Urban renewal is an inevitable requirement for adapting to the new situation of urban development and promoting the high-quality development of cities. As an integral part of the city, the redevelopment of the urban waterfront has increasingly become an important way to promote urban renewal and participate in global competition. In order to comprehensively understand the status of waterfront redevelopment, this article summarized the relevant progress of urban waterfront redevelopment in China and abroad from the aspects of waterfront concept, waterfront redevelopment concept, spatial process, evolution path, organizational model, and driving mechanism, and examined the research prospects. The findings are as follows: 1) The evolution trend of the spatial process of waterfront redevelopment changes from production to service-economy, and from a single land use type to a multiple land use types. 2) From the evolution of the spatial process, it can be concluded that waterfront areas are mainly redeveloped in four different temporal and spatial evolution paths: material space improvement, high-quality economic development, shared vision of leisure and entertainment, and historical and cultural protection. 3) The organizational model of waterfront redevelopment is mainly divided into three types: government led, private, and public-private partnership. Stakeholders participate in forming the organizational model of waterfront redevelopment, interacting with the social-environmental systems composed of port, environment, economy, politics, culture, and so on and jointly acting on waterfront redevelopment. 4) In the future, the research on urban waterfront redevelopment should focus on the innovation of analytical systems and theoretical research frameworks, pay attention to the research on the dynamic evolution path of waterfront redevelopment, further analyze waterfront redevelopment mechanism and mechanism of influence, strengthen the systematic analysis of the multiple performances of waterfront redevelopment, and establish a waterfront redevelopment management and control method library to promote urban renewal.