Conservation of the Urban Identity (Part 4): The Riverfront

By Guest Author Vaswar Mitra

The greatest cities of the world and the cradles of civilization have grown up on the banks of rivers. These cities have a complex relationship with the water body that is built up in layers over the lifetime of the city and the sustaining of which is vital for preserving the identity of the urban fabric.

In countries of Asia, especially India, the river and several other water bodies are revered as divine manifestations and have always been the fountainheads of trade and culture. These qualities and relationships are expressed through built forms along the river’s edge, such as multi-use plazas, temples, and harbors, all of which enabled citizens to interact with the river as a part of their daily lives. However, the decrease in the navigability of these rivers, combined with changes in lifestyle, have meant that the rivers and riverfronts have gradually fallen into great neglect. Though the riverfronts like those of Varanasi (the Ganges), Allahabad (confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna), and Madurai (the Vaigai) still enjoy religious significance and are therefore still in use, those sections of the riverfront which depended primarily been trade have fallen into disrepair following a decrease in the navigability of the river and the popularity of surface trade. The river itself lies in a state of neglect, far from the consciousness of the city.

The river Thames is recognized as an important natural and cultural asset of London that reflects the city’s history, its evolution, and its contemporary significance through different projects and policies formulated by private agencies and grassroots community organizations. The Thames riverfront development projects take into account local history, townscape, nature conservation, public-access networks and land management. With the creation of iconic public architecture like the Millennium Dome, adaptive reuse of dilapidated buildings as cultural hubs (Tate Modern art museum), and renewal of dockyards as new business districts (Canary Warf), the riverfront itself has been given an identity and has become a major economic driver.

In New York City, realizing the need for alternate uses of the riverfront, the members of the Battery Park Project reclaimed a narrow strip of land along the Hudson River that bordered the financial district in Lower Manhattan. Mixed-use developments were planned on the 92 acres of landfill along with 30 acres of parkland that made the riverfront more accessible and allowed the built fabric to actually interact with the river spatially.

Although planning strategies adopted in the West are often geographically and socially incompatible in Eastern contexts, lessons learned from these projects can be applied selectively in spirit. The rebuilding efforts of any city should focus on the riverfront area’s potential to become a melting pot for city living, recreation, tourism, and commerce. Given the scale and the multiplicity of functions of such a project, it is important that it forms a balance or a buffer between the different zones and neighborhoods of the city, all of which should ideally enjoy easy connection with the river. Unlike many of the present projects that are in operation, sustainable riverfront development calls for holistic understanding of the urban ensemble rather than isolated architectural monuments of little significance to the urban whole.

Ideally, a waterfront project should be self-financing and be developed in a number of phases to allow for better generation and use of revenue. It necessitates the selling of a percentage of the reclaimed land for residential or commercial development (for the Sabarmati Riverfront Project in the state of Gujarat, it is estimated that selling 21% of the 36 hectares of reclaimed land should be sufficient to finance the rest of the project comprising public non-commercial development). The revenues from this phase can be used to construct public amphitheatres, pedestrian walkways, infrastructure networks, and rehabilitation works (which is indispensable in the Indian context since the riverbanks are presently covered in squatter settlements). A riverfront project on an urban scale helps in the formation of a “spine” of high-density mixed-use commercial and residential development along the water, raising land prices in the process.

In some cases, riverfront development projects require active conservation of the building stock in addition to the actual intervention along the river. The large number of derelict mansions and warehouses rendered defunct by the decrease in trade have potential for reuse as cultural hubs or even as cafés, restaurants, and studios that offer a view of the river. Correspondingly, it also opens up the possibilities of initiating river cruises that could encourage cultural tourism and make a river more accessible. Even the ghats (traditional covered structures with a flight of steps leading down to the water) can be developed as commercial nodes punctuating the public zones of the riverfront.

The rejuvenation of a riverfront can only be carried out over a long period of time and requires a steady control of the development typology that varies with the urban fabric. To ensure maximum economic benefits, a riverfront project calls for aggressive marketing of the river as a brand in itself.

A row of derelict mansions and an intra-city railway system fringing the riverfront in Calcutta holds great potential to be developed as a cultural tourism spine that connects a network of heritage sites along the river

Riverfronts have traditionally been hubs of cultural practices and need to be preserved as such

References:

Sabarmati Riverfront Development – www.sabarmatiriverfront.com

“Calcutta: The Living City” by Sukanta Chaudhuri

Thames Landscape Strategy (accessed from www.escholarship.org)

The Western Riverfront Detroit – The University of Michigan

This segment is part 4 in the series : Conservation of the Urban Identity
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