OB PORTUS. The potential of nature to integrate the port as an environmental infrastructure to the city in the Americas

The research argues that nature has the potential to integrate the apparently irreconcilable relationship between port and city. In this sense, its main contribution lies in an alternative perspective on the port city; not only as the result of two opposing categories, but as the synergy of two entities that may coexist and integrate through the inclusion of the environmental dimension. For that purpose, the port—considered in the twentieth century as an annex to the city, a hard, operative, mechanical and contaminant infrastructure— presents nowadays the potential, thanks to the new technologies, to become an environmental infrastructure. The thesis states a new planning approach which, first, transcends the port-city dichotomy, and second, replaces the traditional notion of port renovation from the end of the twentieth century. This new approach is based on landscape-oriented planning, and it refers to the blurring of limits between city and port, through the infiltration of natural systems. In this regard, the notion of regeneration of an urban piece—based on the concept of interface defined by Brian S. Hoyle (2006) as an area of transition between the uses of the port and the urban areas—is extended towards a diffuse space which is organically integrated to the territory, that we refer to as the field of strategic interaction between port, city and nature. This field acknowledges the natural systems as key planning subjects with the potential to sustain new collective programs and mixed uses. For this, the research interprets the biophysical systems (manifest or latent) as natural pulses with the potential to infiltrate vacant urban and port areas, through visible flows (natural infrastructures) and invisible flows (energy) within a single metabolism. The research is centered on the American continent, where the natural exuberance and geographical potency is understood as a unique object of design to regenerate the port city coast. A selection of six American port cities is analyzed that could be potentially expanded to other contexts. On the one hand, three successful cases are studied—referred to as representative cases, Toronto, San Francisco, Boston—, where an emerging tendency towards a type of coastal planning associated to the creation of new links between the port, city and nature becomes evident. On the other hand, three contexts are analyzed—referred to as cases of opportunity, Buenos Aires, Manaus and Montevideo—, where nature’s potential to activate a new type of relationship is verified. For an analytical reading of the evolution of the port coast, we revise Hoyle’s original diagram (1989, 2000), a paradigmatic model that defines the phases in the evolution between the city and the port. We reinterpret it for the American context and we add a third component to the relationship: nature. Finally, with the purpose of bringing these statements down to the project level, the identification and interpretation of theoretical-operative tools is exposed. These tools are referred to as keys and are formulated to contribute to future reflection and interventions on port coasts, in an attempt to incorpo¬rate the environmental dimension as a criterion and a driver of reconnection between the port and the city.