Restoring socio-ecological balance in City-Port Areas. A conceptual framework for a circular and sustainable regeneration of coastal wastescapes integrating Nature-Based Solutions

Research context City-Port Areas (CPA) can be defined as multi-risk exposed environments characterized by high-complexity (Hein, 2016, 2018, 2023) and facing diverse intertwined challenges related to overlapping environmental, natural and anthropic risks. They are the first to experience the impact of climate change, being affected by resource scarcity and linear urban metabolism processes, showing difficulties to grow within socio-ecological limits and ecosystem boundaries. These challenges, that characterize the capacity of today’ s CPA to be future proof, are interconnected to the problems related to the supply of energy and materials, and to the availability of land for agricultural purposes and further developments. Land in CPA is a scarce resource if connected to linear and thus unfunctional urban and territorial metabolisms as well as to unsustainable processes of growth. However, CPA are prone to become hot spots and hubs of innovation and incubators for circular solutions based e.g. on mitigation and adaptation measures (AIVP, 2018, 2021) and on regeneration processes through nature-based solutions (NbS) applied in the context of wastescapes (Amenta and van Timmeren, 2018). Conceptual and methodological framework To understand how to implement a transition towards circularity and sustainability for CPA, this contribution presents the methodological approach of the research SPArTaCHus (financed within the framework: “Programma per il Finanziamento della Ricerca di Ateneo FRA 2022”, of the University of Naples Federico II, Corresponding proponent: Libera Amenta). SPArTaCHus proposes a mixed method that combines insights from urban ecology, urban metabolism, ecological urbanism, and more-than-human perspectives for the regeneration of their wastescapes, understood as a system of underused or abandoned territories crossed by resource flows. To define circular strategies for alternative scenarios to cope with the intertwined contemporary challenges of CPA, this research emphasizes the urgent need to strike a balance between environmental goals, social equity and justice. SPArTaCHus interprets CPA as promoters of circular and sustainable prosperity in equilibrium with nature through the adaptive management of their natural habitats. Being transitional landscapes, CPA both face ever-changing challenges from e.g., port activities, and offer a rich socio-cultural environment. Understanding the complex dynamics of CPA informs a path toward circularity, that can reconnect people, spaces, flows, economies, and ecologies. Project’s ambition Research on City-Port Areas allows to move from local to global and back, understanding ports as knots (Lobo-Guerrero & Stobbe 2016), towards the multidisciplinary, multiscale and integrated concept of territorial metabolism (Grulois, et al. 2018). In this way, it is possible to focus on the mutual relationships between human activities, resource use and the effect of these activities on the built and natural environment, including the countryside, for boosting a sustainable and different kind of growth, and looking for design-driven strategies for implementing innovation in urban and social agendas (IABR, 2014). Implementing circular urban metabolism and economy principles can help create regenerative territories that operate within the planet’s safe and just limits. Understanding that CPA are characterized by land scarcity and large amount of wastescapes, the project aims to set design and planning guidelines for a regenerative approach by working on soil resources that are often degraded, polluted or abandoned due to many factors, among which port-related activities which concluded their lifecycle. Wastescapes in CPA can be seen as the result of a linear process of an unequal growth, as the port and the city follow different logics and planning time. This contribution critically examines how NbS can tackle the complex multi-risk challenges faced by CPA, using Rotterdam as a case study to highlight both the opportunities and challenges associated with circular transitions.