Urban regeneration strategies in waterfront areas: an interpretative framework

In this paper, we discuss strategies and practices for regenerating waterfronts, a typology of urban space, exposed more than others to profit-driven urbanization. Following the literature and the academic debate of the last decades, the main elements of two fundamentally different visions of the waterfront and of the city in general are identified and investigated. Based on these elements we draw a unified framework to elicit the city vision underlying actual regenerative practices and we propose a concise set of criteria to compare case studies. This conceptual and methodological grid can be usefully employed for the framing of the decision making process at the planning stage by policy makers and practitioners, for the assessment of these policies in the public debate and, more generally, for teaching and empirical research purposes in this field.