Zuzanna Róża Chybicka
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft
Most people associate port cities with coastal locations. River ports, however, are equally important within water transportation systems and are often overlooked. Cities with river ports, such as Paris, offer a valuable lens for understanding the complexity of contemporary urban development: defined by their relationship to water, they are places where infrastructure, economy, culture, and everyday life intersect. Along the Seine, this intersection is particularly visible as the river serves as a transport corridor, a public space, and a protected UNESCO cultural landscape.
The importance of bringing these multiple functions together within a coherent urban space was the focus of the course “Adaptive Strategies Past, Present, Future: Topics in the History of Architecture and Urban Planning”, held at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Using Paris as a case study the course aimed to teach students how to design adaptive strategies for the future of Paris’ Port of Bercy while preserving its historical references and cultural significance.
Drawing on the course’s focus on the relationship between urban planning, infrastructure, and societal change, this blog post explores how current planning initiatives seek to balance industrial functions, public access, and environmental ambitions along the Seine. It argues that the future of river port cities depends on adaptive spatial and governance strategies that allow multiple, and sometimes competing, uses of the waterfront to coexist.
Between Industry and Public Life
The evolution of the Port of Paris, a network of river ports and logistics infrastructure along the Seine, including the site of Bercy, reflects broader transformations in the relationship between cities and their waterfronts. Historically, the Seine was deeply integrated into daily urban life. It served as a primary trade route with numerous small docks located throughout the city. One of the most important docks was the Port of Bercy, which was constructed in the 18th century and hosted one of the world’s largest wine markets during the 19th century, supplying Paris and the surrounding region. As industrialization intensified and water transport systems expanded, the riverbanks in Paris became increasingly organized around specific industrial and logistical activities. Larger port facilities dedicated to freight handling, storage, and distribution emerged, creating spaces that were spatially separated from surrounding residential and public areas. This transformation gradually reduced public access to certain waterfront areas and contributed to the emergence of a clear functional distinction between industrial port areas and public urban spaces.
In recent decades, however, urban planners, policymakers, and local communities have increasingly challenged this separation, advocating for greater public access to the river. Changing societal values, particularly around sustainability, quality of life, and access to public space, have prompted a rethinking of the Seine’s role in urban life, extending its function beyond transport and logistics to include ecological and recreational purposes. Waterfront redevelopment has become a key strategy for Paris as the city government revitalizes underused areas and opens these spaces to the public, while also seeking to address the ecological challenges facing the metropolis. While waterfront redevelopment projects can create new, vital urban spaces, they also risk disconnecting the waterfront from the industrial heritage that has long shaped its identity. The challenge of waterfront redevelopment is not simply to shift the focus from industry to recreation, but to create a shared space where port activities, public life, and environmental goals can coexist while supporting both economic vitality and social inclusivity.
Actors and Interests
For Paris, integrating these functions is particularly difficult due to the presence of multiple stakeholders with differing priorities. HAROPA PORT (a public authority overseeing the port network of Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris) plays a central coordinating role in maintaining the Seine as an efficient transport corridor while also complying with environmental regulations and responding to urban development pressures. Private operators depend on the Seine for efficient freight transport, which reduces road congestion and emissions compared with road transport. Therefore, they require dedicated logistics infrastructure along the waterfront, which can sometimes compete with proposals to increase public access and recreational uses along the riverbanks. Meanwhile, the municipal government of Paris, local communities, and environmental groups often emphasize accessibility, environmental quality, and the cultural value of the riverbanks. These priorities do not always align with those of HAROPA PORT and private operators, creating an ongoing negotiation over how the waterfront should evolve (HAROPA PORT, 2025).
One of the most salient examples of this tension between recreational use and industrial river functions is the city of Paris’s effort to reintroduce swimming in the Seine. It illustrates both the growing public desire for access to the river and the city of Paris's efforts to reconnect the Seine with everyday urban life (Ausloos, 2025; Connolly, 2025). At the same time, the Seine remains an important transport corridor within a dense metropolitan region. Making the river swimmable again therefore requires careful consideration of water quality, safety, and spatial organization. To achieve this public authorities have proposed designating swimming areas, clearly separated from navigation channels, with rows of fixed pillars. These measures allow public use of the river while maintaining safe and efficient vessel movement. At the same time swimming depends on substantial improvements in water quality. Efforts to reduce pollution, modernize wastewater systems, and continuously monitor the river have been essential in making recreational use of the Seine possible (Ville de Paris, 2025).
Toward Adaptability
This example highlights how carefully planned spatial arrangements can help accommodate competing uses of the river among different stakeholders. By introducing physical or operational separations, planners can reduce direct competition for space between swimmers and navigation, enabling both uses to coexist within the same river corridor. The reintroduction of swimming in the Seine also reflects a move toward more flexible and adaptable spatial strategies in waterfront development. While swimming has historically been part of the river’s everyday use, it was banned in 1923 due to safety risks associated with river navigation and high levels of pollution (Ville de Paris, 2024). In contrast to earlier approaches that tended to separate and fix waterfront functions in space, contemporary planning increasingly favors arrangements in which the same areas can support different uses at different times. In the case of the Seine, this involves coordination between urban planners and port operators, such as HAROPA PORT and the city of Paris, to balance logistics, navigation, and public access. Depending on operational needs, certain quay areas may continue to support freight handling and port activities and are then opened to the public outside operating hours. This approach reflects a broader shift in Parisian waterfront governance away from rigid zoning toward more flexible and responsive urban design strategies that can adapt to changing patterns of use and the diverse requirements of stakeholders along the river.
On a broader level responses to these planning challenges highlight a fundamental shift in how urban planners, policymakers, and citizens understand the role of rivers and waterfronts in cities. Previously viewed as an infrastructure corridor, the Seine is increasingly recognized by urban planners and public authorities as a space that can support ecological, social, and cultural values alongside its economic functions. This shift reflects both public demands for cleaner, more accessible waterfronts and planning initiatives aimed at expanding public engagement with the river.
Conclusion
The case of the Port of Paris illustrates the broader challenge of integrating port infrastructure into the contemporary city. It demonstrates that coexistence between industrial activity and urban life is not only possible but necessary, particularly in the context of sustainable, adaptable development of port cities' waterfronts. Achieving this balance requires more than technical solutions: it demands a shift in perspective among planners, policymakers, and port authorities, recognizing the port as an integral part of the urban fabric rather than a separate, purely industrial zone.
Together, these developments point toward a future in which the Seine functions as a multifunctional river landscape, balancing logistics, ecology, and public life through careful and coordinated governance. Shared waterfront spaces that accommodate both public activities and port functions, improved access to the river through walking paths and designated swimming areas, and adaptable port zones that can support logistics operations while opening to the public at certain times will play a key role in this transformation. These strategies allow the river to serve a wider range of users without compromising its economic function. Ultimately, the reconnection of the port and the city depends on continuous negotiation, flexibility, and a willingness of different actors to cooperate. Although many of these changes are still in progress, Paris demonstrates how ports and cities can work toward a more spatially integrated relationship that accommodates economic activity, public life, and environmental concerns within the same waterfront landscape.
Acknowledgments
This blog post has been written in the context of discussions in the LDE PortCityFutures research community. It reflects the evolving thoughts of the authors and expresses the discussions between researchers on the socio-economic, spatial and cultural questions surrounding port city relationships. This blog was edited by the PortCityFutures editorial team: Eliane Schmid and Floris Catijn.
References
Ausloos, M. (2025, July 5). Paris opens River Seine for public swimming for first time since 1923. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/paris-opens-river-seine-public-swimming-first-time-since-1923-2025-07-05/
Bercy Village. (n.d.). History. https://www.bercyvillage.com/tourisme-section-en/history
Connolly, K. (2025, July 7). Paris reopens Seine River to public swimming after century-long ban. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/06/paris-river-seine-public-swimming-after-century-long-ban
HAROPA PORT. (2025, September 10). Déclaration d’intention. Projet Stratégique. https://projetstrategique.haropaport.com/fr/publications/declaration-dintention
Hein, C. (2016). Port Cities and Urban Waterfronts: How Localized Planning Ignores Water as Connector. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 3(3), 419-438. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1141
Hein, C. (2019). The Port Cityscape: Spatial and institutional approaches to port city relationships. PORTUSplus, 8(Special Issue).https://portusplus.org/index.php/pp/article/view/190
Les Pavillons de Bercy - Musée des Arts Forains. (2017, January 9). History of Bercy. https://arts-forains.com/en/our-story/history-of-bercy
Lestel, L., Meybeck, M., Carré, C., & Belliard, J. (2023). The Seine, the River dedicated to Paris. In UNESCO eBooks (pp. 673–697). https://doi.org/10.54677/cgdx8656
Ville de Paris. (2024, May 17). The history of swimming in the Seine. https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/the-history-of-swimming-in-the-seine-27195
Ville De Paris. (2025, July 15). La Seine s’ouvre la baignade. https://www.paris.fr/pages/se-baigner-dans-la-seine-en-2024-et-au-dela-6935
Ville de Paris. (2026, June 29). Baignade dans la Seine : on vous dit tout pour en profiter cet été! https://www.paris.fr/dossiers/tout-ce-que-vous-devez-savoir-sur-la-baignade-dans-la-seine-247
[Photograph used for the collage: Matson Photo Service, photographer. Solomon's pools becomes a picnic & swimming resort. Taking a dive into the deep water of the upper pool. [Between 1940 and 1946] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2019711162/.]