The Waterfront Theorem: an integrated and creative planning approach

Waterfronts are sensitive interfaces between land and sea, creative interfacesbetween urban and environmental components, social interfaces between nodesand networks. They not only coincide with the areas of infrastructure that are gathering on the coast, not only with the shoreline or the environmentalcomponents of the coastal territories. They are hired by the project as complexinteraction of crossing flows, stratified identity of urban communities:fundamental element of the environmental system, synthesis of landscape, spaceand community, a place of solidification of the identity of the social, cultural andeconomic community (Carta, 2009).The management of urban interface of waterfront presents some problemsarticulated in relation to both new environmental and ecological concerns and thecomplex dimension of the multiplicity of rules and institutions charged withprotecting, planning and managing processes. For the intervention on thewaterfront the Project defined general strategies that was able to intercept the linksbetween port and urban economies, between the local and the global strategies ofthe territorial system, between public spaces and touristic fluxes.