Progettare città liquide

Urban waterfronts are today one of the most prolific variants of augmented cities: fluid and hybrid places where resources, opportunities, aspirations and ambitions of cities are translated into visions, new relations and projects. The creative port city is capable of reactivating new fluid metabolism, generating new architectural forms and producing new landscapes. The permanent flows of urban culture, grounding on the waterfront, are capable to fuel huge relational networks, making cities more dynamic, communicative and competitive. The most important implication of waterfront regeneration is that this particular area should be addressed as a structural and strategic element of the city as a whole. Enforcing the fluidity as a characteristic of contemporary cities. One of the inevitable consequences of tightly inter-woven relations among cities, ports and coastal areas is that tools of intervention used on urban waterfronts must be capable of intercepting, interpreting and transforming the entire city and not be restricted purely to areas along the coast. Rising to the challenge of the urban waterfront as a spark of urban regeneration demands targeted efforts to create the sensation of a waterfront not so much as a physical location but more in the form of flexible, porous, liquid aspects the whole city: what I defined the “Fluid City Paradigm”. Today a new paradigm of knowledge/action on urban waterfronts should guide us, and we could define it as the third generation in waterfront planning, after the first leisure-based generation and after the second one based on cultural and services investments. The third generation in waterfront planning and design have to be creativity-driven, able to produce a whole regeneration force for the city competitiveness, smartness and quality, contributing at the urban fluidity.