Sharing Waterfront

Focusing on Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek, this book examines waterfront industrial heritage from a socio-spatial perspective. It approaches the waterfront not as a collection of isolated relics, but as an evolving urban landscape shaped by changing planning ideas, production relations, and forms of public access. Drawing on sustained research into Suzhou Creek’s waterfront industrial heritage, the book develops the concept of Sharing Waterfront as both an analytical framework and a design vision for urban regeneration. It argues that waterfront industrial heritage should become a shared urban landscape, understood through five interrelated qualities: diachrony, permeability, time-sharing, diversity, and everydayness. Tracing the transformation of Suzhou Creek’s waterfront from a production-oriented industrial landscape into an increasingly open civic landscape, the book offers a new way to connect heritage conservation with public life, urban design, and adaptive reuse. It will be of particular interest to graduate students, researchers, and professionals in architecture, urban design, urban history, heritage studies, and planning. Its key strengths lie in three areas: a distinctive socio-spatial approach to industrial heritage; a Shanghai-based case study with broader relevance to post-industrial waterfront regeneration; and a clear conceptual and design framework for turning former production sites into shared civic space.