Contested port cities: Logistical frictions and civic mobilization in Genoa and Venice

This article examines the increasingly conflictual relationship between ports and their surrounding communities at a time of wide-reaching infrastructural expansion. It highlights how the centralization of power and logistical gigantism produce deterritorializing frictions, decoupling inhabitants from their territories and creating the...

The Texas Coast: Ship Channel Network of the Petroleum Age

This article provides an overview of the Texas Gulf Coast as a port city region dedicated above all to oil and gas. By the late 1800s, the same trends in transportation and industry that encouraged ship channel construction around the world drew attention to schemes to transform the Gulf Coast’s shallow bays and estuaries into inland deep-water...

How We will Live Together in the North: Cooperation among Port Cities in the Baltic Sea Region

The integrated, cross-border, cross-territorial and macro-regional planning paradigm is recalibrating the world and planning practice all around the globe. The Baltic Sea Region (BSR) has become one of the exemplary models of macro-regional practice in the European Union (EU) context. It is recognized as a flexible entity due to its activities,...

“The Hoist of the Yellow Flag”: Vulnerable Port Cities and Public Health

Port cities have long played a key role in the development, discovery, and fight against diseases. They have been laboratories for policies to address public health issues. Diseases reached port cities through maritime exchanges, and the bubonic plague is a key example. Port city residents’ close contact with water further increased the chance...

Mapping Maritime Mindsets: Mental Maps

Imagine: You are asked to draw a port city from memory. What would you put on paper? Do you think of harbours? Water, docks, cargo, moving loads, and ships? If your drawing shows these elements, don’t be surprised. Sixty-five graduate students also took on the challenge. In answering: “draw the port city of Rotterdam by mind”, the drawings of...

Resilience and Path Dependence: A Comparative Study of the Port Cities of London, Hamburg, and Philadelphia

Port spaces, functions, and interests have shaped the growth and development of many cities around the world. At times, different stakeholders—private and public, local, regional, national and global—have collaborated to assure the continuity of port functions in old and new locations and, if the port relocates or if that effort fails, to...

Defending the past by challenging the future: spatial and institutional path dependencies in the Naples port-city region

Historical paths matter in port-city regions. Here, spatial patterns and governance arrangements are path dependent to the point that once certain paths have been established, these become hard to change. This defines a condition of institutional inertia that plays a significant role in preventing any form of spatial change. Naples is an...

Resilience, Disaster, and Rebuilding in Modern Port Cities

Resilience has become a buzzword used to describe the capacity of cities to bounce back after disasters. It carries the hope of a robust and more sustainable future. Disasters can strike any region, but port cities face complex and particular risks due to their location at the intersection of sea and land, and their role in an international...

Learning From Waterfront Regeneration Projects and Contemporary Design Approaches of European Port Cities

This paper analyses the processes and approaches of waterfront regenerations in Europe and aims to evaluate the implementations. There are some common processes and cross-cultural transactions between port cities, as all port cities have to respond to the same functions to be part of the network. Since ports were interrelated, architectural...