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From Planning the Port/City to Planning the Port-City: Exploring the Economic Interface in European Port Cities

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European Port Cities in Transition

Part of the book series: Strategies for Sustainability ((STSU))

Abstract

In last three decades, planning agencies of most ports have institutionally evolved into a (semi-) independent port authority. The rationale behind this process is that port authorities are able to react more quickly to changing logistical and spatial preferences of maritime firms, hence increasing the competitiveness of ports. Although these dedicated port authorities have proven to be largely successful, new economic, social, and environmental challenges are quickly catching up on these port governance models, and particularly leads to (spatial) policy ‘conflicts’ between port and city. This chapter starts by assessing this conflict and argue that the conflict is partly a result of dominant—often also academic—spatial representations of the port city as two separate entities. To escape this divisive conception of contemporary port cities, this chapter presents a relational visualisation method that is able to analyse the economic interface between port and city. Based on our results, we reflect back on our proposition and argue that the core challenge today for researchers and policy makers is acknowledging the bias of port/city, being arguably a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence, we turn the idea of (planning the) port/city conflicts into planning the port-city’s strengths and weaknesses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A good example of a contemporary conflict following the biased port-versus-city view is Amsterdam, whereas ‘HavenStad’, a full functioning port area, is being appointed by the city authority to be redeveloped as a residential area, based on the idea ‘port out, city in’ (Pliakis 2019).

  2. 2.

    Although Hoyle (1989, p. 429) himself criticized the functional-morphological view on port cities stating that the port-city interface is “an interactive economic system” (Van den Berghe et al. 2018).

  3. 3.

    https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-schematics/overview.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management in the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Julianalaan 134, 2628, BL, Delft, The Netherlands

    Karel B. J. Van den Berghe & Tom A. Daamen

Authors
  1. Karel B. J. Van den Berghe
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  2. Tom A. Daamen
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Correspondence to Karel B. J. Van den Berghe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering and Environment, University of Gävle, Gävle, Gävleborgs Län, Sweden

    Angela Carpenter

  2. University of Gävle, Gävle, Gävleborgs Län, Sweden

    Rodrigo Lozano

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Van den Berghe, K.B.J., Daamen, T.A. (2020). From Planning the Port/City to Planning the Port-City: Exploring the Economic Interface in European Port Cities. In: Carpenter, A., Lozano, R. (eds) European Port Cities in Transition. Strategies for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36464-9_6

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