Contents
Waterfront development is the work of turning a city’s edge along the sea, a river or a lake into a place where people live, work, visit and spend their free time, very often on land that used to belong to a port, a rail yard, a shipyard or a row of warehouses. It usually combines new buildings, a public promenade, some kind of landmark and a program of events, and few kinds of urban project anywhere in the world get photographed more.
That last point is where my doubts begin. A waterfront is judged on its opening day, from a drone, in sunshine. Its real test comes much later and much more quietly: whether people who live nearby walk along it on an ordinary weekday because it has become part of their routine. A promenade is not a monument. It is a habit, and habits form only when a place is easy, open and worth repeating.
The warehouse that became a tower
Most waterfront projects begin with the same piece of luck. An industrial use leaves, and a long strip of land beside the water becomes available close to the city center. What happens next decides almost everything.
The easiest path, financially, is housing and offices. Water views sell, and the first buildings are usually tall residential blocks with a lobby, a car park entrance and perhaps a gym on the ground floor. They are not bad buildings. The problem is what they do to the edge. Project for Public Spaces’ list of qualities of a great waterfront puts it bluntly: high-rise towers without public uses on the ground floor create a wall that cuts the waterfront off from the neighbourhoods behind it, and great waterfronts are not dominated by residential development, because heavy residential use creates pressure against the night-time activity that keeps the place alive.
I think the second point is underrated. Residents who paid for a view of the water often become the strongest opponents of the concerts, markets and evening crowds that drew them to the waterfront. Nobody is acting in bad faith here. It is a predictable conflict designed into the project at the masterplan stage, much as a tourism master plan can design one into a resort coast, and it can be avoided only by deciding early which stretches are for living and which are for gathering.
The ground floor matters more than the height. A tower with a bakery, a bookshop, a rowing club and a covered arcade at street level adds to the walk. The same tower with a blank wall and a garage door subtracts from it, however handsome it looks from the water. Placemaking earns its keep at exactly this level, because the decisions that make an edge lively are small, early and easy to lose once the plots have been sold.
A railing between people and the water
Walk along many new promenades and you notice how far the water has been pushed away. A railing at chest height, a drop of a few meters, a strip of planting, and the sea becomes a view rather than a presence. Safety rules explain part of this, and they are not to be dismissed. But a lot of it is simply the easiest detail to draw.
The waterfronts people love usually let them get closer. Wide steps going down to the water where you can sit with your feet near the surface, a low edge where children can lean over and look for fish, a slipway for small boats, a place where people fish from the quay in the evening, a floating platform for swimming in summer. Each of these needs more thought about safety and maintenance than a railing does. Each of them also brings people back in a way no railing ever will.
The water itself is the main attraction, and a good design treats it as a public space in its own right, with ferries, kayaks, rowing clubs and boat tours, not just as a background for photographs taken from the land.
The sea wall path and its missing piece
What turns a promenade into a habit is continuity. A walker or a runner wants a route they can follow without thinking: a few kilometers along the water, with a natural place to turn back, shade at intervals, a tap, a toilet and something open at the end.
Many waterfronts are built in pieces, one plot or one phase at a time, and the pieces do not always meet. A smart new stretch ends at a construction fence, a ferry terminal, an industrial site that has not yet moved or a private plot whose owner has not agreed to open the edge. The walker has to leave the water, cross a busy road and find the path again two blocks later. Most people do that once and then stop going.
I would argue that the missing piece is often the most important part of the whole project. A shorter promenade that connects is used more than a longer one that keeps breaking off, and a modest temporary path around a gap, a few boards and some lighting, does more for daily use than another landmark further along. The logic of destination development shows clearly here too: the route residents walk every evening is the same one visitors will discover on their first morning.
The marina fence and the hotel beach
The quieter threat to a waterfront is privatization of the edge, one reasonable decision at a time. A marina needs security, so it gets a fence. A hotel wants its guests to have a private stretch of beach, so the public path bends inland behind it. A restaurant extends its terrace to the water and the path narrows to a passage between tables. Each step has its logic, and each owner is doing what any business would do.
Taken together, though, they can turn a public shore into a series of private frontages with the public squeezed into what is left. The pattern shows up in resort destinations and in city harbours alike, and here our own industry, hotels, marinas, developers and the event companies that rent the quay, carries a responsibility it does not always accept. A guest at a waterfront hotel enjoys the place partly because the promenade outside is lively, and a hotel that closes off its stretch of shore is taking a little of that life away from everyone, its own guests included.
The better arrangements keep a continuous public path along the water and let private uses face it rather than block it. A hotel terrace that opens onto the promenade, a marina with a public walkway along the outer pier, a beach with private sunbeds and a public strip at the waterline: none of these cost the owner much, and all of them keep the edge whole.
A car park on the best stretch of shore
Access decides who comes, and on a busy summer evening it is most of what visitor flow management has to work with. When the easiest way to reach a waterfront is by car, the best land near the water tends to end up as parking, and the promenade becomes a place for people who drive in at weekends rather than people who walk over after dinner.
The same Project for Public Spaces list notes that waterfronts flourish when they can be reached by means other than private vehicles, by boat, by bike and on foot. For a promenade that means safe crossings from the neighbourhoods behind, bus stops close to the water, bicycle parking, and in harbour cities a ferry that runs often enough to be part of daily life. It also means putting car parks behind the first row of buildings rather than in front of the view.
For the visitor experience, access is half the story. A visitor who can walk from the hotel to the water in ten minutes, along a street that feels safe, will use the waterfront several times during a stay. One who needs a taxi will go once, if at all.
The festival stage on the quay
Waterfronts attract events, and they should. A quay is a natural stage, a promenade a natural audience space, and the water makes every concert, race or regatta look good on a screen. Many waterfront projects are launched with a festival, and many keep a large annual event as their signature.
The trouble starts when the event calendar is built only around the largest crowds. A big festival can close the promenade for a week before and after, fill the quay with fencing and generators, and push out the walkers, runners and fishers who use it every day. A mega event on the water multiplies all of that. For residents, the waterfront becomes a place that is regularly taken away from them, and some stop thinking of it as theirs.
A waterfront development should be judged by whether people who live nearby walk along it on an ordinary weekday, and every building, fence, event and car park on it either adds to that walk or interrupts it.
For this reason I prefer waterfronts with flexible event space over those with a large permanent stage. The Project for Public Spaces guidance suggests the same thing, a temporary or retractable stage instead of a fixed one that is busy in summer and empty in winter, with on-site storage for movable chairs and tables. Flexibility lets the quay host a market on Saturday, a children’s sports morning on Sunday and nothing at all on Monday, when the space simply belongs to the people walking along it. It also keeps the place within its tourism carrying capacity on the busiest days, because organizers have to fit their event to the space instead of bending the space around the event. The best event legacy on a waterfront is often modest: a race route that becomes a permanent running loop, a market that stays weekly, a set of steps that was built for an audience and is later used by everyone.
The quay in February
Every waterfront looks good in July. The harder question is what it looks like on a windy weekday in February, when the summer crowd is gone and only residents are left.
This is where seasonality in tourism meets everyday design. A promenade that is all hard surface and open sky is pleasant in summer and bleak in winter. Shelters from the wind, a few covered seats, a café that keeps its doors open all year, lighting that makes the path feel safe at five in the afternoon, a sports club or a sailing school with a winter program: these small things decide whether the waterfront remains part of daily life outside the season.
The evening matters in the same way. A waterfront where everything closes at sunset loses most of its users for half of the year. A waterfront’s night time economy does not need to be loud. It needs a few places open, some light, and enough people around to make the walk feel normal rather than lonely.
Most waterfronts are built for the summer photograph and lived in during the other nine months. Count the people walking on a new one on a grey weekday out of season, and that number says more about the project than the brochure ever will.