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.

Op 9 juni 1899, aan de vooravond van de twintigste eeuw waarin Rotterdam zijn status van wereldhaven definitief zou waarmaken, bezocht koningin Wilhelmina, begeleid door haar moeder koningin Emma, de stad aan de Maas. Als tienjarige had zij Rotterdam ook al een bezoek gebracht en toen een gedenksteen gelegd voor de naar haar genoemde Wilhelminakade, vertrekpunt van de Holland-Amerika-Lijn en een van de boegbeelden van de wereldhaven in opkomst. [...]

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, and on the eve of global climate emergencies, difficult choices need to be made to safeguard a sustainable future. These choices call for value-driven deliberations, especially in the globally connected, multi-problem environment of the port city. To do that, however, stakeholders need to know what they mean when they talk about values, and how to deliberate them. In other words: they need to be value literate. In this article, we study the concept of value and values in the context of port cities in the past, present and future. After an analysis of historical uses of values in port cities, we assess six projects that explicitly and implicitly deal with values in port cities, to explore methods or strategies that can help to elicit values in different phases of decision making processes.

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 documenting expressions of maritime culture and trade in public space. In conclusion, it addresses some questions that are crucial when addressing a maritime mindset, such as whether it is a top-down or bottom-up mindset, which spatial scale it entails, and whose values and interests the mindset represents. Ultimately, we argue that (deep) mapping can play a role in producing a more layered spatial, social and cultural understanding of the complex nature of port cities.

Port city regions are at the forefront of many urgent contemporary issues such as migration, climate change, digitization, etc. Addressing these challenges and developing sustainable solutions, requires more than technical interventions, it requires rethinking and redesigning the basic spatial and socio-cultural paradigms that prevail at present.

In this course we will analyze examples of port cities from a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural perspective. You will develop the skills to identify and address the challenges port cities face now and into the future.

Water has served and sustained societies throughout history. Understanding the complex and diverse water systems of the past is key to devising sustainable development for the future with regard to socioeconomic structures, policies, and cultures. Today, past systems form the framework for preservation and reuse as well as for new proposals. In this course, you will learn how to identify the spatial, social and cultural aspects of water heritage in your environment. You will investigate real situations, assess specific issues and evaluate the impact of potential measures, following existing expertise on water heritage and water management traditions as a model for your own practice.

The PortCityFutures team aims to study port city ecosystems and the concepts of ‘maritime mindsets, port city cultures and values’ from a variety of disciplinary angles. In our subgroup, consisting of four PhD researchers and one postdoc, we assess various mapping techniques (geo-spatial, socio-cultural and mental mapping) to move towards a shared research methodology. In a blog series under the title ‘Mapping Maritime Mindsets’, we will monitor, document and share our research progress on mapping port city regions, and especially address the theoretical and methodological issues that we face during the process. Moreover, we ask guest writers to reflect on related themes and projects.

As hubs of global exchange, port cities are host to inconvenient and contested pasts. Many of these pasts have yet to be fully recognized. In the wake of demonstrations against racial injustices this summer, the PortCityFutures team discussed how our own research practices relate to systemic inequalities within port cities. It was concluded that we need to better understand how these contested and complex pasts, legacies of diversity and segregation, and colonial pasts impact port cities today.

A sunny Helsinki was the backdrop for the 13th biannual conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). The EAUH was established in 1989 with the aim to create a common platform to historians, geographers, sociologists, planners, and other scholars working with a multidisciplinary approach on urban history in different time periods. The first EAUH conference took place in Amsterdam in 1992 and the next one will take place in Rome during 2018 (for further information about EAUH, please visit the website: http://www.eauh.eu/). The ambitious theme of the 13th conference was Reinterpreting Cities. For planning historians, this theme held ample promise on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical levels. With 592 participants, 44 main sessions, and 30 specialist sessions, we decided to look at the conference through a specific lens. Based on a selection of relevant panels, therefore, we formulated two questions: first, how can a reinterpretation of cities lead to new theories on the city and connect to existing theories in other disciplines? And second, how can a reinterpretation of urban history connect to the ‘real world’, for example, planning practices? This conference report explores the ways in which this conference actually reinterpreted the city, in particular, how it connected to the spatial dimension and planning history.