Harbourscape Aalborg - Design Based Methods in Waterfront Development

How can city planners and developers gain knowledge and develop new sustainable concepts for water front developments? The waterfront is far too often threatened by new privatisation, lack of public access and bad architecture. And in a time where low growth rates and crises in the building industry is leaving great parts of the harbour as urban voids planners are in search of new tools for bridging the time gap until new projects can be a reality.

This chapter presents the development of waterfront regeneration concepts that resulted from design based workshops, Harbourscape Aalborg in 2005 and Performative Architecture Workshop in 2008, and evaluates the method and the thinking behind this. The design workshops provide different design-based development methods which can be tested with the purpose of developing new concepts for the relationship between the city and its harbour, and in addition to generate easily grasped images of a coherent harbour transformation (Kiib, 2007).

The lessons learnt in the course of these workshops in Aalborg indicate that comparable methodological achievements require a consistent line in the professional approach of the team leaders. Design-based development can make an independent contribution to the visioning process on urban development, city life planning and landscaping, but this has to be based on a “non-dogmatic” approach in the architectural and urban space design. This involves, among other aspects, the combination of independent evaluation and discourse analyses in the regeneration of the harbour area, and a combination of methods and approaches used in order to achieve quality design and ownership from citizens as well as commitment from professionals.