Adaptive Strategies in Naples and Beirut: Methodology, Scenario Thinking and Design Fiction

Port cities are places at the edge of sea and land, where flows of goods and people create unique spaces, institutions and cultures, often over long periods of time. History matters when it comes to understanding and designing the future of port cities such as the two ancient Mediterranean cities of Beirut and Naples, where institutions and...

Fire in the port city: the impact of different population groups on the destruction and revival of Canton city in the nineteenth century

Canton (present-day Guangzhou) has long flourished as a port city. As the city expanded in the nineteenth century, the risks of conflagrations increased; streets became more crowded, buildings were more often made of wood, and there was more use of open fires. The reconstruction of Canton after conflagrations provides an excellent way to...

Evaluating the sustainability of scenarios for port city development with Boussole21 method

This research aims to evaluate the sustainability of urban strategies in Skikda, a prehistoric, ancient, and Mediterranean port city of northeastern Algeria, known as by the Punic name Russicade. The port city of Skikda shows a diverse landscape of heritage sites and the industrial reality of a city, rich by its under-exploited cultural and...

From natural environment to artificial system: Chang'an and its water system in the Western Han Dynasty

People around the world have shaped societies and urban spaces around water for millennia. They have transformed natural water structures and patterns to serve their diverse needs. The ways in which historical decisions affect contemporary water systems and influence future planning of urban systems still need to be fully recognized. This...

“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...

The role of Dutch civil engineering in modern port planning in Japan (1870s–1890s)

In the mid-nineteenth century, civil engineering and technological innovation began to play a major role in the modernization and westernization of Japan. From the 1870s to the 1890s, Dutch civil engineers worked with Japanese practitioners on the design of Japanese ports, a key starting point for urban development. This article explores the...

Towards Culture-Aware Smart and Sustainable Cities: Integrating Historical Sources in Spatial Information Infrastructures

This article addresses the integration of cultural perspectives in the smart city discourse and in the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030; it does so specifically with respect to land patterns and land use. We hope to increase the ability of relevant stakeholders, including scientific communities working in that field, to handle the complexity...

Straddling the Fence: Land Use Patterns in and around Ports as Hidden Designers

Ports are clearly demarcated structures on land and water. They are fenced in, easily recognizable on satellite and orthophoto images, and they have specific functions. This apparent clarity of ports, their function and outline, in relation to nearby urban and rural areas, becomes more complex when explored through the lens of land use, that is...

A Call for Value Literacy in Port City Transitions

Over the last decades, values have been re-addressed in planning, policies, businesses, heritage and education. While these fields seem to agree on the importance of values, it is often unclear what actors mean by values, and how they use these values to shape decisions. A decade after a global financial crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic...

The Maritime Mindset: A Conceptual and Practical Exploration of Mapping Port Cities

Centuries of trade have left their traces in the culture and society of port cities. This paper explores the usefulness of the concept “maritime mindset” to recognize these traces, and analyses it from different disciplinary perspectives. In the second part, it proposes the practice of “deep mapping” as a methodology of identifying and...

Heritage Words: Exploring Port City Terms

Maritime heritage structures, such as cranes or warehouses, are typical for historical port cities around the world and many of them have received recognition as having Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) and have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites. They have often been preserved and revitalized as expressions of former shipping...

Marking a New Chapter in the History of our City: Newspaper Narratives of Proposed Waterfront Star Architecture

A recurrent claim associated with the development of star architecture buildings along new urban waterfronts is that star architecture’s capacity to garner media exposure can support a port city’s efforts to communicate narratives that support the process of urban transformation. However, despite the centrality of the role of the media, little...

Mapping as Gap-Finder: Geddes, Tyrwhitt, and the Comparative Spatial Analysis of Port City Regions

Politicians, planners, and mapmakers have long used mapping to depict selected spaces, to document natural and humanmade changes within them, and to identify spaces where planning intervention is needed or can be helpful. Recent innovations involving big data, GIS-based research and digital datasets offer opportunities for maps and mapping that...

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...

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...

Towards a Comparative Spatial Analysis for Port City Regions Based on Historical Geo-spatial Mapping

Researchers from multiple disciplines study ports and port cities using various forms of visualization. To better understand port cities’ challenges and opportunities, some use mathematical modeling of economic flows or shipping, while others use geo-spatial mapping of land and water territories. In the visualization of port city regions,...

The Port Cityscape: Spatial and institutional approaches to port city relationships

Port-related flows of goods, people and ideas cross institutional boundaries and create complex, fuzzy territories without strong, mutually supportive governance frameworks, legal systems and planning guidelines. Multi-scalar markets and global value chains leave their imprint on the spaces of the port and on neighboring urban and rural...

Cities (and regions) within a city: Subnational representations and the creation of European imaginaries in Brussels

This article explores how sub-national institutions – representations from cities and regions – help create a European imaginary in Brussels. Political scientists and other scholars have noted the importance of these city and regional institutions, but have paid little attention to their physical form. Through a select set of case studies, this...