Urban Beaches: Balancing Public Rights and Private Development

Our urban agglomerates (over 10,000,000 residents) continue to grow (UN, 2000) and it is reasonable to assume that future population growth will continue to expand our urban areas. The already crowded beaches and shores where residents flock to find much needed recreation will become even more overcrowded and will have an urgent need for expansion.

The Hudson River forms a border between New Jersey and New York. This river has a rich and varied history, resulting in a variety of shorelines such as bulkheads, marinas, bluffs, wetlands and urban infrastructure, some of which is in a dilapidated state. As urban areas are redeveloped, the riverfront must also be restored for public safety, improved aesthetics, environmental benefits and enhanced recreational opportunities. An example of urban riverfront recreation is the ambitious Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in New Jersey. The walkway, which affords stunning views of the New York City skyline, will eventually extend 18.5 miles along the Hudson River through nine municipalities and hundreds of parcels of private property.

The paper reviews the changes in the polity of coastal protection in Spain after the old regime and the posterior evolution along the twenty years. The problems emerged after 1950 and exploded in 1970s. Economically the funds grown suddenly up in 1983 and went on growing up to nom with a reflexive period in 1993–1995. The paper analyses the evolution of the investments and the legal justification. Technically rigid works were refused from the beginning of the strenghtening in 1983. At that time the American experience rejecting "hard works" for shore protection and claiming for artificial nourishment was accepted for Spanish coastal authorities in a generalized way. Most of resources has been expent in protection and development by artificial nourishments not always successfully, so that in some occasions complementary actions were required. On the other hand fisheries and environmentalists has been presenting an increasingly opposition to sandy dredging and disposal. This paper also trys to analize the question about the suitability of "hard and soft works" for shore protection and coastal development reviewing the Spanish experience on the behaviour of the different kind of solutions and their environmental impacts and social conflicts.

Current conventional erosion protection techniques are both costly and can detract from the natural environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe how Presque Isle State Park, located along the shoreline of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, implemented a low-cost and innovative erosion protection project. Erosion within the back bay area of the park threatened the park's heavily used multi-purpose trail. With a matching grant from the Great Lakes Commission, the park developed a plan that placed riprap off the shoreline of the trail, anchored downed trees from the park in the riprap to function as timber groins, and then filled in the area between the trail and the riprap with sand dredged from a local sandbar. Geotextile and wattles were than positioned in the fill to aid in vegetative rooting. After placement of the geotextile and wattles, indigenous vegetation was transplanted in the newly created area.

Although only 20% of European Union (EU) municipalities are coastal, there is a long tradition dating from at least the eighth century AD of using urban shores as sources of food, places for building and ‘beaching' boats, markets and meeting places. However, the industrial revolution was followed by the establishment of coastal towns accessible by railway. Earlier, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the health resort was made popular by upper classes. Beaches today are used in many different ways, the users' behaviour depending in part on the physical nature of the beach itself. Most urban beaches are largely anthropogenic features within which the natural features are only the loose sediments. Similarly, the values attributed to beaches vary greatly but represent economic, cultural, historical and social attributes of both individuals and groups. The future of European urban beaches will be affected by national and EU policy strategies, marketing, revitalisation of urban waterfronts and climate and technological change. EU policy, however, has very little emphasis on the urbanised beaches even though they represent the most used part of the European shoreline. Similarly, little attention has been given to the potential for innovative revitalisation or development of the urban beach in contrast to the urban former industrialised waterfront where there has been large-scale redevelopment.

The Coney Island Public Beach and Boardwalk Improvement of 1923 is noteworthy not only for its technical merit, but also for its social and economic benefit to the City of New York. The people who have benefited from the project can be numbered in the millions. Many of these people were of limited means and would not have had access to the more exclusive beaches on Long Island. The Improvement helped convert nearly 2 miles of shoreline characterized by ramshackle development and narrow to non-existent beaches from which the general public was excluded, to a world famous resort that was accessible to all for no more than the cost of a subway fare. There is no project that better represents the aspirations of ASBPA to promote the wise use of our shoreline assets for "the health and physical well being of the people by affording an opportunity for wholesome and necessary rest and recreation," and to foster "sound, far sighted and economical development and preservation of the land to aid in placing benefits within reach of the largest possible number of people."

The coastal zone of the United States is a major source of economic and population growth. All aspects of the coastal economy — tourism, residential and commercial development — are heavily dependent upon the environmental preservation and recreational quality of beaches. This study characterizes the linkages among beach quality, tourism, and the coastal economy. We document the empirical evidence for the economic and demographic importance of the coastal zone, and for the crucial role that tourism plays in its economy. The remaining piece of the puzzle — the link between beach protection activities on the one hand and tourism and the coastal economy on the other — is less-well substantiated. We identify two economic models that can be used to measure the strength of the relationship between beach quality and the coastal economy. We consider both cross-sectional differences, i.e., variation among coastal counties in recreational and property values as a function of beach quality; and temporal differences, i.e., recreational and property values along the coast both "before" and "after" placement of federal shore-protection projects.

This presentation examines the definition of urban beaches from an economic perspective. Discussion of economic measures for urban beaches is provided. Hedonic results are offered from a study undertaken by the authors for the City of Virginia Beach. The results demonstrate that 19% of the market value of properties near the urban beach in the study area appears to result from the proximity to the urban beach. While an unexpected result of the research, the results provide an insight into the very substantial impact of urban beaches on surrounding property values. Additional measures of the value of urban beaches are suggested for further research.

With nearly 1500 miles of shoreline, the history of New York City has been intimately linked to the sea. Four out of five of the New York City boroughs are located on islands, which are interconnected by a large network of bridges and tunnels. New residential and commercial complexes have replaced decaying piers and factories at water's edge in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Edgewater, New Jersey. Battery Park City, lower Manhatten has risen on landfill. Beaches and coastal wetlands, provide the large regional urban population with many leisure opportunities, including swimming, fishing, boating, and hiking, as well as maintaining critical habitat for local wildlife. Barrier dunes constitute an important line of defense against destructive storm surges. Ironically, the rediscovery of the waterfront comes at a time when climate change may threaten the future of the shoreline. Rising sea levels, associated with global warming, will magnify the hazards already facing the coast: storm surges, beach erosion, and loss of wetlands.