... technological changes in the shipping industry (Pinder, Hoyle, Husain 1998). The industrial waterfront has been reduced to a postmodern corporate product (Keating, 1993) that maintains little or no connection to its particular urban context, spatially, socially, and economically spurred on by cities that pursue the gentrification of inner cities and industrial districts through the provisions of public subsidies to encourage the interest of private investors in the reconditioning of industrial areas. Public planners have evolved in this environment into mediators between "private investors and public sponsors" (Fainstein, 1994) and commodity managers and the public are omitted from planning process. The physical outcome is the post-modernist image based environment where the specificity of history and place are discarded and are replaced by the kind of homogenized commodification with which we are all familiar. Some urban theorists in the United States and Europe contend that there are great adverse ...

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