The social life of working waterfronts : strategies for renewing the social value of productive harbors

The Social Life of Working Waterfronts is an independent thesis project that envisions the expanded role of an urban waterfront as a landscape for both industry and everyday life. The project calls for new synergies between public and private stakeholders to challenge the cultural perception of industrial landscapes and renew social and ecological value of productive harbors. By integrating industrial processes with civic life, working waterfronts can begin to operate mutually for industrial and societal needs. This proposal aims to establish spatial and systemic commons between a declining city and its thriving commercial fishing port by engaging and celebrating the City’s identity as a working maritime community. New and adaptive forms of public-private relationships can begin to restore civic ownership of the harbor as a hybridized urban-industrial system. Grounded at the intersection of built and natural systems, landscape architects have the ability to mediate the complexities embedded in these urban landscape typologies and engage the various scales of cultural and physical production