The Sustainable Waterfront

This chapter discusses how a methodology for the development of a sustainable waterfront might be shaped through an understanding and consideration of environmental remediation technologies. The chapter begins by considering the history of waterfront development in Europe and America and how this model has become codified into a generic real estate process. The author develops a critique of this model from an environmental perspective. The use of sustainability as an ideology to provide a framework for critique but also strategies and techniques for moving towards a new model of waterfront development are explored. The development of a possible hypothesis for the design of a sustainable waterfront is developed, followed by a speculative case study of a waterfront project that explores how the design hypotheses might be tested. The chapter concludes by speculating on the ways in which a study of urban ecology, in particular urban biodiversity, could enhance the finding of the case study towards the development of a waterfront design process that could contribute to the ecological health of the 21st century city.