Introduction to “Political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations”

The papers in this special issue focus on the political ecology of waterfronts in selected cities in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. The papers incorporate emphases on the myriad influences that different scales of social and environmental policy development and implementation, planning decisions, infrastructure funding, investment and ownership practices, and public engagement, for example, have on the social and ecological processes that occur on urban waterfronts. We posit that urban waterfronts are interesting and complex spatial locations that, when studied with attention to broader transformative processes as well as the changes that occur within the scale of the urban waterfront, allow for new insights into the production of nature, patterns of social entanglement, and political–economic configurations in cities.