This thesis investigates site-specific design approaches in contemporary harbour transformation. The integration into the urban fabric of disused harbour areas, those spatial leftovers of late 19th- and 20th-century heavy industry, is a major task of contemporary urban planning. Common solutions for these areas feature generic office complexes, luxury housing, shopping centres and leisure facilities, built on the tabula rasa of the former harbours, only preserving the occasional old object from a harbour for folkloristic reasons.
This research explores more site-specific ways to transform harbours, where certain design approaches integrate the site into the urban fabric by making use of that which already exists on a harbour site. The current understanding of site, design and site specificity is discussed and updated to define the analytical framework for the thesis’s case study. Six European design projects are scrutinized for their site specificity, namely the Euromediterranée 2 project in Marseille, the Ile de Nantes project in Nantes, the Tagus Cycle Track through Lisbon’s harbour, the Port’s Visual Quality Programme in Rotterdam, the Right Bank redevelopment in Bordeaux, and the open space plan for Bjørvika Bay in Oslo. The nuances of site-specific design emerge from examining the designs, as does a panorama of possible approaches ranging from low to high interpretive freedom. A universal recipe for how to treat disused harbour areas is impossible to generate; rather, game rules for site-specific design are proposed for all actors involved in harbour transformation. The study ends with an invitation to further investigate translation as a powerful metaphor for the way existing qualities of a site can be transformed, rather than erased or rewritten, and to explore how this metaphor can foster new design ideas for old harbours and other post-industrial areas.