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HARBOURSCAPE BETWEEN SPECIALIZATION AND PUBLIC SPACE

Michelangelo Russo, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

TWO KEY NOTIONS

Talking about urban waterfronts and port areas, landscape and public space are key notions in a

contemporary debate about cities. The waterfront is a liminal urban area, an extraordinary

gateway between artifice and nature, where the city traditionally represents itself on the edge

between land and water.

The port is an area of transition, an urban dividing line that, thank to flows and functions density,

increased its attractiveness and its ability to receive its symbolic and representative value.

It is a strategic area where the city becomes landscape. The port infrastructure arises following the

natural morphology of the waterfront and remodeling a space that is not only an access device,

but also a place where it is possible to perceive the territory-landscape, the shoreline and the

urban front. A line with different dimensions but, at the same time, an incredible depth that

defines the city identity, strengthened by architectural elements (lighthouses and lights, docks,

warehouses, customs) improving its magnet role, an attractor for common economics and urban

activities.

In the past, port areas have represented an amazing public space for the city, not only for their

centrality and for the existence of commercial traffics, but also for the social identity of the place

linked to its landscape as a character representing the singularity and the identity of the harbor in

the urban morphology.

However, in the course of time, they lost their urban character, gradually becoming high

specialized ‘independent machines’ and taking out every activity and every function not essentially

related to their internal operation.

Today the port area has become a sectorial infrastructure divided from the city; it lost its double

nature of landscape and public space. The crisis of this relationship created marginalization and

urban blight not only in its proximity, near boundary areas, contact and filter spaces between the

harbor and the surrounding, but also next to the infrastructures that connect and, at the same

time, divide the city from its waterfront.

In the contemporary1 European city, in the post-Fordism era of abandon, dismission ad

obsolescence of many port infrastructures, there was a deep and structural re-thinking about this

double nature, especially in high density and multi-layered urban areas. The aim was to rethink

the port as potential place with enormous transformative prospective, able to offer at the same

time original spaces for urban life, crossing areas, free time attractive territories and new

residential, manufacturing and commercial areas.

1 From the 1980s, a different integration to the existent city throughout the remodeling of port areas was frequent. Examples like the Moll de la Fusta in Barcelona, the London Docklands, the Amsterdam Eastern Docklands, the Kop Van Zuid in Rotterdam and the Hafen City in Hamburg, prove the amazing urban potential of the waterfront as an opportunity of urban and social regeneration and of reconstruction of integrated parts of the city.

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Thinking over this double nature means perceive the port as a multi-functional system. The

intersection between historically incompatible activities can become an innovative form of

functional and spatial joint as a multifunctional system, an interdisciplinary project that creates

urban spaces integrated to the city and that allows the coexistence of different uses. The project

of a new public space between the sea and the hinterland could involve all these conflicting

functions. These spaces, connection between sea and land, are central because of the topology,

the big amount of infrastructures, the intersection of flows and functions and – not least – the

ability to revitalize the layered identity of these areas.

Integration and cross-sectorial strategies are the keywords – in a new port area prospective - for a

different concept of it as a landscape and a public space. We need to extend the multifunctional

landscape2 concept to the port’s waterfront, as a conceptual reference useful to rethink these

area, traditionally used for manufacturing and sectorial uses, as a part of an over scaled landscape

system. This system needs to be reconfigured, not only in terms of sustainability, working on any

material that links, on a larger scale, its identity to different territorial figures.

In the contemporary world, landscape is a multi-sense notion, used in different cultural contexts

as a reference of different project approaches: the dimension of its use results from its attitude to

represent the “long duration” and the connections between space and society. It’s not only about

the state of nature, neither ecology or biodiversity: landscape is becoming an argument that

identifies different spaces, infrastructures and settlements, that includes also fragmented spaces,

result of contemporary urbanization, suburbs degeneration, urban and functional dross, materials

that have a potential coming from the urban metabolism3. Landscape is about potential spaces,

tractable and convertible areas, a resource of many phenomenon of the urban change: it includes

in-between spaces, the enclosed open spaces potential, urban agricultural areas, disused places,

uncultivated lands, waterfronts and brownfields, dismissed areas, and any type of landscape

recognizable as drosscapes4.

There are places with strong and hidden landscape values, potential common landscapes, as

spaces of social relations and inclusion, of continuity and rebalance between urban functions and

functional and infrastructural polarities. Landscape, in this sense, is a public space, a space usually

marginalized by the modernity of the twentieth century, sometimes relegated to be an “inverse 2 Multifunctional landscape is a concept related to ecosystems, where sometimes the ecological function have to become compatible to different and usually incompatible uses. These type of studies are usually agricultural or – when working on the city – greenways oriented, especially in the US landscape, as structures “planned, designed and managed for multiple purposes including ecological, recreational, cultural aesthetic or other purposes compatible with the concept of sustainable land use”. Ahern J. F., Greenways as Strategic Landscape Planning: Theory and Application, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. 3 A clear form of urban metabolism is also in the city and infrastructures building process that, producing dross and waste, creates new landscapes categories: “Contemporary modes of industrial production, driven by economical and consumerist influences, contribute to urbanization and the formation of “waste landscapes” (…..) there is no growth without waste and the urban growth and dross go hand in hand, and always have (…..) due to physics itself. Complex processes must export waste to their boundaries in order to maintain and grow”. A. Berger, Drosscape. Wasting Land in Urban America, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006 (pag. 45). 4 Drosscapes refers to the famous Alan Berger notion, but also to many reinterpretations and a different contextualization of this term in many current research programs, like “Re-Cycle Italy”.

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space”, a residual extension of the functional city design, an inertial shape of a sectorial project

that produced specialization, fragmentation and discontinuity.

The port is, potentially, landscape and public space: its shape, its position, its history, its shore line

connections, its nature of public space as an extension of the city into the sea, define its social and

urban character.

A DOUBLE NATURE AND A DOUBLE INTERPRETATION

This double nature of public space and landscape, can help us thinking the port area as an

independent machine, regulated by laws and rulings into his spatial and authority enclave, but also

as a part of the city, as a natural extension of spaces and fabrics that characterize the urban

morphology.

We can read the port of the contemporary city with a double view: lengthwise and transverse. A

two dimension view, that allow us to interpret the port waterfront as an hybrid territory that

belongs to land and water: a boundary and an offshoot city space, infrastructure and specialized

area, flows space and urban front, public and collective space, exchange and crossing space. An

uncertain space, with an identity that changes in the course of time leaving the prosperity of the

landscape and growing in a closed, unfathomable, and supervised envelope. The port’s waterfront

connects specialized areas that lost the characteristics of a place, sectorial rationality sediments,

that left a mark with deep incisions and irregular zones, and contemporary city’s critical and

potential materials that need to be understood through a perceptive and functional interpretation

of spaces. An interpretation that defines a double interpretive framework.

Lengthwise, because the port is a space closed to the city, between its enclosure and the sea. It is

an unfathomable zone organized on the basis of connections between different parts, areas,

elements, buildings, characterized by functional reasons often without any link to the urban

context, except for the infrastructure that allow the access and the crossing of the internal space.

The harbor enclosure has monitored access and imposed direction of travel that define –

lengthwise – an inner organization of linear series of volumes, of enclosures and buildings,

describing the urban waterfront as a composition of large buildings, linear infrastructure and

functional centers.

Lengthwise, the harbor subdivision works on the architectural perception of sequence: maritime

station, support facilities, Ro-Ro handling platforms, warehouses, offices, silos, military buildings,

shipbuilding, dry docks, large tow trucks and gantry cranes, cargo platforms, multifunctional and

multicolored buildings. Lengthwise, the port is an infrastructure governed by a sectorial rationality

and an efficiency logic.

Transverse, the port concerns the relationships with the city along the history. Indeed, thanks to

the “calate”, roads transverse to the coastline and aligned to small and big piers, it was possible to

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arrive in many historical docks in port-cities (Napoli, Genova, Marsiglia, for example), projecting

the city on the water intersecting spaces and relationships.

The historical port – as a natural waterfront extension – was a place of social, public and

commercial activities, with no distinction between public and specialized spaces. We can clearly

see this structure thanks to the historical city-port iconography, for example on the Neapolitan

Tavola Strozzi (before 14875) that represents an amazing landscape perfectly integrated to the

city.

These urban spaces, coming along from the core of the city to the sea, disappeared and

established the construction of a space divided from the city, taking away the presence of the

water and, therefore, of the waterfront morphology, changing the perception of the city-port. The

perception of the waterfront as an open and public space was modified permanently by its

progressive strengthening and expansion, creating a vast barrier for the transverse flows that

previously connected the waterfront to the city.

Transverse, the best geometry possible to describe the morphological connections between city

and waterfront, it is possible to read the human relationships palimpsest during the

transformation of the port city into an independent system. The weakening of the social use of the

space created a city-port dualism, from a morphology and transformation process point of view.

Today, also in Naples, the estrangement of the development targets, the time disagreement, the

plans actions and the management of the spaces, make the integration between port functional

areas and public spaces even more marginal. This means that the integration-oriented project

becomes an “impact mitigation” action that works only on the compatibility of the intervention

between the port service areas and the surrounding city.

The functional and physical division increases the perception of the port as a barrier rather than a

filter, creating marginalized in-between spaces, usually degraded and abandoned and difficult to

transform; urban spaces waiting for new functions, urban regeneration and re-design of public ad

service spaces (like the Marinella park in Naples). This condition, often limited to specific part of

the city, on the edge of port areas, underlines the critical elements of the role of this even more

specialized infrastructure into the urban context, expunging the public space, excluding the

crossing and putting the landscape on the background.

The port zones are now impervious industrial and manufacturing enclosures, large platforms

isolated from the context and crossed by railways, viaducts and highways, full of logistical

platforms and large parking lots.

Turn the sense of these conditions aims rethinking waterfront – inside and outside the port – as a

public space. A place where integration and specialization spaces become new, open and

accessible spatial devices, able to host urban related functions, not only specialized ones, with a

5 C. De Seta, Napoli fra Rinascimento e Illuminismo, Napoli, Electa 1991 (pp. 12-16).

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project that works on hidden layouts and potential spaces, to reinvent the continuity and the

identity of the city.

This can help us rethinking the infrastructures, the territory transit and crossing, the housing

condition in degraded districts near and along the waterfront, rethinking the social identity and

the connection of fragmented ecological, environmental and landscape networks.

The lengthwise view, linked to the waterfront parallel zone, refers not only to morphology but also

to managerial and administrative logics of the actors involved into the sectorial port functions6

(Port Authority, authority subjects, Port Captaincies, etc.). The transverse view, on the other hand,

requires the constant and continuous exploration of the possible connection to the city, involving

different institutional subjects (Municipality and Port Authority), public and private, mobilized by

the city value.

The integration between these two dimensions is related not only to the port morphology, but

also to a different concept of uses and functions, rethinking the port waterfront as an urban

regeneration device, as a landscape infrastructure, as an accessible public space system integrated

to the city.

Designing the port could mean think over a system of internal connections of the urban functions,

considering public crossing patches along the barriers that divide traditional port activities. But

this means, especially, enlarge the perimeter and the scale of the transformation project, thanks

to a port regeneration urban policy.

The port-city interface doesn’t have to be restricted to the re-design of specialized area edges, but

has to orient the project for the port functional areas, for its spaces and urban infrastructure,

outsourcing some parts if necessary (many European cities that had a deep transformation in their

port areas, like Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rotterdam and London).

This means rethink the port as a multi-scale landscape, directly referred to the city-port

dimension: the harbourscape concept is an historic and urban culture meeting place, characterized

by attractive and public uses; a space that have a strategic place in the urban territory and that

give an identity to this part of the city thanks to the perceptive and functional integration between

the environmental part and its historical footprint.7

This peculiarity – in a reality like the one in Naples – represent a deny value, changing the original

relation between the sea and the waterfront: policies that support the Naples port area

management in the last decade, from the new PRG to the new port plan, don’t focus on an organic

and integrated project for this area as a part of the city regeneration.

The following considerations are made to think over the port role – starting from the case of

Naples – trying to define a strategic approach to the regeneration between city-port connections 6 In particular, in Naples, we can find these functions: shipbuilding; industrial; mixed; passengers and goods (cruising, fast passengers navy unit, fast navy unit, Ro-Pax and Ro-Ro); generic port services. 7 It could be interesting to read the landscape as a site specificity, made of relational dynamics, as a relational specificity, against modern concepts like the blank slate (Braae, Diedrich, 2012).

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based on port activities and transverse and lengthwise tensions that govern the port functionality

and its roots to the urban context.

NAPLES: AN HARBOURSCAPE SEARCHING FOR ITS FOUNDING VALUES

Naples is an harbourscape8, a landscape built in the course of time thanks to the sedimentation of

uses and port activities that made the waterfront ticker, landing and foundation place of the urban

settlement system that characterizes the development of the cities9.

The port is strongly connected to the city from a morphologically, functionally, economically and

socially point of view, thanks to its history and its transformations; the Naples’ forma urbis, as we

can see on historical iconography and the image of the city in itself, are built on connections

between settlements, spaces and waterfront.

Harbourscape emphasize the city characterized by the relationships between the historical layout,

urban identity and landscape, as a city palimpsest. Identifying the port with the landscape and

with the imagine that history gave us, means that the waterfront is not a “functional machine”

anymore, but a part of a larger system that includes territorial and environmental components:

this meanings slip transforms the prospective of a landscape components recycling.

The port needs to be considered as a multifunctional landscape, because it is not only a specialized

infrastructure but also a deep network of human and environmental values (connected to water

communities, with their protected values), a multi scale, wide, shared landscape, a community

space, where values and uses, physical shape and functional contents create public space.

Landscape and public space, represented by a double key notion of waterfront as an ambiguous

and referential space of contemporary city, define two strategic notions to rethink the port as a

dynamic and propelling area of the city.

The Naples port is a point of view where it is possible to look up to the environmental landmark,

the Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples (from Posillipo to Sorrento coast); but it is also the fabric of a

stratigraphic city, with its monumental front (S. Vincenzo, Angioino and Beverello docks) and its

urban architectures (from Immacolatella Vecchia and Porto Salvo, to the maritime station of

Bazzani and the Canino’s general Warehouse Building, to the amazing industrial cranes and

overhead travelling cranes).

Places that summarize the connections between port and city are hub for a new open public space

design thanks to the previous waterfront-historical city relations. This happens specially in three

specific points: the town hall square, towards Palazzo S. Giacomo; the ancient Porto Salvo Church,

part of the system that connects Piazza Borsa to the pedestrian walkway to Monterone; and the

historical Piazza del Mercato, near via Garibaldi, the Luigi Cosenza’s fish market and Marinella 8 A similar neologism is used describing the port waterfront in Aalborg and a design-based regeneration model; Kiib Hans, Harbourscape, Aalborg University Press, Aalborg, 2007. 9 Gravagnuolo B., “La città e il porto. Storia di una dialettica” in Gravagnuolo B. (edited by), Napoli. Il porto e la città. Storia e progetti, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli 1994.

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Park, now abandoned. This potential places could become spaces of public and pedestrian

continuity and spaces of functional and geometrical reconnection between port and city.

It is necessary to rethink the typical waterfront functions and their respective accessibilities, to

allow the insertion of open public spaces – connected to the city’s axis – that could re-open the

port boundary. It becomes important to rethink specific waterfront functions and their

accessibility, creating “functional platforms” like spine paths and spaces overlooking the sea.

These areas have to be defined by a less functional and more public character. Where the

functions are mixed and not specialized, the enclosure is interrupted, like Maritime station and

local passengers’ docks: public spaces that – like railway and subways stations – represent major

attractors with different flow types.

It is possible to create and improve a “water community” working on lengthwise functions and city

morphology, using different functions able to create new accessibility from the city. This

community – meant as a community interested in the waterfront requalification – could be able to

act on the port area revitalization, with the partnership of many different actors. This could create

a circular administrative, managerial, transformative process that involves stakeholders and all

citizens.

Traditionally, the lengthwise direction – focused on the port-system – is characterized by

companies interests, entrepreneurial subjects and by Port Authorities that usually define the

harbor as an enclosed, specialized space.

The transverse direction is a contest between the public and private sector: the fluency between

port and city values the waterfront as a common good, as a public space. An example of this

conflict between the port as an open or enclosed space is the design competition made for the

renovation of the monumental area of the Port of Naples 10, managed by Nausicaa – holds by Port

Authority, Municipality, Province, Region born in 2003 to redesign the Naples’ waterfront – in

2005. A group made of Italian and French architects (coordinated by M. Euvè, with R. Pavia, G.

Salimei among others) won the contest, aimed to recreate an intermediate fabric between the city

and the port, with a project that design an osmotic boundary line defined as filtering line. This

space becomes a control and access device to the port and to some functional areas, especially

the passengers’ terminal. The project have also a new subway station, designed by Alvaro Siza, in

the town hall square – in front of the Maritime Station, where all the cruise traffic from the

Mediterranean arrives – with a pedestrian tunnel that becomes an hub for the square, the port

and the waterfront. The project is still incomplete.

The main problem still remain a Port Authority influenced by ship owners11 and other subjects,

adverse to the port opening to the surroundings and to a mixed and porous layout. The port is still

a contented space, sector managed in opposition to a possible surrounding opening, to an identity

value, to its potential multifunctional role. The 2005 project comes from an awareness of the city

10 Pavia R. (2010), "La riqualificazione del waterfront monumentale del porto di Napoli", Dossier Portus n. 20 http://www.reteonline.org/images/stories/archivos/portus/pdf/20/06%20Pavia.pdf 11 Gasparrini C., “Le mire degli armatori dietro il no a Nausicaa”, 11 novembre 2010, la Repubblica

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in a strategic prospective: the demolition of the wall along the Acton dock was one of the first

symbolic actions for the re-appropriation of the waterfront, followed by the design contest as a

way for an achievable integration.

However, the exchange between the Municipality and the Port Authority did not transform into

politics, actions, or planning tools useful for a coherent transformation: not only there is not a port

masterplan, but there is also a generic urban plan that cannot work – because of competences

dualism12 - on the city-port integration.

The port expansion continue to grow without any integration to other parts of the city, distorting

its “urban area” role, establishing its independence and making urban system compatibility

conditions even weaker. For example the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) 2007-2013

with an investment of 240 million euros for the creation of the "Great Plan: logistics and ports.

Integrated system harbour of Naples"13, represents one of different actions that aim to reinforce

the sectorial role of the port, strengthening infrastructures and networks.

In the last 20 years has been strengthen a development prospective, with the hypothesis of large

infrastructural work. Between them, the East Dock is the most significant one, with the complete

fill of the actual dock, to reinforce the East exchanges. Today only 10% of containers move on train

and everything else is on road transport. We will have an increase of traffic (1000 vehicle per hour)

when the new terminal will have a 1,5 million of TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) movement,

excluding the Ro-Ro.

In opposition to the port enlargement, there is a less sustainable scenario, related to the vehicular

congestion problem that could be determined on the back of the port to the other regional

logistics platforms. This could create a progressive breaking with the urban fabric and the

degeneration of the spaces near the specialized port enclosure.

Without a project, the port machine keep on going, creating problems not only for the potential

port-city integration, but also for minimal conditions of mutual compatibility.

PRINCIPLES AND POSSIBLE STRATEGIES

Some prospective changes are possible in opposition to the specialization and integration dualism.

This means think over processes, tools, and methods to redesign these urban spaces, related to

their uses and shapes.

Landscape and public space become driving forces to rethink the port system, defining the

waterfront as a space of urban identity, connected to the city, to its life and to the perception of

its spaces, in a multi-scalar relationship with the territory.

12 M. Russo, 2010. 13 The great Plan is defined as “(…) many works, activities and services that create an invisible technical and economical action clearly identified that cost more than 50 million euros.”

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It is possible to define some principles, as a strategy orientation:

1. Port in a multiscalarity logic:

A multiscalarity vision represent a necessary framework. At the metropolitan scale it is possible

rethinking port functions in a regional system – following ecological values and infrastructural

relations connected to flows, settlements, mobility – with the possibility of some areas and

functions decentralization, rethinking the port uses and its role. At the local scale, it is possible

creating some mixed use along the waterfront (public use of the space). Thinking over port-city

relations aims working on different dimensions, physical and immaterial, project and process,

creating network between strategies and projects for these infrastructures as a part of the city

with an important landscape-making role.

2. The waterfront multi sectorial governance:

A subjects co-planning aiming at a common purpose is necessary: the reclamation and the

integration between waterfront and city. Plans and control and management tools have to

interact to define coherent and integrated strategies. Without coordination, their space of

relations becomes a division line, physical and procedural, that divides sectorial strategies and

urban policies creating a fragmentation between relevant urban areas and the port.

3. Waterfront-city integration:

It is possible to think over the whole urban system, working on ongoing projects and especially

on interstitial areas, as an urban regeneration of relevant projects areas, that defines new

relations between functions, fabrics, infrastructures, and urban centralities. The re-use and re-

cycle of these areas is an outstanding opportunity to re-define territorial logics that works for

entire city’s parts: the “in-between spaces”14 represents a “revitalization of relations” strategic

resource that creates a continuity between different parts of the city that historically lost their

mutual contact, like the waterfront in Naples.

4. Partnership as an implementation model (economics and financial):

Co-planning and partnerships represent the only possible implementation model (urban,

economics and financial) for the port waterfront regeneration, that could become an attractor

for new activities, flows and private investments.

5. Landscape as a device

14 M. Russo (2012).

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The connections between ecology, port and urban landscape components creates a new idea

for an urban waterfront.15

We could use the landscape concept with its multidimensional and multifunctional value,

pinpointing and correlating morphological, historical, physical and natural characteristics in a

complex and stratified territory, like the one that define the land-water transition. This

transition zone loses its “conventional” identity to become a complex material that helps the

urban plan to find history signs, to redefine ecological continuity systems, to emphasize the

layered identity in the coastal urban context.

REFERENCES

Amirante R., Bruni F., Santangelo M., Il Porto, Electa Napoli 1993

Berger A., Drosscape. Wasting Land in Urban America, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006

Braae E., Diedrich L. (2012), Site specificity in contemporary large-scale harbour transformation projects.

Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 7, issue 1. London: Routledge (pag. 20-33)

Gasparrini C., “Le mire degli armatori dietro il no a Nausicaa”, La Repubblica, 11 novembre 2010

Gravagnuolo B. (a cura di), Napoli. Il porto e la città. Storia e progetti, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane,

Napoli 1994

Gren M., Svensson L., Carlsson M., Kevin Bishop, “Policy design for a multifunctional landscape”,

Regional Environmental Change, December 2010, Volume 10, Issue 4, pp 339-348;

Kato S., Ahern J., “Multifunctional Landscapes as a Basis for Sustainable Landscape Development”,

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Hans Kiib, Harbourscape, Aalborg University Press, Aalborg, 2007.

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politiche progetti, FrancoAngeli, Milano 2010

15 Kate Orff studies the potential of urban waterfronts to be regenerated thanks to an adaptive and ecological project approach, based on the reflection that “designers in the new era will look for inspiration to the dynamic equilibrium of water and aim to restructure the city shores to be more changing, interactive and mobile”. (K. Orff, 2010).

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Pavia R. (2010), "La riqualificazione del waterfront monumentale del porto di Napoli", Dossier Portus n.

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Toma P. A., Storia del Porto di Napoli, Sagep Editrice, Genova 1991