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.
WANG Xiao-wen
. A New Insight of Urban Waterfront in Europe and America: Political Ecologies Turn[J]. SCIENTIA GEOGRAPHICA SINICA, 2009
, 29(4)
: 601
-606
.
DOI: 10.13249/j.cnki.sgs.2009.04.601
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