The cruise ship industry, is detrimental to the environment and encourages unsustainable patterns of consumption. This thesis proposes instead that this industry become a catalyst for change, working to protect the environment from which it is directly profiting from.

While the recent Slow Tourism movement (an offshoot of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement) is a step in the right direction, it falls short of what is needed: a new tourism model that is centered on true reciprocity, emphasizing a positive tourist contribution to the host city, its landscape and education.

This thesis
is tested through the redesign of a barge and an abandoned site originally slated for a Norman Foster development in Duisburg, Germany. The intention of the design is to reverse the balance of give and take between the tourist and host city and focus on education relating to sustainable water treatment and decontamination practices.