Archipelago

This section serves as a true observatory on contemporary water landscapes, understood in their broadest and most interdisciplinary sense. Oriented toward analyzing complexity, “ARCHIPELAGO” gathers a rich mosaic of contributions – essays, case studies, interviews, and reports – to interpret and map within the international context the multi-scale challenges and strategies reshaping waterfronts.

The archipelago metaphor responds to a precise descriptive logic. On one hand, it reflects the identity of PORTUS’s scientific and professional community: a network of experts, professionals, and researchers who are geographically distributed and possess multidisciplinary expertise, bridging design culture with social and environmental sciences, and governance with economic and management dynamics. On the other hand, within this same framework, the individual experiences represented emerge through the voices of their authors as autonomous “islands” of knowledge and expertise: realities that are unique and heterogeneous in their geographical location, dimensional scale, historical-cultural identity, and contextual complexity, yet deeply united in sharing the same water landscape that surrounds them and defines their horizon of reference.

Through the testimonies of its protagonists — institutional figures, design professionals, scholars, and territorial governance stakeholders — the section explores the plurality of these approaches to highlight virtuous models, resilient solutions, and replicable practices oriented toward sustainability, innovation, urban regeneration, and territorial value creation, projecting specific field projects and management models toward new development scenarios.