ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 examines the historical, geographic and socio-economic factors that have shaped the urban waterfront in small Mediterranean port towns, discussing their long-established relationship with the sea, which had favoured the establishment of the port and lately the development of the tourism industry, contributing to their prosperity. This is a common trait for the Mediterranean tourism industry and applies well to the three small port towns of Santa Teresa Gallura, La Maddalena and Palau selected to represent the ‘archetypical waterfront’ in this study. Although the benefits of coastal tourism development to the local economy is apparent, the increasing demand for beach tourism facilities has brought substantial changes to the urban development pattern of the coastal towns, which rarely considers the environmental consumption and coastal deterioration.
Consequently, the unrestrained depletion of natural resources will eventually lead to the decline of recreational coastal tourism in the region and result in the overall deterioration of the tourism product.
Therefore, proposals for a new form of sustainable and/or eco-tourism were put forward in the past decade, suggesting various strategies for sustainable development.
As the EU continues to support campaigns and deliver updated measures for sustainable
environmental development, examples of how the individual European countries are working towards adopting and adjusting their local planning policy and practice on coastal management and waterfront development to the EU recommendations are illustrated in this chapter, together with a review of the many obstacles that engender the delivery of the proposed measures, one of the most decisive being the confusing and overlapping jurisdictions, which make it difficult to assign liability.
The chapter ends with a critical analysis of emergent theories and principles of sustainable design, and how they apply even more to waterfront design in small port towns as they share unique development potential and can take on a leading role in launching a sustainable urbanism model.
