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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...