Re-Design Port-City Ecosystem: The Transformative Regeneration Challenge

The aim of the special issue is to investigate how configure innovative collaborative processes and projects for the redesign of the port-city ecosystem, from the global to the local scale able to promote transformative regeneration processes. The regeneration of port-city ecosystem is characterized by continuous transformation processes that request a strong demand of redesigning at different scales: territory, landscape, infrastructure, architecture, services and products. Development processes and possible evolutions identify significant components of a multidimensional process which requires new challenges and new collaborative approaches and tools to guide and manage change. The transformative capacity of the port-city offers a crucial lever to re-design regeneration approaches and to reconfigure urban, social, ecological and technological systems according to the Circular Economy principles. In particular, among new approaches and tools, the "7 Rs" of the Circular Economy model could support to re-design for port-city ecosystem regeneration especially in: 1) rethinking the models and solutions at different levels of governance and territorial scales, with attention to innovative collaborative decision-making processes; 2) reducing the consumption of energy, materials and resources by applying sustainable design principles and new smart and green technologies; 3) reusing existing resources, with particular attention to the protection of the maritime space, the enhancement of the coastline and the urban fabric; 4) repairing the components and the fabric of the city-port interface according to an ecosystem vision of the port-city relationship; 5) renewing abandoned, degraded, or underused ports, identifying new territorial attractive capacities in the redesign of the spaces and forms of the port-city system; 6) recovering the waste landscapes of the port-cities, with attention also to the redesign of the waterfronts, through processes of circular urban and territorial metabolism; 7) recycling resources and developing processes and methodologies for sustainable land and sea management through sustainable governance of ports and coastal areas. In this perspective, the special issue welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions that aim to provide deeper insight in all aspects of: ?port-city ecosystem vision from cognitive analysis to design approach; ?application of circular economy principles in the waterfront re-generation; ?architectural projects for port infrastructure and services re-design; ?collaborative processes and co-planning for innovative governance approaches; ?redesign and open innovation for integrated port-city re-generation; ?place branding and local cultural identities in port-city re-design. ?transformative capacity and local action for port-city sustainability.