欧美城市滨水区的再开发实践促进了滨水区研究的多维观察与思考,其中一个重要共识就是:在全球化与新技术革命的推动下,城市滨水区的变化是一个具有高度复杂性的现象,不仅涉及自然生态环境,更有着经济、社会和政治层面的深刻内涵;同时,还反映着从社区、地方到国家、甚至全球尺度的社会政治变迁。因此,研究发生在滨水区范围内各种变化的同时需要关注更大尺度的一些因素,需要对发生在城市中的自然生产、社会网络关系模式及政治经济结构等进行重新审视。欧美学者基于政治生态学空间与社会关系、尺度的政治学等视角对城市滨水区变化的思考,无疑为城市滨水区研究提供了一种新的理论工具。
Urban waterfronts, where land and water meet, have always been interesting and complex spatial locations, and are generating considerable debate about their role in urban restructuring processes. The study of urban waterfronts transformations is especially important at this time not only because of the role of urban waterfronts in economic restructuring, but also because intense changes are occurring in port cities that involve major human interventions in the non-human environment. In more than 40 years passed in Europe and America, and the re-development of waterfront has advanced the multi-dimensional investigations and speculations on urban waterfronts. Thereinto, a vital enlightenment and understanding can be achieved that the change of waterfront is a very complex phenomenon, involving not only ecological environment, but also economic, social and political dimension,and imaging the social and political transformation from local to national to global scale. When studied with attention to broader transformative processes as well as the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, we allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social relations, and political-economic configurations in cities. The paper focused on the political ecology of waterfronts in Europe and North America, and emphased on the myriad influences that different scales of social and environmental policy development and implementation, planning decisions, infrastructure funding, investment and ownership practices, and public engagement, for example, exerted on the social and ecological processes that occur in urban waterfronts. As with relatively small geographic areas where research was conducted, there is concern about urban waterfronts as places where 'everything happens’actually. The problems that focusing on a microcosm can cause in terms of research analysis, and avoid an understanding of urban waterfronts as static or essential spaces. Urban waterfronts are not study of objects where research attention is focused solely on what occurs within the terrain of urban waterfront areas. Rather, urban waterfronts are as one scale out of many scales and as places that are connected with decisions and phenomena that occur at varied scales. By researching transformations on urban waterfronts we can trace the way that urban waterfronts are constituted by different and variable scales, such as levels of governmental social and environmental policy or private investment practices. New political-ecological approaches that incorporate scalar analyses offer a solution to the dilemma of making conclusive observations about social and ecological occurrences within single geographical areas. Instead, an emphasis on the relational and fluid connections between and within scales of analysis provides a new method by which to analyze the re-production of spatial areas. Then we study the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, with attention to broader transformative processes, and allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social entanglement, and political-economic configurations in cities. Moreover, political ecology research has embraced the complexities found in these relationships and fluidities, which offers an alternative to research that focuses solely on 'cause and effect’ analyses. In sum, political ecology offers a new and innovative theoretical and methodological approach to the study of urban waterfronts that differs from previous analyses of urban waterfronts.
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