The Old Harbor Waterfront Revitalization Methods Research On European North Sea Regions

The European North Sea Regions (ENSR), located to the west of Norway and Demark, to the north of Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, and to the east of United Kingdom, has been the most important commercial and trade center since the Age of Discovery. Early in the Middle Ages, a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds, named the Hanseatic League, was formed and dedicated to strengthen the connections between the market towns in ENSR. Due to the industrial revolution in the middle of the 18th century, United Kingdom and France started seeking new routes for commercial trade, which made ENSR the global center of the seaborne trade. In 1959, the discovery of the North Sea Oil Field further promoted the shipping industry, which grew rapidly and became the primary industry in ENSR. This lasted until the year of 1966 when the old harbors stared to be gradually abandoned as their relatively small handling capacity cannot fulfill the requirement of the modern shipping throughputs as result of the development of the shipping container technology. Consequently, most of the workforces moved to the deep-water ports, leading to the decline of the old harbor waterfronts. This results in many social problems in ENSR and attracted a lot of attention in finding ways to reactivate the old harbors and bring the diverse economic activities back to the waterfront district.Research on the revitalization of the old harbor waterfronts in ENSR started since the 1970s. A great deal of theories, knowledge, and practical experiences have been acquired in various study cases during the last few decades. In addition, these old harbor waterfronts show quite some similarities in the culture backgrounds and the environmental conditions. Therefore it is valuable to conduct comparative study on the different cases of the old harbor waterfront revitalization in ENSR. In the present work, several typical old harbors of ENSR were selected to study the methods of revitalization in three different scales of view, i.e. the city, the harbor and the waterfront.In the scale of the city, focus was set on the space structure of the waterfront cities in ENSR. The effects of the city’s waterfront morphology on its space structure were investigated and classified using the spatial syntax and the axial analysis implemented in the software DepthmapX. The conditions and basis for the revitalization of the old harbor were discussed according to the analysis. In the harbor scale study, the combined axial analysis and the empirical study of classification method was applied to compare the spatial arrangement patterns used in the old harbor revitalization in three aspects:function, transportation and visual attraction. Finally, based on the urban design theory, the practical cases were investigated in the waterfront space scale to study the corresponding revitalization methods from the different perspective such as space construction, traffic arrangement, and architecture design and so on.From the previous research, five approaches were found to be crucial to the waterfront revitalization and are presented as follows:hydrophilic space design, plaza node construction, slow traffic arrangement, historic architecture renewal and waterfront landmark activation. Meanwhile, the problems existing in the revitalization of the old harbors in China were also discussed in the current paper. Based on the insights obtained from the study of the successful and valuable practical cases applied in the revitalization of the old harbors in ENSR, it is expected that this work can provide references to better ways of old harbor revitalization in our country.