Resumen de Europe's City Beaches as Post-Fordist Placemaking
Quentin Stevens, Mhairi Ambler
City beaches are produced by spreading sand, deckchairs and umbrellas onto industrial brownfields, parking lots, rights-of-way or other under-utilized open spaces. Where major reinvestment projects are lacking, these informal developments offer great amenity. This approach to placemaking is post-Fordist. It is highly flexible, even mobile. It involves complex, temporary networks of people and resources. It focuses on "soft" content-services, programmes, themes, atmosphere-rather than inflexible built form. This enables rapid innovation. Through four case studies, the paper explores the roles and relationships among diverse actors-city mayors, entrepreneurs, property developers, grass-roots organizations, think-tanks and planners-in the production of city beaches, and identifies what new policies, tools and management approaches they require.
