Introduction to “Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations”

Abstract

The papers in this special issue focus on the political ecology of waterfronts in selected cities in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. The papers incorporate emphases on the myriad inOuences that different scales of social and environmental policy development and implementation, planning decisions, infrastructure funding, investment and ownership practices, and public engagement, for example, have on the social and ecological processes that occur on urban waterfronts. We posit that urban waterfronts are interesting and complex spatial locations that, when studied with attention to broader transformative processes as well as the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social entanglement, and political-economic configurations in cities.

Framing scrappage in Germany and the UK: from climate discourse to recession talk?

“…In this case the re-nationalisation of automobile policy-making has opened the way to lobbying that seeks to foreground the 'national car industry' as imagined community -and as victim rather than villain. The use of different scales to shape policy discourse produces social and environmental 'realities' that in turn shape political values and spatial politics (Bunce and Desfor 2007).…”

The Emergence and Spread of Ecourban Neighbourhoods around the World

“…Since the 1980s, ecourban redevelopment projects have also been pursued to revitalize and "grow" cities, aiming to capture hidden value by reclaiming and transforming land once considered a liability [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. From 1981 to 1998, London Docklands Development Corporation established the prototype for a form and ethic of urban redevelopment that has reproduced across Europe, North America, and beyond, with comparable results [37,42].…”

Municipal strategies for introducing housing on industrial estates as part of compact-city policies in the Netherlands

“…In some cases, mixed-use areas combining housing and carefully selected other functions have proved very successful (Hoppenbrouwer and Louw, 2005). Former docklands that have been transformed into high-quality, high-price waterfront living environments are a good example of this (Gordon, 1997;Wigmans, 2001;Bunce and Desfor, 2007). This process can be bolstered by appropriate placemaking discourse (Raco, 2003).…”