Palermo Waterfront: the “fluid city” planning

Abstract

The most dynamic cities in the future will no longer be those that are able to attract iconic urban projects and investors driven by the real estate market focused on waterfront development, but the cities that have extensive cultural and ecological coastal resources and that are able to use them as the basis for creating new social identity and economic value. In a growing dematerialised development, the waterfronts of European cities are intersected by flows of the Network Society. They are subjects of experience economy and crossed by more powerful forces of regeneration and creativity-driven development. After the simple function of interfaces between sea and land, waterfronts are going to begin the "gateways" connecting material and immaterial global flows. Leaving its productive, commercial and functional roles, waterfront appears as "sensible hub" of global and wide networked economies into powerful resources able to revitalise local contexts. Urban coastal areas are today interested by new commercial functions or by naval mobility innovation, but they are also subjects by environmental regeneration and conservation of architectural heritage, or are under pressure by real estate investments. But more often the waterfronts can seize the opportunities offered by cultural dynamics of creative economy. Waterfronts are today one of the most fertile identity of the cities that are investing in the enhancement of local culture, talent and excellence. They are places where dense and hybrid resources, opportunities, aspirations and ambitions of the city become vision, new relationships and projects. Not just real estate areas for aggressive capitalism, but nodes of a global network of flows of goods and people, places of cultural exchange, gateways of the "capitals of culture" increasingly competing to attract people, events, functions and investment and to produce quality, environmental sustainability and social cohesion.