Creative Practices: Bridging Temporal, Spatial, and Disciplinary Gaps

Creative practices are at the heart of human history. Humans have responded creatively to a broad range of challenges—environmental, political, economic, social, religious, cultural—by shaping our tangible physical environment and our intangible cultural practices. Our present buildings, cities, and landscapes as well as our local cultures,...

Water Resilience: Creative Practices Past, Present and Future

Creative practices are at the heart of human history. Humans have responded creatively to a broad range of challenges—environmental, political, economic, social, religious, cultural—by shaping our tangible physical environment and our intangible cultural practices. Our present buildings, cities, and landscapes as well as our local cultures,...

Complexity and contradiction: in memoriam Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi was not a member of the IPHS, but his writings influenced planners around the world. As a result, his impact is also visible in planning history. In the following pages, five planning historians from Europe and the Americas remember the impact of Bob on their scholarship and the architectural and planning debates in their...

Port City Porosity: Boundaries, Flows, and Territories

The introduction to this thematic issue on port city porosity sets the stage for the study of port city territories as a particular type of space, located at the edge of land and sea, built, often over centuries, to facilitate the transfer of goods, people, and ideas. It argues that the concept of porosity can help conceptualize the ways in...

Innovative Methods for Studying and Shaping Cultures in Port City Territories

Following part 1 of Port City Cultures, Values, and Maritime Mindsets, this issue explores how cultures of port city territories are put into words, visualized, and can even be shaped. Continuing the argument that port city territories merit particular attention due to their location at the border of sea and land and the presence of global and...

Living with Water: Bringing Back Human-Water Relationships

In March 2023, thousands of people from various disciplines came together in New York for the United Nations 2023 Water Conference. The attendees included policymakers, activists, professionals and academics, all with an interest in the water sector. The conference provided a platform to share knowledge and exchange ideas about water-related...

Port city symbiosis: introduction to the special issue

Port cities and their neighbouring areas, located at the confines between sea and land, are key hubs in the transportation of goods and people. Ports serve global transport needs, while they are embedded in local geographies, topographies, political, economic and historical settlements. People have always been attracted to human settlements...

Shipping Canals in Transition

Shipping canals have supported maritime traffic and port development for many centuries. Radical transformations of these shipping landscapes through land reclamation, diking, and canalization were celebrated as Herculean works of progress and modernity. Today, shipping canals are the sites of increasing tension between economic growth and...