In the first few pages of her 2007 graphic novel Le Jeu des Hirondelles (Translated to A Game for Swallows in 2012), Lebanese author and artist, Zeina Abirached, provides detailed illustrations of her East Beirut neighborhood during the year 1984. Through twelve black and white panels, Abirached moves slowly from the map of Lebanon to views of the neighborhood, streetscapes, apartment buildings, and close-ups of architectural details, before she introduces her first character. In all these introductory panels, Abirached very skillfully depicts and overlays the war landscape over her neighborhood’s streets and architecture. Elements such as deserted streets, bullet-torn drum barrels, piled-up intermodal containers and building blocks, barbed wires, and bullet holes, altogether through visual representation and textual narration, introduce the reader to the experience of the civil war in her neighborhood of Beirut. It is this representational capacity of literature that this chapter analyses, to investigate how the Lebanese war literature represented, drew meaning from, and overall intersected with the concept of the neighborhood as a bounded socio-spatial unit. The employment of the neighborhood as an analytical unit emerges from its capacity to generate new insights by shifting the focus to a limited spatial setting where the intensity of social relations relations between group members of quasi-comparable socio-cultural-economic classes becomes easier to capture. The notion of the neighborhood is presented here not as a rigid planning unit, but as a fluid spatial setting that is a product of multiple social operations which are constantly being reimagined and redefined.

Ports are key nodes in the distribution of goods and people on a global scale. They link diverse territories and impact nearby cities and territories. Understanding the ways in which maritime flows shape territories on sea and land and using them to improve cities and landscapes in the short- and long-term is key to future sustainable development. Architects, planners and landscape designers can play a key role in this process; to do that, they first have to understand the role ports play in space, society and everyday life. Developing sustainable port city territories (Hein, 2023) requires keen awareness of intricate relationships regarding space and governance. In line with this premise, the Master Course Adaptive Strategies: Designing Scenarios for Port Cities, coordinated by Carola Hein and run by teachers Paolo De Martino and John Hanna at Delft University of Technology, focuses on educating architects, planners and landscape designers to understand the specific conditions of port city territories, including long-term developments and path dependencies.

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 spaces are the result of longue durée histories. Long-standing spatial and institutional frameworks in these cities have influenced recent plans. In the Italian city of Naples, historic spaces and practices have impeded transformation, because port and city authorities are pursuing divergent and historically established goals while many industrial sites, including areas used by oil industry, await redevelopment. In Beirut, reconstruction following the tragic explosion of 2020, which significantly damaged both port and city, shaping and perhaps limiting the present and future of the city. This article analyses the historic development and the opportunities for future planning of Naples and Beirut through the lens of the Adaptive Strategies course, a master-level course coordinated by Carola Hein and co-taught with Paolo De Martino and John Hanna at TU Delft in 2022. Students, through imaginative methods, rethought the relationship between land and water, port and city, questioning current planning models and imagining new resilient and adaptive processes.

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. [...]

This year’s Urban Archipelago graduate design course focuses on water and public space in Moroccan cities. We are building on and advancing the methods that we developed during last year’s exploration of the Italian city of Trieste on the Adriatic coast, including, among others, biographies of place, micro-narratives, and guided imagery of water within urban landscapes. Once again we challenge students to rethink the spatial, societal, and cultural practices of today by learning from the past and envisioning sustainable futures by design. The effects of urbanization and climate change are also increasing in Morocco; however, here in particular, the lack of water will have a long-term effect on public areas and urban life. After visiting Trieste, we concluded that personal experience is key to understanding the role that water plays in our lives. This insight remains valid. It promised to be an immersive exploration into the multifaceted dimensions of water in the Moroccan cities of Rabat, Salé, Fes, and Tetouan. [...]

Port cities are at the forefront of the contemporary climate crisis, facing multi-risk conditions from shifting water systems, migration, technological and energy transition. Addressing these challenges require collaborative stakeholder efforts to develop multi-scalar, long-term visions, focusing on interconnected port, city, and territory spaces for sustainable development. Historical continuities and maritime heritage mapping are foundational for adaptive strategies.

This article explores design education's potential to reimagine industrial and modern locations that fostered segregation and rigid infrastructure. Waterfront redevelopment, energy transitions, and new shipping technologies are ending these areas' lifecycle in many western port cities. Neglected spaces like obsolete infrastructure offer opportunities for innovative ideas. New maritime mindsets and collaborative public spaces are needed for meaningful stakeholder and citizen engagement.

Insights from the Adaptive Strategies master’s elective at Delft University of Technology demonstrate education's role in sparking discussions and developing adaptive strategies. The course, initiated after the 2021 Port of Beirut explosion, used Dunkirk's industrial heritage as a case study. This article argues that education can activate research, generate innovative planning approaches, and create integrated port-city-territory scenarios while questioning architecture's role and limitations.

How do we protect our cities from rising sea levels? This question is no longer hypothetical for coastal cities like The Hague, the political capital of the Netherlands. Set to celebrate its 800th anniversary in 2042, The Hague faces significant risks from climate change, particularly from the rising North Sea. With the city’s rich history and cultural heritage connected to the maritime dynamics at stake, innovative strategies for climate adaptation are urgently needed. This was the central challenge tackled during the recent International Workshop Netherlands eXchanges Recife (NXR-2024), where experts, students, and professionals from across the globe collaborated to co-create solutions for sea level rise adaptation. [...]

This blog contribution supports the Urban Archipelago expo at Nieuwe Instituut (NI) in Rotterdam, designed to consist of four elements: a map, a view, a model, and a series of films that depicted a future of living with water, as well as a booklet that documented student work. The expo has been part of the Water Cities Rotterdam, which opened with the work of Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ) on 13 May 2023.

How provocative can visions about the future be? What is the role that education can play in helping (re)imagining port-city territories at a time of transition? In this contribution we will answer this question through the lens of master’s elective course ‘Adaptive Strategies’ for the 2020/2021 spring quarter run by Carola Hein, Professor History of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Department of Architecture of Delft University of Technology, and co-taught with Nadia Alaily-Mattar, John Hanna, and Paolo De Martino.

Scholars of architecture use the epistemological practices of science and art to imagine alternative futures and identify their spatial prerequisites. Despite, or perhaps because of, the protected laboratory setting of academia, design studios have the potential to demonstrate and illustrate the possibilities of foregrounding different politics. Beirut is a city in perpetual social, economic and political crisis. Tackling case studies during times of crisis, such as Beirut, introduces a particularity to academic studios owing to the pressing urgency to identify levers of change. The academic design studio exercise as an epistemological exercise can generate knowledge which can spill outside the academic setting to affect prevailing public discourse. However, this can lead to a tension in education between a) training students how to solve real world problems versus b) having students produce knowledge that can help solve real world problems.

In the spring of 2021, professors and teachers from around the world taught studio courses and seminars that focused on the destruction and rebuilding of Beirut following the massive explosion that took place in the port on August 4, 2020. Some of these courses were taught collaboratively, others started as an independent project, but students and faculty attended each other’s presentations. Each studio was largely taught online due to the coronavirus crisis, which allowed for easier exchange among the groups. But it also prevented the studios from traveling to the field and closely surveying it. Faculty and students relied on presentations and input by colleagues from Beirut, material that could be found online, and documents that were available, mainly in English/French, which to a certain extent limited perspectives. Mutual interest in one another’s work led to some intriguing observations, including about pedagogical approaches and conceptual foundations. Each studio focused on specific premises, as the teachers chose diverse analytical viewpoints to address the rebuilding. At Delft University of Technology, teachers emphasized Beirut’s status as a port city and on the sea-land continuum as the analytical starting point for the design, and they collaborated with Yale University’s Alan Plattus ran a parallel seminar on the history of port cities. At the American University of Beirut (AUB), the instructors focused on the role of visionary planning for post-disaster rebuilding. In the University of Miami, neighborhood-level interventions inspired the teaching in Jean-François Lejeune upper-level spring studio. Similarly, in the German University in Cairo, Holger Gladys’s design studio focused on interventions at the neighborhood-level, namely the Karantina neighborhood, and its up-scalability to city and regional scales. At Tsinghua University, the design studio of Jian Liu and Yang Tang explored the multiple possibilities of rebuilding Beirut’s port and regenerating the city of Beirut on different scales by way of comprehensive urban design.

Teaching design requires a conscious understanding of time and temporality. The passing of time is central to design as a creative process, which is mainly focused on initiating change and creating a transformation between two states. Whether this transformation is driven by a societal need or an individual need for self-actualization, the creative initiative works in relation to the past (reproducing or challenging traditional knowledge), present (moment of action), and future (the final outcome and its life span). Design also requires awareness of temporalities, that is the difference between natural times (seasons, day-night rhythms), or the times created by modern lifestyles (working hours, traffic jams). In this reading, time in all its tenses shapes and intersects with the process of design. The pedagogical practice of teaching design thus requires a concrete attention to this intersection.

This article investigates the spatial form and social functioning of Hermoupolis, a port city of the Greek island of Syros in the 19th century. It studies the historical development of Hermoupolis into one of the most important commercial and industrial centers and explores the role the port city played as a node in a larger network which extends beyond its physical boundaries. It examines the particular connection between land and sea, and the way that the island’s people and visitors have perceived the multila yered city. Through a systematic study of the local archive of the island, this research highlights the functions located near the waterfront during the 19th century and the complex network that formed and shaped the social functioning of that city.

In August 2020, an explosion in the port of Beirut killed around 200 people, injured few thousands and destroyed large parts of the city. It was yet another traumatic event in the history of Beirut. It has also reminded the world of the intimate connection between ports, cities and their regions that continues to exist despite the process of spatial and functional detachment that has followed containerization and automation of port processes since the 1960s. Port and city remain interlinked in many ways. They co-exist in a limited, shared space. They face multiple challenges, including climate change, energy transitions, digitization, or social transformations. These challenges require coordinated responses from all stakeholders: port authorities, city and regional governments, private and public actors, as well as NGOs and citizens. Such collaboration among port and city stakeholders is historically a trademark of port cities around the world. Through the ages, public and private stakeholders have displayed great capacity for overcoming challenges meaningfully, forcefully and rapidly. The film “Magic of Port Cities” provides some insight into this interconnection. Over time, port and city stakeholders have dealt with a broad range of external and internal shocks to the advantage of both their ports and the neighbouring cities. For example, to avoid strikes and to avoid losing workers, decision-makers at times made efforts to improve working and living conditions for their employees. Understanding these historical conditions and activating lessons from the past can help inspire integrated spatial and social planning and design measures to make use of limited space in ways that allow the port and city (and region) to evolve together.

This article explores the concept of ‘green’ in architecture and urban design through the lens of port cities. Due to global pressures such as climate change, energy transition and soil consumption the planning of port cities requires new scenarios for achieving equilibrium between nature and water systems. Despite the fact that the concept of green is widely shared in both academic and professional fields –who could possibly oppose green?– it can be argued that the concept is also widely misused and misunderstood. This article uses the “Building Green” TU Delft Architecture master’s elective course (academic year 2021/2022) designed and coordinated by Carola Hein as a starting point for a larger discussion of whether the term green is helpful for achieving sustainability in port cities and at what scale. The course analyzes the concept of sustainability through time, arguing that people built green “by necessity” before the industrial revolution and it explores contemporary attempts at building “green by desire”. Finally, it asks for approaches of building “green by design”. The course argues that these diverse approaches to building green and the contemporary needs of sustainability are highly relevant for port cities. It challenges students to analyze a port city in light of its sustainability practices and to develop scenarios for sustainability.

Terrorism targets cities, creating experiences of violence that shape new spatial imaginaries. These imaginaries are performative and productive of new spatial orders. Following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, several French state officials made public declarations to address the terrorist violence and its ramifications on the city. These declarations were rich with spatial references that aimed at explaining the range of the terrorist violence and the threats terrorism imposes on the nature of the Parisian urban life. Through language, and the utilization of rhetoric, the declarations of the French state circulated specific spatial conceptualizations of the terrorist threat, which were situated along other spatial representations of Paris as a referent object – an urban space of open and multicultural qualities, which is now threatened by this form of violence. This chapter investigates how the utilization of distinct metaphors in relation to the magnitude of the attacks as well as the nature of urban life in Paris has activated particular geographical imaginaries in a way that advanced specific forms of spatial organization and practices, at the neighborhood, city and national scales. In doing this, the chapter advances the discussion on the relevance of spatial analytical categories for understanding the spatiality of terrorist violence.

In the aftermath of the devastating explosion in Beirut in August, 2020, many ideas for reconstruction surfaced in the media. These ideas, however, often hinged on old visions on the city and did not always have the best interests of the people living near the port in mind. In an interuniversity design studio project, master students of architecture at TU Delft proposed new visions. They are now on display in the virtual Adaptive Strategies Exhibition. In this blog, teachers Nadia Alaily-Mattar and John Hanna recount the importance of academic visions on planning in general, and on the reconstruction of the port city area in Beirut in particular.