Brief Abstract (250 words)People have redesigned coastlines -creating ports, shaping waterfronts, and building cities -to connect water and land. Specialists from many disciplines have explored the function and design of the water-land transition over many centuries. Among them, planning as a discipline engages both with the functionality of working ports and the design of the waterfront for the urban public. Exploring the development of working ports and the revitalization of abandoned inner-city waterfronts since the 1960s, this paper reviews planning and planning history literature in regard to the specific appreciation of water. It first examines the planning of ports and its focus on improving the speed, safety and logistics, assigning water an industrial role. Second, it reflects on the design of postindustrial waterfront spaces, which ascribes a more aesthetic and symbolic as well as leisure-related role to water. Third, it points to the recent reconnection of cruise shipping with inner-city waterfront redevelopment and the coastline in general. In conclusion, the paper underscores local perceptions of water in planning literature and the need to recognize how interconnected water systems connect otherwise separated areas along the same coastline. It argues for integrated planning of port, waterfront, and city in conjunction with a comprehensive study of the environmental and ecological role of water in each of those places, both as a resource they share and, with climate change, a risk to which they must collectively respond.