ABSTRACT
Cities built at the water’s edge engender complex relationships with this fluid and changeable substance, since the line that mediates between land and water is often redrawn in the process of urban growth. The resultant urban palimpsest inevitably records such operations, but the legibility of these events and their vestiges can become obscured over time. This chapter examines recent urban transformations in Nantes, France, a city whose multiple waterways encompass compound histories and social narratives. Its publicly-sponsored redevelopment projects include several large-scale urban landscapes, the reclamation of a former port district and its extensive built heritage, and a memorial that reflects on Nantes’ historical role in the French slave trade. The planning process throughout has been guided by an explicit goal to reinstate the legacy of Nantes’ rivers as sites of collective memory and shared culture. Seen altogether, these urban interventions reveal the city’s indelible connection to its rivers and reassert the central presence of the Loire in its midst.
