi rst-hand observation and participant observation in the lives of those involved, attending formal and informal community meetings and festivals as well as being engaged in everyday life. From this embedded perspective, the waterfront is not just an abstract image, value, or process. This is not to discount the importance of concepts for understanding, critiquing, and shaping waterfront change. The contributors to this volume use a wide range of metaphors to describe and interpret the waterfront and its constituent fi xities and flows. Within the case studies themselves, concepts are also deployed by actors to either fi x or transform the future of waterfront spaces—most notably in Ramsey’s study of Seattle. Looking across the chapters at specific conceptualizations, we can discern a certain ambivalence about the waterfront: about natural forces, about the waterfront’s economic and social role, and its connection to various social groups and activities. On Toronto’s waterfront, “Nature provided both an advantage and an obstacle.” While Gidel’s metaphor of mangroves suggests particular conditions of stability, sensitivity, flexibility, and variability, Desfor discusses swamps as unproductive, degraded, and unhygienic, in need of refashioning, ‘rationalization’ to speed up or slow down flows. Schubert describes the ‘cleansing’ and ‘sanitizing’ of Barcelona; Kane documents the ongoing contamination of Buenos Aires. In all these cases, biophysical health, economic health, and physical orderliness become linked. In contrast, the loose, disorderly nature of Germany’s city

312

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beaches is given positive connotations: their edge condition, their exoticism, and their flowing, transient nature are seen to embody freedom. The beach’s “uninterrupted prospect and exposure to the elements” make it “a ‘smooth’ space where the strictures of urban life are escaped to some degree” (Dovey 2005, 230, 241). This book’s Introduction and Wonneberger’s chapter both draw upon Cresswell’s (2006) distinction between sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics. Waterfronts are obviously places characterized by flows: of water, traffic, goods, people, ideas, and diseases. There are also contra-flows, from tidal backwash to grassroots mobilization. This makes for highly dynamic systems. As noted earlier, the directions of flow also shift. Research in this book investigates whether fi xity is always orderly and whether flow necessarily implies change. Waterfronts’ fi xed elements are often disorderly. Landforms, watercourses, old roads, old factories, and old ways of thinking often seem to get in the way; they compromise the capacity of particular waterfronts to remain vital, to stay linked into the wider flows of society and economy. Another theme frequently encountered is progress, or, as our Introduction puts it, ‘modernization’. Desfor’s chapter critiques the often-unquestioned belief in the teleological improvement of nature, to increase productivity. The ‘natural’ waterfront is an asset, but its unpredictable fluidities also make it an obstruction. Its potential is waiting to be imagined by planners and realized by developers. This productive ethic seems to be starkly counterposed by the consumption emphasis of many contemporary urban waterfronts, but neoliberalism appears to have turned consumption into a productive asset. Gidel, Wonneberger, Brownill, Rubin, Schaller and Novy, Kane, and Heeg all discern stark metaphysical contrasts of the shiny and new against the old and dirty. In the Caribbean, Dublin, Rotterdam, and London, taller is also considered better. Seen negatively, newness is sterile, faceless, anonymous, a rupture with the past. For Kane, Puerto Madero’s architectural optimism, its “steel and glass architecture, emboldened by repainted cranes”, cannot dispel a troubled political history. The existing is positively seen as ‘heritage’: gasometers and old pubs provide links to Dublin’s past, although its cranes must be reimported from other waterfronts where they still exist. Schaller and Novy critique the nostalgic reimagining of the Gowanus Canal, “one of the most polluted urban waterways in the country”, as ‘New York’s Little Venice’ (Prete 1998). Depictions of new and old span across a range of imaginaries: waterfront architecture and infrastructure is often valued for its functional and economic importance and progressiveness rather than its spectacular aesthetics. Ramsey presents cases for and against a progressive reading of several waterfront transport infrastructure options. The chapters show that newness and progress are value-laden distinctions that are politically expedient. The sustainability of change—or stasis—remains an open question. The new is not always durable or flexible. Its benefits are not always widely distributed. Such

Conclusion 313 metaphysical conflicts are sidestepped by the U.K. use of the term ‘urban renaissance’ (see Schubert, this volume; also Carmona 2009).

LOOKING FORWARD . . . AND BACKWARD . . . AND EASTWARD AND NORTHWARD There is ample scope for both new and revisited studies of urban waterfront change following the methods and employing the concepts outlined in the preceding, and engaging with the key issues laid out earlier in this chapter: the scale and direction of development; how development changes over time; the roles and interests of various players; and the political structures and processes through which they interact. In all these respects, further research will inevitably chart continuing shifts in what is flowing and what is fi xed about urban waterfronts. In terms of research approaches, the diverse case studies presented in these chapters, and the wide variety of disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches employed by the contributors, suggest that the future research agenda should be transdisciplinary and encompass comparative perspectives. The clear evidence that waterfront development progresses unevenly and often furthers social inequalities suggests that waterfront researchers should be skeptical of the modernist notion that current design proposals and management approaches are necessarily improvements on the past. As its name suggests, neoliberalism is not a new panacea; it has its roots in the brutish early industrial era that now defi nes the pre-history of contemporary urban waterfront development. It is important to dig beneath the rhetoric to look at detailed qualitative and quantitative data of what is happening and to compare that with what has happened before. Looking to Rubin’s elucidation of neoliberalism, we are led to ponder whether we do in fact currently live in a neoliberal age. Schaller and Novy end on an optimistic note that even in New York, “a ‘poster child’ city of neoliberal urbanism”, struggles between the Bloomberg administration and local community interests have led to the retention of and reinvestment in Brooklyn’s working waterfronts of Red Hook and Sunset Park. Is this a triumph of advocacy or is it just economic expediency in a slowed economy? The context and resources for property investment and development have already changed significantly since the International Network of Urban Waterfront Research conference in Hamburg in October 2008. In both the Americas and Europe, research will need to chart the changing fate of neoliberal thinking and practice after the global fi nancial crisis. In some cases the state may feel compelled to reassert leadership in investment and development. San Francisco’s patient custodianship and Germany’s temporary permitting of city beaches suggest this is not the only way forward. The emergence of neoliberalism should perhaps be seen as one part of a broader search for workable approaches to fi xing

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waterfronts and making them flow, and ongoing struggles between competing philosophies. Reflecting on Taşan-Kok and Sungu-Eryilmaz’s speculations about the future of development practice, the transfer of policy tools from the U.S. such as CLTs and CBAs makes sense if Europeans are also adopting the Americans’ understanding of the problem of neoliberalism. Researchers will need to look at how such political and economic approaches become locally inflected, and become ‘actually existing’, given the differing institutional contexts, patterns of landownership, investment markets, and so forth. Widening the geographic perspective, research could also examine what the rapidly developing port cities of the East and Middle East can learn from the relatively slow centuries of rise and decline of waterfronts in Europe and the Americas (see also Graf and Beng Huat 2007). In terms of the physical landscape, too, research is needed to assess the geographical variation among, and transferability of, waterfront development approaches. Toronto’s waterfront is cold for many months of the year, with a lot of ice, snow, and wind. Hamburg and Dublin are less icy but even less sunny. Despite warming climates and the success of Germany’s artificial beaches, cities probably should not always be trying to apply the same ‘Barcelona model’. We need to consider the particularities of wet and wintry waterfronts. This brings us to a close on two wide-open questions where much research is needed, and where social scientists may wish to make connections to technical expertise in the natural sciences. First, what are the environmental implications of deindustrialized waterfronts and of the urban redevelopment schemes that have transformed them? Ecological systems keep flowing, and they also keep changing, which requires regular study. And second, how can waterfront developments that are equitable and economically viable also be sustainable? Ramsey’s account of the discourse in Seattle suggests a pure antagonism between environmentalism and social justice. We need to consider what kinds of relationships and actions can move both agendas forward.

REFERENCES Brenner, Neil and Nick Theodore. 2002. Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Bryce, P. H. 1892. Letter to John Hendry, The Globe, 3 September. In The River Don and Ashbridge’s Bay. Toronto Port Authority Archives: SC 26, box 4, folder 4. Carmona, Matthew. 2009. The Isle of Dogs: Four development waves, five planning models, twelve plans, thirty-five years, and a renaissance . . . of sorts. Progress in Planning 71(3): 87–151. Cox, Kevin. 1998. Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for local politics. Political Geography 17(1): 1–23 Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. New York and London: Routledge.

Conclusion 315 Desse, Michel. 1996. L’inégale maritimité des villes des départments d’outre-mer insulaires. In La maritimé aujourd’hui, eds. François Péron and Jean Rieucau. Paris: L’Harmattan. Dovey, Kim. 2005. Fluid city: Transforming Melbourne’s urban waterfront. Abingdon: Routledge. Fainstein, Susan. 2005. The return of urban renewal: Dan Doctoroff’s grand plans for New York City. Harvard Design Magazine 22: 1–5. Flyvbjerg, Bent. 1998. Rationality and power: Democracy in practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graf, Arndt and Chua Beng-Huat, eds. 2007. Port cities: Asian and European transformations. Oxford: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografi ska Annaler 71(1): 3–17. Hoyle, Brian, David Pinder, and M. S. Husain, eds. 1988. Revitalising the waterfront: International dimensions of dockland redevelopment. London: Belhaven. Lee, R. 1992. London Docklands: The ‘exceptional place’? An economic geography of inter-urban competition. In London Docklands: The challenge of development, ed. Philip Ogden. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Malone, Patrick, ed. 1996. City, capital and water. London: Routledge. Moulaert, Frank, Flavia Martinelli, Sara González, Erik Swyngedouw. 2007. Introduction: Social innovation and governance in European cities: Urban development between path dependency and radical innovation. European Urban and Regional Studies 14(3): 195–209. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3): 380– 404. Prete, Allison, Ben Sonenberg, and Joe Hamersky. 2001. Lavender Lake Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. New York: Filmakers Library. Stevens, Quentin. 2006. The design of urban waterfronts: A critique of two Australian Southbanks. Town Planning Review 77: 173–203. Swyngedouw, Erik, Frank Moulaert, and Arantxa Rodriguez. 2002. Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-scale urban development projects and the new urban policy. Antipode 34(3): 547–582. Thornley, Andy, 1991. Urban planning under Thatcherism. Oxford: Routledge.

Contributors

Sue Brownill is a Reader in the Department of Planning at Oxford Brookes University. She has strong research interests in regeneration and participation and has been researching the regeneration of London Docklands since working for community organizations there in the 1980s. As well as a book and numerous publications on London Docklands, recent publications include work on sustainable communities in the Thames Gateway and participation in planning. Anthony Clark holds degrees in Economics from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, and in Religious Studies from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. He is a graduate of the Master of Urban Studies program at Simon Fraser University. He is a former Opposition staff member in the Alberta Legislature, remains active in politics, and continues to research various aspects of Canadian political affairs. Gene Desfor is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University where he taught graduate level courses in the Faculty of Environmental Studies for more than thirty years. He has been actively involved with waterfront research since 1978, and for the last five years has been Principal Investigator on a research project entitled “Changing Urban Waterfronts”. He has published widely on urban development processes, the making of urban environmental policy, and the history of Toronto’s waterfront. He consulted for the Royal Commission on the Future of Toronto’s Waterfront. His recent co-authored book, Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles, with Roger Keil, argues that continuing modernization of industrial capitalist societies entails change to societal relationships with nature in cities. Changing Toronto’s Waterfront, a co-edited volume with Jennefer Laidley, is scheduled for publication in 2010. Mélanie Gidel is completing her PhD thesis in geography at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. Her research, which is supported by a grant from GECKO (Laboratoire de Géographie Comparée des Nords et des

318

Contributors

Suds), falls within the scope of urban and social geography. It deals with processes of urban fragmentation in Caribbean cities and pays specific attention to the comparison between the French-speaking and English-speaking Caribbean. Peter V. Hall teaches in Simon Fraser University’s Master of Urban Studies Program. His current research examines the connections between shipping and logistics chains, transport sector employment, and the development of port cities. His research on ports has been published in Regional Studies, GeoJournal, Journal of Urban Technology, Environment and Planning A, Maritime Policy and Management, Economic Development Quarterly, Critical Planning, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, and Economic Geography. Susanne Heeg is currently working as Professor in Urban Geography and specializes in questions of the built environment. This includes particularly issues of the globalization of the real estate industry, the development of new evaluating instruments in this industry to assess risks in investment strategies and how these developments go along with the tendency towards iconographic architecture (and architects), and the segmentation of urban space and investment strategies that can be seen in respect to urban waterfront projects. Recent publications include Intermediäre und Standards in der Immobilienwirtschaft: Zum Problem der Transparenz in Büromärkten von Finanzzentren (2009), with S. Dörry, and Von Stadtplanung und Immobilienwirtschaft. Die „South Boston Waterfront“ als Beispiel für eine neue Strategie städtischer Baupolitik (2008). Stephanie C. Kane is a cultural anthropologist and ecologist whose fieldwork and writing address a range of justice issues. Her work on urban waterfronts is informed by ethnographic fieldwork on water security in Brazil and Argentina, in addition to preliminary observations in Panama, Veracruz, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. The journals Signs, Crime Media Culture, and Journal of Folklore Research have published her recent articles about art, environment, and justice. She is currently writing a book entitled “Treacherous Waters”. She has authored The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama (1994/2004), and AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas (1998), and is co-editor, with Philip Parnell, of Crime’s Power: Anthropologists and the Ethnography of Crime (2003). For more information please see her website at www.indiana.edu/~culturex. Jennefer Laidley holds a master’s degree in Urban Planning from the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada, and was Project Manager of the five-year multidisciplinary and multi-institutional “Changing Urban Waterfronts” research project led by Gene

Contributors 319 Desfor. She has published on urban waterfront development issues in Cities and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research as well as in popular periodicals. Changing Toronto’s Waterfront, a coedited volume with Gene Desfor, is scheduled for publication in 2010. Johannes Novy (MPhil, MA) is a researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, and a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University’s Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Novy is the co-editor of Searching for the Just City (2009) and enjoys thinking and writing about issues relating to urban politics, planning, and development in the United States and Europe and the role of urban tourism in processes of urban change, as well planning theory and history. Kevin Ramsey is a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at University of Washington Bothell. His interdisciplinary research intersects urban political geography, environmental studies, and ‘critical’ geographic information science. Substantively, this work examines the local politics of ‘sustainable’ development as well as the ways in which these politics are mediated by geospatial technologies. He explores these issues through inductive and ethnographic studies that engage with scholarship on governmentality, urban regime theory, and science and technology studies. Jasper Rubin is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at San Francisco State University. Before joining academia he was a planner in the San Francisco Planning Department for a dozen years where he served as a senior policy analyst and plan manager for two large community planning efforts. He is nearing completion of a book entitled A Negotiated Landscape: Planning and the Transformation of San Francisco’s Waterfront Since 1950. Susanna Schaller earned her PhD from Cornell University’s department of City and Regional Planning in 2007. Over the past few years, she has been actively engaged as a community and economic development professional and advocacy planner in New York City. Her research focuses on the social production of urban space and on dissecting the micropolitics of revitalization, specifi cally place-making strategies in ethnically and economically diverse urban neighbourhoods in the U.S. She has also published her research on business improvement districts (BIDs), which investigates the widespread use of BIDs to restructure urban space and examines the implications of grafting a governance structure designed for downtown districts onto the neighbourhoodlevel context. She enjoys maintaining active practice-oriented scholarship and teaching.

320 Contributors Dirk Schubert is Professor in Urban Planning, Comparative Planning History, Housing and Urban Renewal at the HafenCity University (formerly the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg) and since 2008 has been Dean of the Masters Program in Urban Planning. He has a Diploma in Architecture and Sociology, and published his PhD on the history of urban planning in Germany and his habilitation treatise on a comparison of urban renewal in London and Hamburg. His research focuses on urban history, planning history, the history of housing, urban renewal, and the revitalization of harbour and waterfront areas. His latest books are History of Urban Renewal in Hamburg and London, Changes in Port and Waterfront Areas Worldwide, Growing Cities (with Uwe Altrock), and Residential Areas in Hamburg, as well as many publications in periodicals and journals on housing, urban renewal, planning history, and waterfront revitalization. Quentin Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He is author of The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces and co-editor of Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (both 2007). He has published articles about people’s behaviour on urban waterfronts in Urban Design International, The Journal of Urban Design, and Town Planning Review. During his current study of temporary city beaches in Germany he is a research fellow in the Geographical Institute at Humboldt University Berlin. His next research project looks at visitor perceptions and behaviour at contemporary public memorials. Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz worked as a research associate at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy from 2004 to 2009. Her work focuses on strategies and collaborations that balance economic and community development goals in urban areas. She has published and taught in the area of land use and policy, regional economic development, and community development. She maintains an international and comparative perspective in her work, along with her United States–based research. She earned her master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in the fields of public policy, international development, and urban and regional planning from the University of Pittsburgh. Tuna Taşan-Kok is a Senior Researcher at Delft University of Technology, OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment. She has mainly published and taught on the topics of globalization, neoliberalization, institutional and spatial transformations, property market dynamics, urban governance and urban regeneration issues, and lately on the impact of single European market regulations in urban development. She is the author of Budapest, Istanbul, and Warsaw: Institutional and Spatial

Contributors 321 Change (2004) and co-editor of Cities between Competitiveness and Cohesion: Discourses, Realities and Implementation (with Peter Ache, Hans Thor Andersen, Thomas Maloutas, and Mike Raco, 2008). Her background is in urban planning and geography. She has been conducting international research across Europe and working in a number of universities and research institutes, including Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), Polish Academy of Sciences (Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Warsaw), Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Centre for Regional Studies, Budapest), University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), Antwerp University (Belgium), and Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). Astrid Wonneberger is Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Hamburg University. Her research interests include diaspora and migration, ethnicity, urban anthropology, studies of conflict, stereotypes and prejudice, and empirical fieldwork methodology. Wonneberger has published on waterfronts in the academic journal Ethnoscripts and the edited collection Networks, Resources and Economic Action (edited by Clemens Greiner and Waltraud Kokot, 2009) and has co-edited a volume entitled Port Cities as Areas of Transition: Ethnographic Perspectives (2008).

Index

100 Acres Master Plan 286 1912 Waterfront Plan (see Toronto)

A accumulation by dispossession 204, 232 Adams, Thomas 207 adaptive reuse 166, 184, 318 aesthetics 233, 328 affordable housing 64, 71, 167, 176, 181, 184, 258, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271, 303, 305, 306 Agence des Cinquante Pas Géométriques (ACPG) (see Fort-de-France) AG Stadsplanning (see Antwerp) Alaskan Way Viaduct (see Seattle) Alioto, Mayor Joseph 154 Alster (see Hamburg) American Institute of Architects 114, 154 analytic borderlands 215, 217 Angotti, Thomas 176 ‘An Open Waterfront for All’ 108, 111, 112, 113, 116, 307 anthropological fieldwork 55 Antwerp 54, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 268, 270,271, 296, 299, 304, 305, 306, 308, 321 AG Stadsplanning 265, 268, 269 BOM initiative 268 Buro 5 Maastricht 262 Cadixwijk 263, 265, 269 Port Authority 260, 262, 263, 265, 268 Stad aan de Stroom (City on the Stream) 260 VESPA AG 265

architectural heritage 68, 69 architecture of symbolism 69 Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh (see Toronto) Ashbridge’s Bay Property Owner’s Association (see Toronto) Asia Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative (APGCI) (see Vancouver) Avinguda Diagonal (see Barcelona)

B ballot (see referendum) Baltimore 7, 54, 77, 78, 86, 93, 101, 217, 221, 258 Inner Harbor 280, 284, 285, 286, 299 Barcelona 74, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 221, 300, 307, 311, 314 Avinguda Diagonal 84 Barcelona model 85, 314 Barceloneta 83 Besos, River 84 Cerda Plan 84 Forum 2004 84 Forum Universel de les Cultures 84, 85 Gran Via de les Corts Catalan 84 Llobregat 83, 84 Maremagnum 83 Olympic port 83, 84 Palau del Mar 83 Passeig de Colom 82 Placa Catalunya 83 Poblenou 83, 84 Port Vell 83, 84, 85, 300 Rambla de Mar 83 Rambla Prim 84 Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona (PEMB) 85

324

Index

Barcelona model (see Barcelona) Barceloneta (see Barcelona) Barracas (see Bueno Aires) Battery Park City (see New York) Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) (see San Francisco) Bay Plan (see San Francisco) Beavis and Brown (see Toronto) Belfast 69 Belgium 260, 263, 305, 306, 319 Berlin 61, 235, 237, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 299, 302, 306, 310 Oststrand 251 Sommerwelt 249 Strandbar Mitte 245, 251, 253 Besos, River (see Barcelona) Big Dig (see Boston) Bilbao 77 biographical interviews 55 Bloomberg, Mayor Michael R. 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 178, 183, 306 ‘Bloomberg way’ (see New York) Blue Ribbon Network (see London) BOM initiative (see Antwerp) Bonnycastle, R. H. 199 boosterism 145 Boston 7, 54, 77, 78, 93, 101, 217, 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 299, 301, 302, 304, 306, 308, 309 Big Dig 281 Boston Common 286 Boston Harbor Association 284 Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) 274 Boston Society of Architects 285 Central Artery “Big Dig” 281 Faneuil Hall / Quincy Market 291 Fan Pier 287, 291 Ferry Building 154, 158, 160 Fort Point Channel 286 Fort Point Waterfront 280, 284, 286 Government Center 291 Logan International Airport 280 Massport/ Massachussets Port Authority 280, 284, 285, 307 Seaport District 283, 291 Seaport Public Realm Plan 284, 286 Silver Line 281

South Boston 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 283,284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 301, 302, 309 South Boston Waterfront 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290 Ted Williams Tunnel 280, 281 Zoning Code 287 Boston Common (see Boston) Boston Harbor Association (see Boston) Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) (see Boston) Boston Society of Architects (see Boston) Bremen 54, 246 Brian Lara Promenade (see Port of Spain) bridges 18, 83, 91, 101, 110, 211, 213, 215, 223, 224, 300, 311 as catalysts for communication 213 signature 211, 213, 215 Bridge of Womankind (see Buenos Aires) Britannia Urban Village (see London) British Columbia, Province of 18, 23, 25, 28, 29 Bronx (see New York) Brooklyn (see New York) Bryce, F. H. 202 Buenos Aires 12, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226, 229, 297, 299, 300, 302, 308, 311 Barracas 222 Bridge of Womankind 226, 228, 300 General San Martín Treatment Plant 219 La Boca 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 300 Pendant Bridge 218, 224, 229 Plaza de Mayo 220, 222 Puerto Madero 221, 213, 215, 217, 219, 220, 221. 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 300, 312 Reconquista River 218 Building Congress (see New York) Burnaby (see Vancouver) Buro 5 Maastricht (see Antwerp) Burrard Inlet (see Vancouver) Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) 145, 148, 317

C Cadixwijk (see Antwerp) Calatrava, Santiago 226, 227, 229, 300

Index California 25, 52, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 163, 267, 269, 309 State Lands Commission 155, 156 Canadian Manufacturers’ Association 203, 310 Canary Wharf (see London) Canary Riverside (see London) Canning Town (see London) Campo, Daniel 239, 252, 253 Capital accumulation 5, 144, 152, 160, 170, 208, 288, 301 circuits of 7 immobile forms 75 mobile forms 8, 75 Caribbean12, 35, 36, 38, 42, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 295, 297, 308, 312 case study / studies 70, 118, 127, 167, 173, 274, 297 Castells, Manuel 6, 7, 216 Catalonia 82, 85 Celtic Tiger 54, 55, 64 Centerm (see Vancouver) Central Artery “Big Dig” (see Boston) Central Business District 45 central waterfront area 76 ceramic curtain 77 Cerda, Ildefonds 84 Cerda Plan (see Barcelona) Cèsaire, Aimè 48, 49, 50 cholera 202, 222 Chopp, Frank 113 city beach as development approach 235, 236 concept 245, 248 environment 244 projects 244, 245, 253 city marketing 77, 85, 95, 237, 238, 245, 258, 261, 268, 308 City Port 3, 36, 40, 54, 88, 261, 263 City Vision 2030 (see Sydney) Civic Guild of Toronto (see Toronto) Civic Trust (see Dublin) class warfare 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 304 Clarion Quay (see Dublin) Clarke, Mayor E. F. 206 coastal squatting settlements 35, 36, 39, 41, 43 Coatsworth, Emerson 204 Cochrane, Alan 129, 133 Cologne 242, 246, 247, 250, 251 colonial space 42

325

colonialism 42, 48, 49, 51, 194, 199, 222, 297, 308 Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) 269 Community Land Trust (CLT) 258, 266, 267, 309 competitiveness 122, 124, 126, 136, 137, 138, 139, 262 global 134, 135 urban 46, 101, 170, 261 Connelly, Joel 109 consensus 28, 55, 60, 71, 103, 122, 131, 132, 133, 139, 163, 192, 284, 307 construction of identities 56 containerization 17, 20, 27, 31, 54, 60, 74, 77, 150, 168, 297, 301 container ports 21, 94 container terminals 20, 22, 27, 28, 75, 90 contamination 178, 179, 211, 218, 219, 249, 311 contestation 94, 146, 166, 167, 173, 182, 198, 207 oppositional practices 167, 310 Convention Center and Enhancement Zone (see San Francisco) conversion 35, 77, 82, 90, 93, 184, 199, 217, 284, 285 Copenhagen 54, 278 Corbusier, Le 220 Cox, K. R. 19, 298 creative class 2, 76, 110, 145, 148 creative economy 3, 117 Cresswell, Tim 5, 6, 56, 63, 67, 312 cruise terminal 91, 154, 160 culture 2, 40, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 65, 67, 69, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 95, 106,109, 148, 214, 216, 217, 221, 283 serial reproduction of 244 Cummins, John 30 Custom House (see Dublin) Custom House Docks (see Dublin) cycle of dereliction 76

D decoupling and spatial specialization 94 ‘deep water and good land’ 11, 191, 192, 204, 207, 208 Delfshaven (see Rotterdam) Denver 269 deregulation 78, 79, 129, 144, 161, 171, 236, 307

326

Index

derelict waterfront sites 75, 93 Delta, Corporation (Municipality) of (see Vancouver) Deltaport (see Vancouver) deterritorializing 7 development concessions 286 density 181 flagship 283 incentives 128, 282 mixed-use 62, 77, 91, 132, 177, 249 pedestrian-friendly 44, 174 property-led 10, 11, 12, 166, 170, 233, 258, 259, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 288, 289, 290, 307, 308, 309 restrictions on 156, 157, 160 transit-oriented 174 dialectical analysis 9 disconnection 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 296 discourse 49, 51, 102, 103, 106, analysis of 107 development 145 hybridity of 126 structuration 107, 108, 113 of waterfront regeneration 125 district increment financing 309 do-it-yourself landscape 243 Docklands (see London and Dublin) Dockland neighbourhoods (see Dublin) Dominion Government of Canada 198, 207 Don Improvement Act (see Toronto) Don River (see Toronto) Dortmund 251 Dovey, Kim 7 downtown redevelopment projects 288 Downtown Seattle Association (see Seattle) dredging 90, 213, 218, 221 dual ownership 267 Dubai Ports World 94 Dublin 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 296, 297, 299, 305, 306, 308, 311, 312, 314 Civic Trust 69 Clarion Quay 66 Custom House 56, 61 Custom House Docks 61 Docklands 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69

Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) 56, 61 Dockland neighbourhoods 61 Grand Canal Basin 59 International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) 61, 301 Liffey 56, 65 North Wall 61 North Wall Quay 68 Pearse Street Community 58, 69 Pigeon Lofts 66 Port Company 69 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay 67 Spencer Dock 68 Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) (see Dublin) Dublin Port Company (see Dublin)

E East London (see London) East of England Development Agency (SeeDA) (see London) East Port of Spain Development Company (see Port of Spain) ecology 2, 10, 51, 194, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 229 economic regeneration 62, 277 economic restructuring 4, 74, 144 world-wide 74 Eemhaven (see Rotterdam) Elbe River (see Hamburg) Elbphilharmonie (see Hamburg) Embarcadero City concept (see San Francisco) eminent domain 174 English Bay (see Vancouver) entitlement process 152, 155 entrepôt area 86 entrepreneurialism 144, 147, 173, 259, 275, 276, 307, 310 entrepreneurial city 85, 145 environmental degradation 155, 176 environmental externalities 20, 22 environmentalism 117, 152, 167, 303, 314 equity 147, 248, 267, 271 economic 181 social 10, 176 Erasmus Bridge (see Rotterdam) Ethnography 2, 213, 214, 215, 316 European seaports 74 everyday life 8, 10, 56, 71, 163, 213, 217, 311 everyday spaces 252

Index exclusion 35, 36, 47, 128, 130, 131, 134, 137, 258, 270, 296

F Fainstein, Susan 133, 171, 278, 289 False Creek (see Vancouver) Faneuil Hall / Quincy Market (see Boston) Fan Pier (see Boston) Farrell, Terry 137 federal government 18, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 245 Feinstein, Diane 155 Ferry Building (see Boston) Ferry Port Plaza (see San Francisco) festival markets / marketplaces 7, 101 ‘fixity and flow’1, 4 flood control structures 92 fluid city 7 fordism 93, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 253, 277, 278, 299, 306 Fort-de-France 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 296, 305 Agence des Cinquante Pas Géométriques (ACPG) 43 Grand Projet de Ville (Great City Project ) 36 Le Malecon 43 Pointe Simon 40, 43 Urban Contract of Social Cohesion (UCSC) 47 Zone d’Activité Économique 42 Fort Point Channel (see Boston) Fort Point Waterfront (see Boston) Forum 2004 (see Barcelona) Forum Universel de les Cultures (see Barcelona) Foster, Norman 86 fractured cities 74 Frankfurt 246, 250 Fraser River Port Authority (see Vancouver) Fraser Surrey Docks (see Vancouver) ‘from ships to chips’ 74, 93

G Gale, Tim 240, 245, 285 gasworks development 64 gated apartments / communities 65, 66 gateway 18, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 90, 124, 125, 135, 136, 138, 307

327

function 90 program 18, 29, 30 Gaudi, Antonio 84 General Plan (see San Francisco) General Roca 220 General San Martín Treatment Plant (see Buenos Aires) genealogical interviews 55 Germany 89, 90, 235, 237, 239, 240, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 297, 299, 303, 306, 310, 311, 313, 314, 318 Gertler, Meric 239 global city 17, 115, 135, 136 globalized urban hierarchies 2 Goheen, P. G. 200 Gooderham & Worts Distillery (see Toronto) Gordon, Ian 135, 137 Gornig, M. 276, 277 Gourlay, Robert 191, 192, 198, 200, 207 Government Center (see Boston) Government of Canada 18, 207 governance corporatist 170 entrepreneurial 257 market-based 257 modes of 126, 144, 305 networked 126, 134, 135, 136 privatization of 257 urban 85, 145, 257, 276 Gowanus Canal (see New York) Grand Canal Basin (see Dublin) grand projets 238 Grand Projet de Ville (Great City Project ) (see Fort-de-France) Gran Via de les Corts Catalan (see Barcelona) Greater London Authority (GLA) (see London) Greater London Council (GLC) (see London) Greater Vancouver Gateway Council (GVGC) (see Vancouver) Greater Vancouver Regional District (see Vancouver) Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront (see New York) Gregoire, Chris 114 gridlock 30 Guano, Emanuela 222

H habitus 226

328

Index

HafenCity Hamburg (see Hamburg) Hajer, Maarten 102 Hamburg 1, 2, 3, 54, 74, 77, 78, 82, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 237, 245, 246, 247, 300, 301, 313, 314 Alster 89 Lake 89 River 89 Elbe River 246 Elbphilharmonie 91 HafenCity Hamburg 1, 54, 90, 91, 92, 93, 301 International Building Exhibition (IBA) 91 International Garden Show (GS) 91 Leap Across the Elbe 89, 91, 92, 93 ‘Metropolis Hamburg—Growing City’ 91, 92 Neumühlen 90 Port Authority (HPA) 90 Speicherstadt 90, 91 ‘string of pearls’ 89, 90, 301 Ueberseequartier 91 Wilhelmsburg 91, 92 Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) (see Hamburg) Hamilton, L. A. 23 Hannover 251 Harbour Commissioners (see Toronto) Harbour Commission (see Vancouver) Harbor Island (see Seattle) Harvey, David 75, 144, 162, 275, 276, 288, 289, 307 Haydn, Florian 239, 247 health 20, 63, 64, 148, 180, 194, 202, 203, 215, 311 Hebbert, Michael 81 height limits 154, 155, 299 Hendry, John 202 heritage 49, 55, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 77, 93, 108, 109, 115, 178, 216, 221, 238, 305, 312 Heseltine, Michael 79 hinterland access 75 historic preservation 155, 158, 159, 178 historical maritime connections 44 Holland-America Line (see Rotterdam) Holmes, Brian 228 Houghton, Graham 134, 135, 136 housing affordable 64, 167, 181, 184, 258, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266,

267, 269, 270, 271, 303, 305, 306 inclusionary 148 social 66, 131, 137, 258, 264, 265, 271 transitional 156 Housing Development Corporation (see Trinidad and Tobago) Hudson River (see New York) Huergo, Luis 220 Huntington, Vicki 30 hybridity 126, 135

I iconography 45 identities 7, 56, 59, 67, 69, 70, 71, 223, 296 ideology 122, 124, 128, 134, 143, 144, 192, 223, 228 of regeneration 128 of the free market replaced by policy rhetoric 122 improvement doctrine of 192, 197 of nature 8, 197, 312 Impact Advisory Group (IAG) 287 industrial lands 31 retention 167, 183, 184, 303 waterfront 20, 93, 102, 177, 178, 191, 211, 235, 237, 239, 244, 247, 302, 308 inequality 258, 270, 308 social 258, 308 informal settlements 38, 49, 296 soft infrastructure 240 infrastructure investment 17, 24, 28, 29, 192, 270 inner city development 93 Inner Harbor (see Baltimore) Innis, Harold 199 International Building Exhibition (IBA) (see Hamburg) International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) (see Dublin) International Garden Show (GS) (see Hamburg) International Network of Urban Waterfront Research (INUWR) 1, 229, 313 International Waterfront Centre 36, 44, 45, 46, 50, 51, 301 Ioannides and Debbage 239 Ireland 54, 60

Index Iron Triangle 173 Isar River (see Munich) Isle of Dogs (see London) Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone (see London) Isle of Dogs Community Foundation (see London)

J Jessop, Bob 126 Johnson, Boris 124, 139 Jørgensen, John 278 Jubilee Line (see London) justice 9, 110, 215, 229, environmental 229 social 35, 49, 103, 116, 117, 303, 314

K Kaika, Maria 10 Kaiser Steel 25 Keating Channel (see Toronto) Keating, E. H. 206 Keil, Roger 10, 11, 315 Keith, Michael 125 Kitsilano Indian Reserve (see Vancouver) Kop van Zuid (see Rotterdam)

L La Boca (see Buenos Aires) Labour Government 123, 125, 134 landmark projects 95, 238 land use 8, 44, 74, 75, 77, 90, 93, 102, 115, 129, 132, 136, 143, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 197, 201, 238, 239, 249, 252, 258, 262, 263, 265, 269, 270, 283, 284, 289, 302, 308 planning 146 regulation 180, 182, 238 Landry, Charles 76 Lapierre, Jean 28 Lake Ontario 193, 201, 208 large-scale redevelopment project 171, 260, 279 Latin America 36, 211, 214, 218 Leap Across the Elbe (see Hamburg) Lefèbvre, Henri 145, 146, 162 ‘left coast city’ (see San Francisco) leisure 54, 61, 66, 75, 77, 83, 130, 137, 217, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 252, 284, 304 Le Malecon (see Fort-de-France)

329

Letchimy, Serge 39, 41, 42, 49 Licata, Nick 110, 113 Liffey (see Dublin) liminal spaces 8 linearization of history, critique of 127 Livable Region Strategic Plan (see Vancouver) Livingstone, Ken 123, 125, 130, 136 living wage 269 Llobregat (see Barcelona) Locke, John 197 Logan International Airport (see Boston) logistics systems 31 London Blue Ribbon Network 81 Britannia Urban Village 132 Canary Wharf 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140 Canary Riverside 137 Canning Town 137 City Airport 123, 130 Development Agency (LDA) 134, 137 Docklands 78, 79, 80, 91, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 237, 298, 300, 301, 305, 306, 307, 310 Docklands Strategic Plan 123, 130 Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) 78, 121, 123 East London 123, 124, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137 East of England Development Agency (SeeDA) 81 Greater London Authority (GLA) 81, 121, 123, 124 Greater London Council (GLC) 123, 125, 130 Isle of Dogs 122, 123, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137 Enterprise Zone 128 Community Foundation 132 Jubilee Line 123, 124, 129, 131 Lower Lea Valley 124, 125, 135, 137 National Conference Centre 68 Olympic Development Agency 124, 134 Olympic village 139 People’s Plan for the Royal Docks 123 Port of London Authority (PLA) 82

330 Index Royal Docks 123, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137 Silvertown Quays 124, 137, 139 South East England Development Agency 81 Surrey Docks 27 Thames 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136, 138, 307, 315 Thames Gateway 78, 79, 80, 81, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136, 138, 307, 315 Thames Gateway London Partnership (TGLP) 81 Thames Gateway Urban Development Corporation 125 Tower Hamlets College 137 London City Airport (see London) London Development Agency (LDA) (see London) London Docklands Development Corporation (see London) Long Beach (see San Francisco) Long Island (see New York) Lord Rogers 136 Los Angeles 28, 267, 269, 315 Lower Don River (see Toronto) Lower Lea Valley (see London) Lower Mainland (see Vancouver) Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board (LMRPB) (see Vancouver)

M Maas (see Rotterdam) Maashaven (see Rotterdam) Maasvlakte 2 (see Rotterdam) MacNaughton, Francis 27 MacPherson, C. B. 197 Madero, Eduardo 220 Magdeburg 248 Magnin, Cyril 150 Mainz 248 managerialism 144, 275, 307 Manhattan (see New York) Mannheim 251 Maremagnum (see Barcelona) Marita 84 markets as the prime mechanism for redevelopment 121 marsh 81, 92, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 213, 221, 296 Martin, Quinquela 226 Martinique 35, 36, 39, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52

Massey Manufacturing Company (see Toronto) Massport / Massachussets Port Authority (see Boston) McAteer Petris Act 153, 157 Mediterranean 82 megaproject 252 Melbourne 7, 54 Menem, Carlos 221 Menino, Mayor Thomas 284, 285, 286 mercantilism 194, 308 Merwehaven (see Rotterdam) metropolitan regions 2, 17, 276 Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance 169 ‘Metropolis Hamburg—Growing City’ (see Hamburg) Miami 258, 269 Milwaukee 269 mixed-use projects 11, 76, 145 mobility 5, 6, 10, 56, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 271, 297, 300 modernization 2, 8, 10, 40, 54, 86, 193, 194, 203, 312, 315 mobilization of scale 46 Mohammed, Asad 38 Montreal 199, 200, 258, 315 Moses, Robert 173, 174, 306 Moss, Mitchell 169 Munich 247 Isar River 247 Municipal Art Society (see New York) Municipal Corporation Act (see Trinidad and Tobago)

N National Conference Centre (see London) National Conference on City Planning 191 National Harbours Board (see Vancouver) navy and military 75 neoliberal agenda 276 urbanization 122, 143, 161, 162, 309 urbanism 143, 145, 147, 148, 167, 182, 313 neoliberalism 79, 106, 110, 112, 117, 118, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 152, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170, 173, 182, 228, 257, 276, 295, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314

Index ‘actually existing’ 144, 147, 148, 157, 161, 310, 314 resistance to 148 ‘roll out’ 161, 308 Netherlands 85, 88, 259, 263, 305,306 networks 6, 18, 19, 22, 28, 58, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 74, 101, 213, 215, 216, 240, 262, 300 global 216, 262 Neumühlen (see Hamburg) New Haven 269 New Jersey 168, 297 New Labour 81, 122, 123, 134, 136, 139 Newman, Peter 126 New York Battery Park City 168, 237 ‘Bloomberg way’ 167, 170 Bronx 168, 172 Brooklyn 167, 169, 172, 178, 180, 181, 183, 213, 239, 242, 296, 299, 300, 302 Building Congress 166 City Department of City Planning (DCP) 169 City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) 169 Gowanus Canal 168, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 302, 312 Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) 180 Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront 178 Hudson River 167, 168 Long Island 167 Manhattan 86, 167, 170, 174 Municipal Art Society 175, 183 Park Slope and Cobble Hill 179 Pratt Center for Community Development 171, 176, 177, 183 Queens 167, 172, 173, 177 Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) 180 South Street Seaport 168 Staten Island 167, 168 Sunset Park Waterfront Vision Plan 183 Willets Point 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 300, 302 redevelopment plan 172 New York City Department of City Planning (DCP) (see New York) New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) (see New York) Nickels, Mayor Greg 111, 114, 118

331

nomadic metaphysics 6, 63, 67, 70, 312 North Fraser Port Authority (see Vancouver) North Seattle Industrial Association (see Seattle) North Wall (see Dublin) North Wall Quay (see Dublin) ‘Not In Our Name’ 2

O Oakland 28, 150, 269, 297 Olmsted, Frederick Law 191 Olympic Development Agency (see London) Olympic Games 82, 168 1992 in Barcelona 82 2012 in London 168 Olympic port (see Barcelona) Olympic village (see London) opening towards the sea 83 opportunity zones 136 oppositional practices (see contestation) Oslo 77 Oststrand (see Berlin)

P Palau del Mar (see Barcelona) Panama Canal 23, 24, 301 Paris 48, 235, 244, 245 Seine 245 Paris Plage 235, 244, 245 Pompidou Expressway 245 Paris Plage (see Paris) Park Slope and Cobble Hill (see New York) participant observation 55, 214, 237, 311 Passeig de Colom (see Barcelona) Pearse Street Community (see Dublin) Peck, Jamie 132, 144, 148, 166, 170 Pendant Bridge (see Buenos Aires) People’s Plan for the Royal Docks (see London) Pigeon Lofts (see Dublin) piers 82, 146, 148, 150, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 221, 222, 226, 229, 300, 301, 302 Placa Catalunya (see Barcelona) Planned Development Area 287, 299 planning community 147, 182, 268 community-based 158 comprehensive 299 inclusive 177 leverage-based 79

332

Index

master 80, 132, 136, 237, 252 opportunistic 128 participatory 77, 132 popular 130 unplanning 236 Plantopolis model 42 Plan Rotterdam Region 2020 (see Rotterdam) Plate River Basin 218, 298 Plate River Estuary 223 Plaza de Mayo (see Buenos Aires) Poblenou (see Barcelona) Pointe Simon (see Fort-de-France) political ecology 2, 10, 194 politics ‘green’ 148 of identity 48 of mobility 101, 102, 103, 107, 116, 118 of reconnection 17, 18, 22, 23, 31 Pompidou Expressway (see Paris) Port Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (see Trinidad and Tobago) port city 18, 20, 40, 41, 89, 211, 218 Port Industrial District (see Toronto) port logistics 21, 74, 94 Porteños 211, 216, 220, 226, 227 Port of London Authority (PLA) (see London) Port Mann Bridge (see Vancouver) Port Metro Vancouver (PMV) (see Vancouver) Port Moody (see Vancouver) Port of Rotterdam (PRA) (see Rotterdam) Port of Rotterdam Authority (PRA) (see Rotterdam) Port of San Francisco (see San Francisco) Port of Seattle (see Seattle) Port of Singapore (PSA) 94 Port of Spain 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 296, 301, 302 Brian Lara Promenade 44 East Port of Spain Development Company 48 Sea Lots 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51 Port of Vancouver (see Vancouver) Port Vell (see Barcelona) Port Vision 2020 (see Rotterdam) post-colonial identity 49, 51 post-industrial 2, 8, 75, 84, 93, 150, 168, 177, 224, 229, 239, 252, 277, 278, 298

city 150, 170, 171, 252 economy 166 waterfront 20, 93, 239, 241, 244 post-industrialization 75 post-industrial society 75 Pratt Center for Community Development (see New York) privatization 66, 79, 88, 136, 144, 157, 158, 161, 171, 220, 252, 257, 307 privatization of public spaces 66 problem spaces 2 project oriented planning 279 property-led development 10, 11, 12, 170, 233, 258, 259, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 288, 289, 290, 307, 308, 309 regeneration 128, 168, 170 property ownership 75 patterns of 75 public participation 268 public services 48, 173, 258 public space 43, 50, 64, 65, 66, 70, 83, 145, 162, 166, 200, 215, 241, 249, 265, 304, 308, 311 public trust doctrine 156 Puerto Madero (see Buenos Aires) Puget Sound (see Seattle)

Q Queens (see New York) Querandíes Indians 218

R Raco, Mike 126, 135 railroads 30, 31, 146, 200, 300 Rambla de Mar (see Barcelona) Rambla Prim (see Barcelona) reconnection 18, 19, 22, 23, 27, 31 Reconquista River (see Bueno Aires) Redevelopment Agency (see San Francisco) referendum / ballot 152, 158, 160, 206 regeneration discourses 125, 130, 131, 135, 139 dynamics of 122, 134, 138 market-led 122 regional agglomeration 276 Regional Planning Guidance (RPG) 81 regional perspective of waterfront transformation 74, 77 Republic of Ireland 54 Résorption de l’Habitat Insalubre 42

Index reterritorializing 7 Riachuelo River 214, 215, 222 ‘right to the city’ 35, 49, 145, 146, 162 Rhine River 251 Rijnhaven (see Rotterdam) Roberts Bank (see Vancouver) Robertson, John Ross 208 Rogers, Richard 138 Rotterdam 74, 78, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 270, 271, 297, 300, 302, 304, 308, 312 City Ports Development Corporation (RCDC) 88 Delfshaven 88 Eemhaven 88 Erasmus Bridge 86, 87, 300 Holland-America Line 86 Kop van Zuid 86, 87, 88, 258, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 268, 271, 300, 305, 309 Maas 86, 87, 88 , 89, 263, 265 Maashaven 88 Maasvlakte 2 87, 88 , 89, 263, 265 Merwehaven 88 Plan Rotterdam Region 2020 89 Port of Rotterdam (PRA) 87, 89, 263 Port of Rotterdam Authority (PRA) 89 Port Vision 2020 89, 263, 265 Rijnhaven 88 Rotterdam Mainport Development Project 87 Rotterdam City Ports Development Corporation 88 Stadshaven 88, 89, 263 Vierhaven 88, 265 Waalhaven 88 Wilhelmina Pier 86 Rotterdam City Ports Development Corporation (RCDC) (see Rotterdam) Rotterdam Mainport Development Project (see Rotterdam) Rouse Corporation 7 Rouse, James 7, 93 Royal Docks (see London) rule of equivalencies 154, 157 Ryan, Brent 252, 253

S sanctuary city 148 Sandercock, Leonie 7 San Diego 269

333

San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) 153 Bay Plan 153, 157 Convention Center and Enhancement Zone 280 Embarcadero City concept 151 Ferry Port Plaza 153, 154 General Plan 153 ‘left coast city’ 143 Long Beach 28, 156 Planning Department 162 Port of 148 Redevelopment Agency 148, 150 San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) 143 Telegraph Hill 159 Waterfront Land Use Plan (WLUP) 158 San Francisco Planning Department (see San Francisco) San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) (see San Francisco) San Jose 269 Sassen, Saskia 17, 217 scalar approaches to development 47 Schacht, Walter 114 Schumacher, Fritz 92 Sea Lots (see Port of Spain) Seaport District (see Boston) Seaport Public Realm Plan (see Boston) Seattle Alaskan Way Viaduct 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 arts community 109 City Council 105, 113, 115 Displacement Coalition 110, 111, 116 Downtown Seattle Association 112 Harbor Island 108 North Seattle Industrial Association 108 Port of 108 Puget Sound 110, 111 Seattle City Council (see Seattle) Seattle Displacement Coalition (see Seattle) sedentarist metaphysics 6 Seine (see Paris) Select Committee on Harbour Improvement (see Toronto) shared equity homeownership 267 shipbuilding 75, 76, 94

334 Index Silver Line (see Boston) Silvertown Quays (see London) Sir John Rogerson’s Quay (see Dublin) sites of promise 2 social anthropology 55, 57 social capital 61, 70, 296 cohesion 47, 257, 271 fragmentation 35, 41, 51 inclusion 80, 126, 135, 139 integration 61, 257, 269, 270, 271, 305 justice 35, 49, 103, 116, 117, 303, 314 networks 58, 60, 61, 67, 70 organization 54, 55, 58, 59, 64, 70, 71 polarization 95, 257, 271, 308 progress 108 sustainability 257, 258, 259, 270, 271, 305 socio-economic polarization 122 socio-nature 8, 191, 194, 197, 202, 207 soft infrastructure 240 Sommerwelt (see Berlin) South Boston (see Boston) South Boston Waterfront (see Boston) South East England Development Agency (see London) South Fraser Perimeter Road (see Vancouver) Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) (see New York) South Street Seaport (see New York) spaces of dependence 19, 298 of engagement 19, 30, 31, 298 of opportunity 2 of promise 3 spatial fragmentation 41, 257, 308 division of labour 88 relationship between ports and cities 74 Spanish colonizers 218 spatial network of cities 7 spectacle 143, 145, 156, 241, 243, 244, 248, 274, 301, 302 Speicherstadt (see Hamburg) Spencer Dock (see Dublin) squatting settlements / communities 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 51

Stad aan de Stroom (City on the Stream) (see Antwerp) Stadshaven (see Rotterdam) staples export economy 24 star architects / ‘starchitect’ 95 Staten Island (see New York) Steinbrueck, Peter 115 Stevens, Harry 24 Stevens, Quentin 7 St. Quentin 235 Strandbar Mitte (see Berlin) Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona (PEMB) (see Barcelona) strategic redevelopment plan 221 Stratford 124, 134 ‘string of pearls’ (see Hamburg) Stuttgart 247, 251 sudestadas 223, 224 Sunset Park Waterfront Vision Plan (see New York) surveillance 102, 145, 147, 219, 304 sustainable 3, 11, 62, 71, 75, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88, 94, 95, 124, 125, 126, 135, 137, 174, 176, 178, 257, 258, 263, 264, 314 sustainability environmental 134 social 257, 258, 259, 270, 271, 305 Surrey Docks (see London) Swyngedouw, Erik 5, 46, 278 Sydney 54, 77 City Vision 2030 89

T Tacoma 28, 297 tax incentives 61 technological authenticity 224 technological change 74 in shipping and cargo handling 74 Ted Williams Tunnel (see Boston) Telegraph Hill (see San Francisco) Temel, Robert 249 tenure / ownership 37, 38, 41, 43, 132, 137, 245, 296 territorial wedges 3 Thames (see London) Thames Gateway (see London) Thames Gateway London Partnership (TGLP) (see London) Thames Gateway Urban Development Corporation (see London) Thatcher, Margaret 78, 123, 128, 129, 131 Thornley, Andy 129, 138

Index Tickell, Adam 144, 166, 170 Toronto 1912 Waterfront Plan 207 Ashbridge’s Bay and Marsh 193, 197, 198, 203 Ashbridge’s Bay Property Owner’s Association 202 Beavis and Brown 204, 205, 206 Civic Guild of Toronto 203, 310 Don Improvement Act 202 Don River 197, 198, 201, 202, 204 Gooderham & Worts Distillery 199 Harbour Commissioners 198, 207, 208 Keating Channel 198 Lower Don River 202 Massey Manufacturing Company 199 Port Industrial District 193, 197, 208 Select Committee on Harbour Improvement 200 Toronto Star 208 York Bay 201 Toronto Harbour Commissioners (see Toronto) Toronto Star (see Toronto) Tower Hamlets College (see London) Town Planning Institute 191 Travelstead, G. Ware 129 Trier 248 Trinidad and Tobago 36, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51 Housing Development Corporation 48 Municipal Corporation Act 47 Port Authority of Trinidad and Tobago 44 Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) 44 trust lands 156, 157 Tully, Kivas 199 Turok, Ivan 290

U Ueberseequartier (see Hamburg) 91 universalism 203 unplanning 236 urban competitiveness 261 ecosystem 40 ecological landscape 204 development policies 84

335

landscape 46, 193, 238, 239, 258, 274, 301 mangroves 36, 39, 41, 49, 51 planning agency 288 planning approaches 276 politics 102, 103, 118, 274, 275, 288, 289 redevelopment ventures 166, 308 regime theory 289 renaissance 313 renewal 36, 42, 46, 47, 50, 51, 84, 101, 171, 174, 278, 306 renewal projects 35 restructuring 150 revitalization 42, 49 space, reconfiguring of 2, 7, 70, 101, 102, 117, 166, 174 spectacle 274, 301 vision 49, 51, 174 waterfronts 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 35, 41, 42, 51, 56, 101, 102, 118, 122, 167, 194, 213, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 243, 253, 296, 297, 303, 307, 312, 313 Urban Contract of Social Cohesion (UCSC) (see Fort-de-France) Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) 10, 78, 122, 123, 124, 237, 307 Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) (see Trinidad and Tobago) urbanization of nature 10 U.S. Postal Service 280

V Velazquez, Nydia (Congresswoman) 180 Vancouver 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 296, 300, 301, 307 Asia Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative (APGCI) 27 Burnaby 30 Burrard Inlet 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28 Centerm 27, 28 Delta, Corporation (Municipality) of 26 Deltaport 20, 27, 28 English Bay 23 False Creek 23 Fraser River Port Authority 18 Fraser Surrey Docks 27

336

Index

Greater Vancouver Gateway Council (GVGC) 28 Greater Vancouver Regional District 30 Harbour Commission 23, 24 Kitsilano Indian Reserve 23 Livable Region Strategic Plan 30 Lower Mainland 18, 25, 28, 30 Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board (LMRPB) 25 National Harbours Board 24, 25, 26 North Fraser Port Authority 18 Port of 22, 25, 27 Port Authority (VPA) 18 Port Corporation (VPC) 27 Port Mann Bridge 29, 30 Port Metro Vancouver (PMV) 18 Port Moody 23 Roberts Bank 20, 25, 26, 28, 30 South Fraser Perimeter Road 29, 30 Vanterm 27, 28 Vancouver Port Authority (see Vancouver) Vancouver Port Corporation (see Vancouver) VESPA AG (see Antwerp) Vierhaven (see Rotterdam) Viking Splash Tours 59 Volga Plage 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51

W Waalhaven (see Rotterdam) warehouse district 1, 91 Washington State House of Representatives 113 water potable 194, 213, 215, 218, 221, quality 84, 153, 206 waterfront change 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 203, 208, 236, 238, 259, 295, 303, 306, 310, 311, 313 development 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 43, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54, 74, 76, 77, 121, 143, 155, 156, 160, 167, 171, 183, 198, 203, 206, 207, 211, 219, 221, 226, 235, 236, 237, 238, 243, 248, 251, 252, 253, 259, 268, 269, 270, 274,

295, 299, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, 314 environment 296 industrial 20, 93, 177, 178, 191, 237, 247, 308 modernization 2 nation 218 planning 146, 167, 302, 309 property 106, 183, 192, 207, 286, 304, 308 redevelopment 43, 49, 76, 77, 93, 102, 170, 252, 274, 278, 279, 297 regeneration 56, 70, 93, 121,122,125, 126, 134, 139, 140, 237, 257, 258, 259, 266, 269, 270 spaces 2, 3, 8, 10, 101, 236, 298, 299, 311 transformation 11, 43, 71, 74, 77, 101, 102, 103 transport infrastructure 300, 312 vernacular 254 Waterfront Land Use Plan (WLUP) (see San Francisco) waterways 101, 156, 168, 179, 213, 249, 297, 309, 312 welfare state 144 wetlands 153 Wilhelmina Pier (see Rotterdam) Wilhelmsburg (see Hamburg) Willets Point 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 300, 302 redevelopment plan 172 Wilson, Norman 198 Wood, Stephen 7 Woodcock, Ian 7 world class city 56, 63, 67, 70, 148 world-class city quarter 67

Y York Bay (see Toronto)

Z Zone d’Activité Économique (see Fortde-France) Zoning Code (see Boston)