Large ports such as Rotterdam, Shanghai, or Los Angeles are always in the foreground; they are in the press, the subject of many academic studies, and key players in political decision-making, but what about all small and medium-sized ports in the same territory? If we look at the map of the port city territory of Rotterdam (Hein et al., 2023), we see several red spots indicating the ports of Scheveningen, Schiedam, Dordrecht, and Moerdijk, among others. These ports facilitate access to water and land, effectively support local industries, connect communities, and cooperate with larger maritime hubs (Figure 1). Together, these small ports form an important spatial, social, and economic grouping that is under-researched (Carella et al., 2024) and in need of comprehensive planning and policy advice. This blog presents different perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of small ports by presenting five ongoing projects by PortCityFutures members that address key issues in small ports. These projects were presented during the poster presentation at the symposium (RE-) CONNECTING MARITIME-URBAN ECOSYSTEMS on 16-17 September, 2024. [...] ... Read more

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 conditions for social contestation. It calls for a rethinking of the role of communities in contemporary port-city governance, with an emphasis on imaginaries of re-territorialization produced through social mobilization. I frame the increasing contestation in port cities through a critical approach to logistics, arguing that citizen engagement holds the potential to drastically readdress the port-city relationship. It examines the cases of Genoa and Venice using ethnographic methods and reconstructs a historically in-depth counter-narrative of interactions between port, city and citizen. I contextualize specific frictions between port and city through the rise in social mobilizations. The article shows how social mobilization challenges the status quo in different ways, producing changes and illuminating pathways toward more sustainable forms of coexistence between ports and cities. ... Read more

PortCityFutures is an interdisciplinary research center, originally set up between the Dutch universities of Delft, Rotterdam, and Leiden. It focuses on the legacies, uses, and future developments of port city regions, motivated to let port and city jointly evolve again, after decades in which these entities have increasingly grown apart under industrial imperatives. As port cities are uniquely located on the edge between sea and land, they have limited space for reinventing their infrastructurally dense and culturally rich territories. Yet, the historical trajectories of port cities also comprise a persistent resilience towards change and future challenges, which can be capitalised on by (re)cultivating shared values and mindsets. [...] ... Read more

This article focuses on the conflictual relationships between citizens and ports. It critically engages with logistics, challenging positivist views of the port growth as ‘business as usual’. I argue that logistical trends such as naval gigantism and the concentration of power in the shipping industry are increasingly influencing ports’ decisions, creating the conditions for frictions between ports and cities.I interrogate the relationships between the inexorable growth of ports and the multidimension character of arising frictions, highlightingtheir potential as deterritorialising forces. I argue that the combination of increasing frictions and expanding perceptions of the climate crisis is triggering social mobilization against imposed port expansion. Such mobilizations are more than counter-logistic actions –they also generate proposals for new forms of coexistence between port and city, based on the direct experience of socio-environmental vulnerability.Utilising the content of the online platform ContestedPorts, I frame arguments that support social mobilization, detecting priorities and values that define new perspectives on social metabolisms and emergent forms of eco-territoriality. ... Read more

For the PortCityFutures community, the working year of 2022 started with a five-day workshop hosted by the Lorentz Center. Even though we couldn’t meet in person because of the lockdown in the Netherlands, these five days were full of connection: between academic, societal and governance partners, between new ideas, concepts and tools, and between water, culture, space and society. Through presentations, discussions and hands-on exercises, we got to know each other’s work better, but were also introduced to new ways for balancing the focus on technology and economy within port cities with a diversity of spatial, social and cultural approaches. In this report, we look back at each day and synthesize the main learnings from this workshop for our world-wide research community. ... Read more