Harbour waterfront: landscapes and potentialities of a con tended space

Abstract

The port is a strategic area of transition, where it is possible to perceive the territory-landscape and the urban front. However, the harbour waterfront mislaid its urban character, gradually becoming an high specialized “independent machine”, a sectorial infrastructure divided from the city: this phenomenon has created increasingly socio-economical marginalization. Within a double view, lengthwise and transverse, we can describe the port as a space closed to the city and as an unfathomable barrier for the transverse flows that previously connected the waterfront to the city. The paper examines the case study of Naples, where the port expansion continues to grow without any integration with other parts of the city, distorting its “urban area” role, establishing its independence and making urban system compatibility conditions even weaker. The functional and physical division increases the perception of the port as a barrier rather than a filter, turning the sense of these conditions aims at rethinking waterfront as a public space and as a landscape, where integration and specialization spaces become new open and accessible spatial devices. The project of a new public space between the sea and the hinterland could involve all these conflicting functions creating, with different strategies, a potential multifunctional landscape. In Naples as well, because the waterfront is still waiting to be re-connected with the story of the city itself.