Waterfront Public Spaces and Collective Assemblages

The widespread development of ex-industrial waterfronts into new civic public spaces in China provides architects and planners with the opportunity to rethink the concept of public space in an age of climate change. This chapter discusses the future role of waterfront public spaces in the Yangtze River Delta region of China and explores the current trend of transformation of the regions watercourses, from industrial uses to new civic public spaces. It explores how these new waterfront public spaces contribute to the democratic nature and social infrastructure of our habitat as well as providing flood defenses by monitoring and mitigating water changes. Matos Silva argues that waterfront public spaces have a new role mediator, providing infrastructure for flood management. She argues that flooding is rarely at a disaster stage and water rises are better dealt with through bottom-up assemblages (Matos Silva in Public spaces for water: A design notebook, CRC Press/Balkema, London, 2020). Bruno Latour has continuously argued against the political realm’s separation from nature and science (Latour in The politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2004). Following Latour many theorists advocate new situated materialist forms of democracy based on political ecology to include multiple actors in the democratic field, forms of assemblage to bring humans together with non-human elements of nature. The chapter discusses two diverse waterfront projects that create ecologic, collective assemblages. The project of the Ruan Yisan Foundation on the Grand Canal a network of protection and observational stations to monitor and study the canal and Jinji Lake. Jinji Lake incorporates a master plan with multiple uses as well as diverse ecological strategies.