'Where people have fun, encounters happen. Where encounters take place, change begins. Are pleasurescapes in port cities Europe’s true driving forces after all?'

With this tagline, the research project Pleasurescapes, funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) and running from 2019 to 2022, investigated historical spaces and legacies of modern entertainment and deviant culture across European port cities. Established as a collaboration between scholars from the port cities of Hamburg, Rotterdam, Barcelona, and Gothenburg, the Pleasurescapes project sought to address the dominance that has traditionally been reserved for port cities’ economic and industrial importance, and rebalance this by shedding light on their underexplored cultural heritage. In doing so, the research team utilised the new ‘pleasurescapes’ concept to craft links between past and present maritime urban contact zones, from bygone sailortowns to contemporary waterfronts, but also to point the attention to overlooked international events and intriguing cultural practices that found a fertile breeding ground in port cities’ transnational environments. Main publications focused both on the conceptual ramifications of the ‘pleasurescapes’ term and its operationalisation within different contexts.[11] Additionally, the project’s final output intends to reimagine and recount the cultural counter-narratives of the investigated port cities: a museum exhibition and theater play, both based on sources and heritage objects uncovered during the collaborative research, are set to launch in the coming year. […]