Draft Final Report

This report contains reviews of various city ordinances, which include plans to improve design regulations along the overlay zone. Also includes a mention of the Waller Creek Citizens' Advisory Committee.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Colorado River corridor from Tom Miller Dam, through Lady Bird Lake and then eastward beyond Longhorn Dam is undoubtedly the most significant community asset in central Austin. This incredibly beautiful stretch of river provides a wide range of benefits to our city including fantastic scenic vistas, wonderful urban recreational opportunities, and serene open spaces that gives our center city a unique character among Texas cities. In addition to providing our drinking water, the river and lake are a major economic asset drawing folks to Austin both to work and play downtown. It is also a fragile beauty that can quickly be overwhelmed if development along its shores is not carefully planned and regulated to provide a balance between accommodating growth in the urban core and preserving the character of the river corridor and the lakefront. Development along the banks of the lake in the 1970’s and early 1980’s drew attention to the need to establish a clear vision of what the community wanted along the lakefront. The 1985 Town Lake Corridor Study and the 1986 Waterfront Overlay ordinance gave the task force the necessary planning guidelines and land development tools to assess what would constitute harmonious development along the lakefront preserving the unique quality of this river corridor. While the original Waterfront Overlay ordinance was largely successful, recent development pressure along the shoreline of Lady Bird Lake has brought into question whether the current Waterfront Overlay ordinance is adequate to protect and enhance the lakefront, especially since the 1986 ordinance underwent a code rewrite in 1999 that made some significant changes. In response to this concern, the City Council charged the Waterfront Overlay Taskforce with reviewing the current situation. The essential finding from the Taskforce’s eight month review is that the current code has been significantly weakened by the changes in the ordinance that have been adopted since 1986 and in particular the 1999 recodification of the ordinance has removed significant protections and incentives to promote community benefits and enhancement of the waterfrontWaller Creek Working Grou

Retooling Waterfront Governance in the New York-New Jersey Harbor: Case Studies from Waterfront Cities

Who is in charge of the waterfront? Everybody and nobody. The scramble of commissions and task forces in the wake of Superstorm Sandy brought the challenge of waterfront governance into sharp relief. With literally dozens of city, state, and federal agencies regulating and protecting New York Harbor and the regional waterfront, it is high time to construct a new regime that will manage our waterways and shorelines holistically, efficiently, and with dedicated foresight. We are developing a 21st century waterfront, with great opportunities and grave challenges for our coastal city. We need governance to match.As in New York, cities from around the world are reinventing their waterfronts. From Seattle to Sydney, other waterfront cities can provide valuable examples and innovative models for New York. This paper distills some of these examples into case studies meant to inform the discussion on how to improve waterfront governance in New York City. It concludes with the recommendation that a Department of the Waterfront is necessary to realize the economic benefi ts of a revitalized waterfront, to capture the cost savings from better coordination and planning, and to implement the city's critical goals for protecting its waterfront

A Sustainable Assessment of the Codes and Plans for South Shore Central of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake

This project report provides valuable information surrounding the socioeconomic climate of Austin. Demographic and economic descriptions are coupled with plans for environmentally conscious future city development.The City of Austin has recognized that Lady Bird Lake (formerly named Town Lake) is a precious recreational resource in the heart of the urban core, which could be quickly overwhelmed if development along its shores is not carefully planned and regulated to provide a balance between accommodating growth in the urban core and preserving the character of the lakefront. The adoption of the 1985 Town Lake Corridor Study established foundational policies which were codified with the 1986 Waterfront Overlay Combining District (WOCD) ordinance. The ordinance established fifteen sub-districts (now sixteen sub-districts) within the overlay in order to calibrate the code to various locations along the 5.4 mile -long town lake corridor. The overall purpose of the ordinance was established “. . . to provide a more harmonious interaction and transition between urban development and the parkland and shoreline . . .” In 2007 the City Council appointed a Waterfront Overlay Taskforce to review the adequacy of the current waterfront ordinance in light of changes that had been made to the original ordinance over the years and to increasing development pressure along the shoreline. The Waterfront Task Force Report, 2008, made several recommendations, including the re-establishment of a Waterfront Planning Advisory Board (WPAB) with responsibilities that include recommending potential changes to the Waterfront Overlay Combining District ordinance, with particular instructions to develop bonus provisions that create clear, predictable methods for increasing development entitlements in exchange for clear, predictable community benefits, and to develop improved design standards. The WPAB has conducted this work since its appointment two years ago, but has had to carry out this task with limited support resources and without the benefit of consultant assistance The SDAT will provide an outside, professional review and assessment of the WPAB’s work to date and assist with recommendations for moving forward. Additionally, the SDAT process will help convene local resources and engage stakeholders to inform and assist with the work. In order to sharply focus the review and assessment process, the SDAT study will concentrate on one of the sub-districts of the Waterfront Overlay – South Shore Central – which is arguably the area along the waterfront most likely to face potential redevelopment prospects, and the adjacent sub-districts to the west and east which, respectively, introduce a major park land (Auditorium Shores) and an area with commercial transitioning to residential uses (Travis Heights). The South Shore Central sub-district is also adjacent to established neighborhoods. This area concentrates the issues of how to promote urban excellence while maintaining, enhancing, and connecting to parkland and neighborhoods.Waller Creek Working Grou

Preserving and Protecting New York City's Working Waterfront: Our Critical Yet Less Visible Economic Engine

The New York-New Jersey Harbor is an economic engine and the center of a logistics cluster that includes rail, highway, and air connections to the rest of the nation and the world. The welcoming waters and shoreline that greeted Henry Hudson have fostered the commerce that built our city over the centuries. Today's working waterfront continues to be a vital part of the regional economy and must be protected and New York City's waterfront has long been a mainstay of its economy.Jobs associated with the working waterfront also continue to increase. Much of the shipping activities is clustered around Newark Bay in New Jersey. But New York City also remains a vibrant home to the maritime support industry: more than 90 percent of support vessels, including tug boats and barges as well as ship repair facilities are located either on the Kill Van Kull shoreline of Staten Island or the Brooklyn waterfront. Overall, the port contributes to NYC's economy more than 31,000 jobs, nearly $2.1 billion in personal income, nearly$6.8 billion in business activity and nearly $1.3 billion in tax revenues.The Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance calls on New York City to promote key programs, facilities and industries to preserve, protect, and grow the working waterfront of New York City. By doing so the city will ensure the viability of its working waterfront and in doing so will preserve deep-water maritime areas on the city's waterfront that have infrastructure that cannot be recreated

Reconnect to Our Harbor: Public Access for People and Boats and Everything In Between

New York City's landmark Comprehensive Waterfront Plan published in March 2011 calls for the creation of a sustainable blue network and more activity and economic opportunities at and on the waterfront. Magnificent new parks and rejuvenated waterfront neighborhoods have opened access to the City's edge, while waterborne transportation and recreation have helped redefine New Yorkers' relationship to their waterways. As water quality has vastly improved, more and more people are interested in getting not only to the water's edge, but onto and into the water.Nevertheless, we still have a ways to go. Some of our waterfront parks are situated in wealthier neighborhoods, or are located in areas hard to reach from the outer boroughs. Too often, existing waterfront parks and even some entire waterfront neighborhoods lack any infrastructure that would allow boats to dock or pick up passengers. The many historic, educational, and cultural vessels that call the harbor home have, in fact, very few places to tie up, particularly in the outer boroughs. The relatively few piers that exist are too often design for non-maritime uses such as pedestrian access or sports; fundamental elements at the sides of the piers that could allow for docking are missing or shortsightedly designed to only accommodate one type of boat.This paper calls upon the City's next wave of leadership to commit to and accelerate the revitalization of New York's waterfront. Restoring piers, constructing new docks, opening beaches, expanding ferry service, and developing more opportunities for human-powered boating will connect New Yorkers to the water while simultaneously achieving critical economic, recreational, educational and environmental goals

Measurement and analysis of water/oil multiphase flow using electrical capacitance tomography sensor

The paper investigates the capability of using a portable 16-segmented Electrical Capacitance Tomo-graphy (ECT) sensor and a new excitation technique to measure the concentration profile of water/oil multiphase flow. The concentration profile obtained from the capacitance measurements is capable of providing images of the water and oil flow in the pipeline. The visualization results deliver information regarding the flow regime and concentration distribution of the multiphase flow. The information is able to help in designing process equipment and verifying the existing computational modeling and simu-lation techniques

Renewal of Buenos Aires city waterfront

This paper reports an analysis of the main phases and factors relevant to the renovation of the coastal area of the city of Buenos Aires. Since the early 1980s, and especially with the country's comeback of democratic life, that area developed along two different paths. The renovation of the docks followed a top-down process carried out by private-public enterprises; it was a successful and lucrative real-state transformation in which contemporary design and aesthetics had precedence. The ecological restructuring of the river front was, however, the outcome of a bottom-up process that involved many actors with conflicting interests quarrelling during two decades. Thanks to the non-government organisation 'Ciudad', who enabled the involvement of otherwise excluded social groups and had ample communitarian support behind its initiatives; the renovation of the coastal strip was successful. The ideologies and policies that have shaped this effort over the years are also discussed in this report.Fil: Faggi, Ana Maria

Contrasting global imagery to local realities in the postcolonial waterfronts of Malaysia's capital cities

Urban waterfront redevelopments are often about image-making for economic and political gain. This article analyses three major recent waterfront projects within the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area: Kuala Lumpur City Centre, the River of Life, and Lake Putrajaya. All have been important in projecting an image of a modern, developed, postcolonial Malaysia. The article examines these waterfront landscapes in relation to three key themes: their contribution to the overall city image, to economic development, and to ecological performance. The article draws upon policy documents, project plans, interviews with local policymakers, designers and academics, field observation of the current physical development, land use and social use of the three waterfront precincts, and a mental mapping survey of users' cognitive images of how these precincts fit within the overall city image. Analysis shows that the appearance, use and development process of these three waterfront projects draw heavily on international models. The article suggests several waterfront sites and uses within the three projects that indicate a more authentic local paradigm for urban waterfront development

The role of sustainability assessment in sustainability management for urban redevelopment

Sustainability assessment has the potential to influence decision making and hence to improve the management of sustainability. This paper presents the development and reporting of benchmark sustainability indicators and discusses the challenges of embedding sustainability indicators into existing process for urban infrastructure development. It links sustainability indicators with a range of tools that were implemented within a Sustainability Enhancement and Monitoring Framework for the £1billion redevelopment of Dundee Waterfront. The sustainability monitoring framework followed the UK and Scottish Government thematic indicator approach and provided a set of Sustainability Benchmark Indicators for assessing and managing a public sector funded urban redevelopment. The process of indicator development was iterative and consisted of three main activities, literature, interviews and document analysis. Indicators were finalised through close working with Dundee City Council, Scottish Enterprise and partnership stakeholders. The indicators were successfully established in 2010 within Dundee City Council at project and departmental level, providing the link across policies, programmes and projects. The indictor development process is discussed and the findings of a January 2015 review of changes in the benchmark indicators will be reported. The transition of the indicators over time and its impact on future sustainability enhancement opportunities are evaluated alongside the implications for sustainability management of Dundee Waterfront. The efficacy of the benchmark indicators to support sustainability management over the planned 30 year programme of urban redevelopment is discussed. The wider implications of the findings of the Dundee Waterfront project are reviewed in the context of current work on sustainability assessment

Contrasting global imagery to local realities in the postcolonial waterfronts of Malaysia’s capital cities

Urban waterfront redevelopments are often about image-making for economic and political gain. This article analyses three major recent waterfront projects within the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area: Kuala Lumpur City Centre, the River of Life, and Lake Putrajaya. All have been important in projecting an image of a modern, developed, postcolonial Malaysia. The article examines these waterfront landscapes in relation to three key themes: their contribution to the overall city image, to economic development, and to ecological performance. The article draws upon policy documents, project plans, interviews with local policymakers, designers and academics, field observation of the current physical development, land use and social use of the three waterfront precincts, and a mental mapping survey of users' cognitive images of how these precincts fit within the overall city image. Analysis shows that the appearance, use and development process of these three waterfront projects draw heavily on international models. The article suggests several waterfront sites and uses within the three projects that indicate a more authentic local paradigm for urban waterfront development