The Waterfront Theorem: an integrated and creative planning approach

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