Designing open spaces in water urban landscapes. Three strategies/ Three projects for reconfiguring historical sites

A paramount challenge for the XXI century urban landscape project is represented by the design of waterfronts, considered as more or less complex and articulated system of open spaces, often featuring the interface between sea (or river) ambits and consolidated mineral fabric of historic cities. During the last decade several designers, working on different scales and using diverse approaches, faced project’s theme of water urban landscape, developing strategies and tools to propose innovative identities for public spaces, to promote places’ multifunctionality, activating plots of new relations, contributing to cultural, temporal and biological diversity, which becomes particularly valuable in urban environments. This paper collects three different design experiences (each featuring different categories of open spaces and promoting peculiar project strategies) aiming at proposing a thematic exploration of the waterfront’s project topic in Europe: it deals with the realization of an urban “archipelago” park in the fringe of Amsterdam, the transformation of a postindustrial district in Lille and the reinventing of a gardened riverside along the Garonne river in Bordeaux