Prof Guy Julier, who has lectured and written about urban regeneration for more than 20 years, said the Dunedin City Council's plans to attract more businesses and people to the Steamer Basin and area by relaxing the land zoning and creating parks and boulevards were similar to waterfront renewal projects completed in many British and European towns and cities.
But Dunedin residents needed to decide for themselves what the unique characteristics of its waterfront were and what they wanted to achieve for the future, he said.
"Projects such as these have to be done creatively and carefully . . . There is a danger in adopting a 'me too' approach based on what others have done and ending up with a cloned city effect.
"Dunedin shouldn't be shy about experimenting. Regeneration should be about experimenting, not replication."
Prof Julier is head of research at the Leeds School of Architecture, Landscape and Design and visiting professor at the Glasgow School of Art.
He is halfway through a four-week visit to the University of Otago as the 2008 Williams Evans Fellow for Design.
Dunedin should think about including sustainability features in its harbourside plans, he said.
"Dunedin has the opportunity to do something unique and interesting - perhaps eco housing, mixed commercial-residential areas and patches of urban agriculture.
"This could be your opportunity to rethink urban living."
Other cities and towns had been able to come up with unique sustainability projects, he said.
Turin (Italy) had established the Eataly food market, which promoted locally grown food, wine and produce;
Totnes (UK) had its own currency designed to build resilience in the local economy and get people thinking about how they spent their money;
Middlesbrough (UK) organised an urban farming project where fruit and vegetables were grown at 280 sites, including schools, parks and rest-homes, and culminated in a shared meal for 8000 residents;
Barcelona (Spain) introduced the Bicing urban bicycle-rental system, which had been a huge success, providing thousands of bikes across 350 rental stations.
It was up to Dunedin people to think about what might be unique for Dunedin, and what might work here, he said.
It was easy to get waterfront upgrade projects wrong, Prof Julier said.
One of the biggest problems was when waterfront areas were disconnected physically from the rest of the city or developed in such a way that people did not want to visit.
"An example of that is Cardiff, Wales, where an exclusive gated residential community has been established which is quite disconnected from the rest of the city.
"It is hermetically sealed off from the community around it - gentrified by day and a ghost town by night."
However, he said there were creative ways to connect Dunedin with its harbourside, which is difficult to access because of the main trunk railway line.
About $NZ13 million was being spent in his home city to connect the central Leeds area with its river front park area via a railway underpass.
