Towards Circular Port–City Territories: Rotterdam and the Port Back to the City

Port and city authorities all over Europe and beyond are striving with finding solutions able to combine sustainability with economic growth. Several global urgencies in fact, such as climate change, energy transition, the exponential changes in the scale of ports and ships and last but not least the economic and health shock related to the...

160 Years of Borders Evolution in Dunkirk: Petroleum, Permeability, and Porosity

Since the 1860s, petroleum companies, through their influence on local governments, port authorities, international actors and the general public gradually became more dominant in shaping the urban form of ports and cities. Under their development and pressure, the relationships between industrial and urban areas in port cities hosting oil...

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...

Urbanization Patterns around the North Sea: Long-Term Population Dynamics, 1300–2015

Around the North Sea, how have port cities and cities in the hinterlands of port cities influenced one another in the past? What possible links are there between population trends in various urban areas and time periods? Is it possible to identify the origin of the urbanization patterns around the North Sea? To understand the current era of...

When a Fire Starts to Burn: The Relation Between an (Inter)nationally Oriented Incinerator Capacity and the Port Cities’ Local Circular Ambitions

This paper assesses the potential of the circular economy (CE) policy ambitions of the port cities of Ghent (Belgium) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Both Ghent and Amsterdam are municipalities that potentially lend themselves ideally to set up a more local-oriented circular (re)production and (re)consumption system. Subsequently, both have the...