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The following excerpt is from Federal Property Policy in Canadian Municipalities, edited by Michael C. Ircha and Robert Young.
The concept of waterfront revitalization and redevelopment began in North America: “in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Canada were the cradles of the waterfront-redevelopment movement”. The most emulated project was Boston’s Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. This project created the prototype of a “festival marketplace” as a recreation-oriented locale to attract people. Similar waterfront projects can be found in Canadian ports, including the Historic Properties in Halifax, Market Square in Saint John, Le Vieux Port in Montreal, Toronto’s Harbourfront, and Granville Island in Vancouver.
The intimate linkage between a city and its port is a historic reality. But during the past century, this linkage has increasingly been attenuated by technical and economic change. Larger ships and their increased cargo capacity forced ports to seek more space for docking and landside cargo storage. As city-centre land costs soared and availability declined, ports were forced to seek downstream alternatives. A good example of this trend is Vancouver’s development of additional container handling facilities at Deltaport, located at Roberts Bank in the Strait of Georgia. In turn, as inner-city port lands became less important for marine cargo handling, opportunities often arose for the conversion of these properties to other urban-oriented uses.
One of the major trends impacting existing port facilities is the public’s strongly rising demand for access to and use of waterfront lands. In ports around the world, politicians, municipal officials, ngos, and citizens’ groups are exerting pressure to convert port lands to alternative uses. Today’s affluent urbanites seek the development of waterfront condominiums, walking trails, parks, cafés, and boutique shopping areas in place of under-used, unsightly industrial port lands.
As development proceeds, the proponents and subsequent tenants of urban-oriented waterfront residential and commercial development enjoy the presence of the port’s busy terminals and active harbour area. But they soon tire of the cargo-handling noise (particularly in the evening and night time hours), dust, noxious emissions from equipment and ships, light spillage from the terminal, congestion from truck and rail traffic, and other detrimental aspects of marine cargo-handling operations. As a result, nearby residents mount pressure to constrain the port’s commercial terminals by seeking municipal regulations to limit the terminals’ hours of operation, reorient dockside lighting, and restrict truck traffic on city streets. In the extreme, commercial marine terminals have been forced to shut down and move their operations to more remote locations.
To learn more about Federal Property Policy in Canadian Municipalities, or to order online, click here.
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