Waterfront areas in the city were occupied by industrial factories and freight ports in industrial age because of their convenience for transporting materials and resources by waterway. In the post-industrial era, as the role of the city gradually shifts from the ‘production centre’ to ‘consumption centre’, redeveloping waterfront industrial areas has become a global trend. In China, the city of Shanghai begins to redevelop its waterfront industrial areas since 2002. A main goal of the redevelopment in Shanghai is to ‘return the river to the public’, namely to open up the enclosed industrial compounds and transform industrial sites in the waterfront areas to public spaces. Focusing on the waterfront redevelopment and regeneration in Shanghai, this paper quantitatively assesses the publicness and quality of the newly created public spaces in three selected waterfront areas in the city. Drawing on the results of the empirical assessments, the paper argues that Shanghai has not achieved its goal of returning the river to the public yet. In response, the paper proposes some suggestions for policy-making aiming at improving the publicness and inclusiveness of public spaces in post-industrial redevelopment areas in Shanghai and other cities in the global south.
Providing Public Space Continuities in Post-Industrial Areas through Remodelling Land/Water Connections
