With the Tide

Sammanfattning

Göteborg has historically developed around productive landscapes where shipbuilding, marine repair, logistics, fisheries, and warehouses operate in close relation with water and ecological systems. As the city expanded, these productive environments became spatially separated, increasingly polluting and extractive. Along the Göta Älv’s waterfronts, regeneration focuses on real estate and public space development, often overlooking the complex relationships between industry, water, and ecology that are integral to these territories. The post-industrial redevelopment paradigm treats waterfront transformation as primarily economic and aesthetic, separating productive function from ecological restoration. The Göta Älv territory was once a continuous industrial-ecological system and has since fragmented into disconnected sites facing increased rain floods, high sea levels, and degradation that threaten both ecological integrity and dependent programmatic infrastructures. Compromised water quality and disrupted habitats undermine productive and ecological potential causing existing waterfront projects to treat the river as a representational backdrop rather than active territorial system. There is potential for the Göta Älv waterfront to be adapted into a productive-ecological corridor- one where industry, water and ecology co-exist and metabolise into a living territory. This thesis explores how rather than accepting post-industrial displacement, regenerative forms of production such as circular material systems, energy synergies, and experimental aquaculture can be introduced and operate alongside ecological landscapes designed to accommodate flooding and restore river habitats. This challenges the dominant paradigm by positioning industrial transformation and ecological resilience as mutually reinforcing forces in the future of riverine port cities.