ABSTRACT
Competitive advantage has become the catch-cry of the modern era as more and more cities are forced to compete with each other for increasingly volatile capital. Competitive advantage is an essential aspect to many national, regional and local urban policy agendas. In a very direct way, this will impact the form of cities. Competition for market shares in the global economy will force major adjustments to the urban fabrics of cities as they rationalize to realize their economic potentials (Serageldin, 1997). Competition between cities is not new. Indeed cities have always competed for larger shares of capital and trade. What is new is the fact that in
a world of unprecedented technological change and the development of a truly integrated global economy, the competition to attract wealth, in physical and human terms, is even more crucial. A city’s success today depends less on location and more on the availability of an appropriate infrastructure (Marshall, 1998). A crucial aspect of these repositioning efforts is environmental and urban regeneration. Waterfront sites provide remarkable opportunities for redevelopment on large, highly centralized and therefore visible locations. It is this fact that makes waterfront development so important to many environmental and urban regeneration efforts.
