22 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 On the Waterfront: Piloting, or Other Ways to Begin In thumbing through design magazines and scrolling online, it would appear that urban waterfronts across the globe have been undergoing an unprecedented transformation. On sites like Domino Park in New York, the West Bund in Shanghai, or the HafenCity in Hamburg, lands that were once places of major industrial production now become places for cappuccinos and croissants. Fallow, inaccessible, toxic land yields to mixeduse megadevelopments with modest (but often iconic!) blue-green public spaces surrounded by high density, and high end, housing and commercial development through a series of neoliberal financial transactions. In these global cities, real estate demand is so torrential that the waterfront will inevitably be developed (and also protected), leaving the primary challenge for the urban designer or planner to direct the flood of global capital to ensure public access and aesthetic coherence. But there is another kind of waterfront, one that characterizes the vast majority of American cities. These are the postindustrial edges of places like Bridgeport, New London, and West Haven, Connecticut, as well as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Here, the challenge is not managing a flood of capital; it is managing a drought. In these smaller, “legacy” cities, the factories receded decades ago, leaving behind a scarred, contaminated, and often flood-prone landscape. Unlike in Brooklyn or Hamburg, there is no rising FEATURE Andrei Harwell, AIA, Executive Director, Yale Urban Design Workshop Alan Plattus, Founding Director, Yale Urban Design Workshop
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