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Acre is a port city in the north-western part of Israel, with a history that goes back more than 4000 years. Being inscribed on the World Heritage List, the Old City of Acre preserves the urban and architectural elements of a historic town. Its outstanding value relies on the Crusader remnants preserved under the Ottoman city, showcasing the dynamism and continuous change of Mediterranean port cities. Moreover, the presence of various religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahai, adds to its complexity, expressed as monuments and religious sites that enrichen Acre’s cultural heritage. The dramatic change in values over the past decades has a direct impact on the built environment and the citizen’s lifestyles, in some cases jeopardising the physical elements and drastically influencing people’s lives. This paper aims to analyse the changes linked to the sea: livelihoods, tourism, and recreational use; and the change of use of the khan, as both the sea and the khan are constant elements in the city. The analysis of these processes serves as the starting point to identify changes in values which can enhance development or promote gentrification, and in the case of Khan Al-Umdan and its vicinity, we aim to recognise the lights and shadows that followed the adaptive reuse evaluation procedure, and the influence of the multiple narratives in its development. The conclusions will provide a solid base on which to develop a methodology on the one hand, identify changing processes, such as gentrification; and on the other, to evaluate adaptive reuse alternatives of cultural heritage in contested societies and changing values.

This article addresses the role and the importance of the 19th-century narratives and depictions of port cities in contemporary architectural design with a specific focus on paintings. In the last decades, cities the world undertook a large number of urban regeneration projects along waterfronts. In this way, vacant sites on waterfront areas became an opportunity to apply contemporary architectural design; however, many of those projects resulted in generic buildings failing to establish relationships with their landscape, environs, and the history of port cities. High-rise buildings, for instance, began to dominate waterfronts in many of the port cities (e.g., in London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Baltimore). The land was simply used as a “site” by developers, and the contemporary architectural design failed to address the specificity of the architecture and caved in to the demands which had little to do with the possibilities of place. This article showcases a library and concert hall project realised in Bodø, Norway, to provide insight into an alternative model, where the architecture is situated specifically in response to the port condition and acts as a mediator between port, city and landscape. An interview with the architect Daniel Rosbottom, founder of the architecture firm DRDH which designed the project, provided insight into the design process. As Rosbottom elaborated broadly, a 19th-century painting of church San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice h, by the English painter J.M.W Turner was used as an inspiration for the design process. The embedded knowledge in the painting informed the project at various levels and turned a site into a place on the waterfront of Bodø. The design process analysis reveals similarities and significance of paired relations between artworks and architectural design and hints that the remedy of the contemporary architectures in port cities may lie in port cities’ own (immaterial) resources.

A recurrent claim associated with the development of star architecture buildings along new urban waterfronts is that star architecture’s capacity to garner media exposure can support a port city’s efforts to communicate narratives that support the process of urban transformation. However, despite the centrality of the role of the media, little evidence exists about the input of the media particularly in the inception phases of such projects where much of the legitimatization and conviction efforts by key actors takes place. This paper shows how newspaper narratives about star architecture proposed along the waterfront of a port city communicate transformation proposals, building on and propagating a sense of maritime belonging and culture. The case study presented is the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. The findings are based on the content analysis of 420 newspaper articles, drawn from the LexisNexis database. The findings indicate that newspapers communicated the sense-making value of the Elbphilharmonie and introduced notions of identity, citizen identification and hanseatic particularity into the discourse. The newspapers played an important role in explaining the Elbphilharmonie as a symbol of the city’s commitment to the port, the maritime context and the Elbe River. Since narratives are constructed discursively, newspapers are a feasible site to investigate the ambitions of port cities as they invest in star architecture along their waterfronts.

Today, anthropic morphologies in river deltas are widespread. The natural morpho-dynamics interact with engineered structures or urbanisation and shape hybrid features not grasped in traditional natural classifications of deltas. However, it is challenging to reconstruct the trajectory of the shifting balance between the natural and the anthropogenic factors over time. This study demonstrates how to systematically integrate human impacts to reconstruct the evolution of deltas at a plurisecular timescale. The approach advocated here is to consider separately the local and global drivers affecting deltaic evolution in using multiscale interdisciplinary chronologies. The high-resolution reconstruction of the evolution of the Francolí Delta in interaction with the city of Tarragona for the last two centuries reveals that the river mouth morpho-dynamics are successively deflected, interacting with an outer harbour and finally fully integrated in modern harbour basins with more significant dredgings at the river mouth. In this last case, the river mouth of the Francolí is no more a delta but a human dominated estuary. Over the past three centuries, the changes affecting the delta of the Francolí are linked to economic globalisation and associated with an increase in ship size. [Display omitted] • Development of tools to reconstruct the evolution of hybrid urban deltas over the last centuries • Georeferencing control point datasets used as a temporal proxy to estimate intensity of urban/port change • Identification of the transitions from a human dominated delta to a human dominated estuary • Elaboration of a methodology for systematically disentangling interlocked chronologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical models point to the occurrence of common and recurrent stages in several port city regions around the world, which have associated the evolution of port-related activities with the process of urban territory transformation. In order to understand the role of port-related activities in framing the urban territory, we conducted a spatiotemporal comparative analysis of two port city regions with contrasting settings. The first involves the European city of Dublin in Ireland, while the second concerns the South American city of Vitória on the coast of Brazil. Morphologic diagrams were used as generalizing tools in order to simplify the representation of the urban territory into structures, and also to facilitate the interpretation and comparison between the two cities. This study-based comparative analysis shows that the dissociation between city and port is dependent on the territorial scale of the analysis, as well as the context the city was formed prior to port establishment. On the other hand, the reassociation between city and port is based on the constitution of new centres beyond the traditional urban centre. Moreover, the use of diagrams proved to be capable of connecting quantitative and qualitative approaches, helping to identify common forms and structures, and historical-cultural patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study examines shipping efficiency and its influencing factors in 19 Chinese port cities using a four-stage bootstrap DEA approach. Infrastructure, asset investment, and labor are selected as its inputs; cargo throughput and cargo turnover are selected as the outputs. First, in the three-stage DEA model, the SFA regression method is used to eliminate the impact of external environmental factors and random factors on shipping efficiency. Furthermore, the Bootstrap DEA method is applied to correct deviation to solve the problem of the traditional DEA method being sensitive to the number of variables of a chosen sample. Finally, the real shipping efficiency of the port cities is measured. The empirical results show that the shipping efficiency of each port city is affected by the factors of foreign trade, population size, economic development, consumption level, and government support. Additionally, the average efficiency values of port cities in the eastern region is higher than the general average at each stage; on the contrary, the average efficiency values in the central and western regions are lower than the general average. Finally, the study provides policy implications for the future improvement of shipping efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Geography & Geographic Information Science is the property of Geography & Geo-Information Science Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Guangdong Architecture Civil Engineering is the property of Guangdong Architecture Civil Engineering Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Currently, port cities face challenges that include activities aimed at revitalisation of post-industrial areas with special landscape, cultural, historical and representative values, as well as their urbanisation. The undertaken activities may be called a resuscitation of waterside spaces that are largely degraded. Sometimes revitalisation activities help to tighten the city’s links with water. Gdynia is an example of recreating its maritime character by returning to the water. The subject matter of this paper, concerning the transformations of the Dalmor quay, illustrates the possibilities created by disused seaport areas.

This research examines the similarities between port traffic structure and economic structure of French port cities. Based on the combination of Automated Identification System (AIS) data and employment data, it performs complementary analyses of the mutual specialization between ports and cities. Main results show that while larger cities handle more diversified traffic, the cross‐specialization is blurred by the complexity of trade networks and supply chains. We then propose a novel methodology whereby the spatial unit of analysis is enlarged according to the type and volume of port traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rajapaksa government consolidated its position with new laws, special task forces, and public-sector appointments. With the opposition wiped out, Sri Lanka now has a unipolar political landscape. Two successive waves of COVID-19 infections caused a rising death toll and necessitated severe lockdowns. The resulting economic problems exposed structural weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic constellation, with depleting foreign exchange and an acute debt burden. These interlocking crises triggered new forms of protest and a new convergence of previously disparate societal opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reconstruction of the human impacts on the morphodynamics of river deltas in the long term is challenging. The ternary diagram of Galloway (1975) used to classify morphodynamics of deltas does not include direct human influence which is now affecting most of the deltas of the world. The study of human-dominated deltas requires specific approaches and consideration of human processes and morphologies in interaction with more commonly studied natural processes and morphologies. This study demonstrates how to combine different datasets from natural and social sciences to reconstruct long term temporal trajectories of hybrid urban deltas. The Francolí delta, associated with the UNESCO city of Tarragona, offers a perfect case study to identify the different steps of a wave-dominated delta leading to a human-dominated delta over a long-term perspective. Tarragona emerged in the 1st millennium BCE and became a significant port city in the Roman period. This study identifies the evidence of a semi-protected harbour built 2000 years ago that initiates the evolution of a hybrid urban delta towards a human-dominated delta. Until the end 19th c. CE, cyclical changes at the river mouth are observed due to natural fluvial and coastal dynamics while progradation stages are partly affected by anthropogenic structures over time. The 19th c. CE is a major turning point. Morphodynamics controlled by anthropogenic factors strongly increase while fluvial and coastal sedimentation is partly erased by dredgings. The systematic approach proposed for the Francolí delta can be standardised and applied to other hybrid urban deltas allowing better comparison between urbanised deltas. [Display omitted] • Development of interdisciplinary concepts and tools to study hybrid urban deltas; • Identification of the different factors leading to a human-dominated delta over 2 millennia; • Discovery of a Roman built harbour initiating hybrid coastal morphodynamics in the Francolí delta; • Modification of the Galloway diagram to integrate human impacts more systematically in deltaic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reconstruct the famed city of Melaka at its height in the 15th and 16th centuries, to its subsequent dispersion in the 17th to 19th centuries. Melaka’s cultural-political influences and impact as a center of the common Melayu based culture and civilisation can be gauged fromits original center in Melaka city as its initial axis of power; which dispersed into surrounding regions. Through visual, cartographic and lithographic sources, the city – before 1511 - is reconstructed and its architecture and core areas are modelled. Subsequently, after its fall, its influences was traced as centrifugal forces, which manifest in terms of cultural and stylistic forms that expanded beyond the realm of its initial center and limits of its port city. As its center of power reconsolidated into surrounding regions; its influence goes beyond the compact Melayu city and re-consolidated into a transnational regional and cultural powerbase. The paper combines both historical and modelling methods to demonstrate the essentially ‘Melayu’ or Malay urban-architectural form of the center, and its survival in terms of a socio-cultural dominion rather than physical city-form. It remained a Malay-based yet multilcultural polity which survived despite changes in its center of power. Its centrifugal dispersion is represented by reverberations of its architectural stylistic forms in surrounding regions and its centripetal influence was its cultural force that can still be seen throughout centuries in the sketches, paintings and depictions of urban life, landscape and architecture of the 17th to the 19 th centuries in the South East Asian archipelago region. The paper reflects how forms of architecture, landscape and urban design are traces of a common culture and civilisation that stretches beyond present national borders and which reflect and resonates with the nature of a maritime-based culture which is reflective of a transnational, multinational and multicultural nature of a regionally-based nation-state in medieval times.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.22.2019.9

As a medium-sized port and tourist city, Jijel is confronted with the challenge of attractiveness according to the national planning policy envisioned for 2030.The public authorities, which wish to elevate this port city to the rank of growth pole in the north-eastern Algerian region, have made enormous efforts to set up new and more innovative development strategies in order to achieve this objective. In addition, ambitious new projects have been launched in recent years in the various sectors, but the more structured ones have not been successful due to the lack of an attractive urban policy in this city. The latter suffers from other weaknesses in governance and urban management that require more rational and ordinary urgent interventions, but this can only be achieved through a strategy conceived within the framework of a comprehensive and integrated development policy, which should take into account all the dimensions of attractiveness (economic, social and urban). In this article, we will develop the use of the urban attractiveness project as a global and negotiated action to explain the solution that could ensure a sustainable development and territorial dynamics of this port city.

Current waterfront studies focus mainly on a land-based perspective, failing to include the water side. Water is, however, not just a resource for port and industrial purposes and an edge to the waterfront; it is also a feature of the waterfront and the complex relation between water and city. Thus, the article suggests that water-land edges need to be re-contextualised, taking into consideration also their shape, functionality, and evolution over time. This article therefore introduces the concept of urban blue spaces, that is, spaces that include at least one land-water edge, such as a shoreline or river edge. The types and character of these edges define the porosity of urban blue spaces: Spaces with easy connections, such as boulevards or parks, are highly porous, while fenced areas have low porosity. The research first analyses the existing literature on the spatial and functional characteristics of the land-water edge in port cities, and explores existing typologies of urban blue spaces. The results of this investigation are used to examine the most iconic urban blue space of Gdańsk, the Motława river, over the last 1000 years. The case study shows that the porosity of the Gdańsk urban blue space has been increasing over time, in line with its spatial and functional development from an undeveloped riverbank to a ‘gated’ port and industry area, to urban living spaces today. The article thus presents the whole breadth of urban blue spaces through the case study of the Motława river urban blue space. The spatial evolution of the urban blue space is depicted through the transformation of its land-water edge—from a natural sloping edge to the dominance of vertical edged structures or ones overhanging the surface of the water, to the emergence of spatially ‘blurred’ sloping, slanted, terraced, and floating structures, partially independent of the riverbank. The transformation of the structure of the Motława urban blue space edges increased its complexity over time, from a single-edge structure to a double and multiple-edged one.

In China, Shanghai often serves as a place to introduce and try out new ideas. This is certainly the case with experimental urban planning and design solutions and sustainability transitions. This article identifies and evaluates the role of pilot projects and demonstration zones along the Huangpu River. These clusters and zones are supposed to guide the urban regeneration of the former industrial waterfronts and to accelerate innovative development in Shanghai and the wider Yangtze Delta Region. The Huangpu River as a whole is considered an urban lab and a showcase of ecological civilisation policies, with a strong ‘people oriented’ focus on improving the overall quality and attractiveness of urban life. Following three decades of rapid urban expansion, Shanghai’s urban development model is shifting toward one that emphasizes densification and the reuse of existing elements. The motto of Shanghai’s latest master plan is “Striving for an Excellent Global City.” One of the pathways to realize this expectation is the creation of thematic clusters for creative industries, financial institutes, AI, and technology, media and telecommunication industries. These clusters are high-density investment projects meant to support and accelerate the transformation of Shanghai into a service economy. There are important similarities between these projects in Shanghai and the role of urban labs in theories of sustainability transitions. Drawing on these theories and those of ecological civilization, this article examines how these so-called ‘experimental’ urban megaprojects along the river contribute to Shanghai’s effort to take the lead in developing sustainable urban transitions.

The relationships Malaga has established with its port have changed over the centuries, conjuring up a variety of scenarios and circumstances. The past and present are closely linked phenomena in this case study where the porosity of the port‐city fabric has marked the city’s development and constitutes a key issue in the current and future challenges it faces. Malaga provides a particularly interesting example of a post‐industrial city that has reopened its port to its inhabitants’ acclaim while maintaining port activity. However, the growth tourism has seen in recent years has come to dominate the local economy. Cruise ships have taken on a significant role and have brought about important changes in the dynamics and flows between the port and the city, unsettling the balance between the two. This profile explores port‐city development through the lens of boundaries and flows, demonstrating how their dynamics have determined Malaga’s spatial, functional, and social development over time and how they continue to do so to this day. This article reviews the transformations the city has undergone and its future opportunities to achieve a balanced and sustainable port‐city relationship.

Port cities located within various metropolitan or functional regions face very different development scenarios. This applies not only to entire municipalities but also to particular areas that play important roles in urban development—including ports as well as their specialized parts. This refers also to the various types of maritime industries, including the processing of goods, logistics operations, shipbuilding, or ship repairing, to name just a few. Since each of these activities is associated with a different location, any transformation process that creates changes in geographic borders or flows will dynamically affect the port cityscape. Municipalities may evolve in different directions, becoming ‘major maritime hubs,’ ‘secondary service centers,’ ‘specialized waterfront cities,’ or just distressed urban areas. Within each metropolitan area, one can find several cities evolving in one of the above-mentioned directions, which results in the creation of a specific regional mosaic of various types of port cities. These create specific ‘port regions’ with specific roles assigned to each of these and shape the new (regional) dimension of the geography of borders and flows. As a result, these port regions are created as porous structures where space is discontinuous. To further develop the issue of the creation and evolution of port regions, the authors present the case study of the Gdańsk Bay port region. This study in particular allowed for the development of both the theoretical background of this phenomenon and the presentation of a real-life example.

Ports are clearly demarcated structures on land and water. They are fenced in, easily recognizable on satellite and orthophoto images, and they have specific functions. This apparent clarity of ports, their function and outline, in relation to nearby urban and rural areas, becomes more complex when explored through the lens of land use, that is the existing and planned future functional dimension or socio-economic purpose of the land. In contrast to urban and rural areas, where land use has been mapped and defined for centuries, the use and function of land and water in port areas has long been multifunctional and not defined on land use maps. This raises questions about the role and understanding of port territory in relation to neighboring spaces, past, and present. This article first defines land use and describes its historical development. Scholars from various disciplines, including geographers, planners, and economists, have addressed the issue of land use in port areas. Land use patterns have emerged over time and are based on earlier demarcations of port areas and distinctions between port and city. As shown by the historical port city borders in Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Koper, these delimitations can change over time, by location and by function. The land use register has only recently been harmonized at the European level. European and national registers distinguish existing and planned land use in port areas differently. Mixed uses prevail in new port interventions, creating a new kind of permeability or porosity; that is, areas where port, urban and rural functions merge. New land use porosity is a particular state of land use (on both sides of the boundaries of port areas) that goes beyond the physical boundaries marked by fences. Land use porosity effectively creates land use continuity, a functional porosity that serves as a hidden blueprint for future planning. Understanding land use porosity can provide a foundation for novel approaches to the development of transition strategies that are needed to address contemporary challenges, including climate change and sea level rise, digitization, and new work and life practices in port city regions. In conclusion, we note that due to the porosity of land use patterns, the separation between the present port and the city is beginning to crumble. However, this process has yet to be made fully visible and used as a basis for design.

Constructed on its natural bay as a fortified Muslim town in the late 18th century, Haifa’s port city transformed into a modern cosmopolitan port city in the second half of the 19th century. Significant technological, administrative, and social changes made Haifa into the transportation and economic hub of northern Palestine: Its harbor, the first in the region, became a gate to the east for commodities, pilgrimages, and ideas. British imperialism enlarged it with landfill areas and added an industrial function, constructing refineries and a connecting pipeline with Iraq. Haifa port served as the main entry port for immigration and goods for the newly founded Israeli state. Privatization and neo-liberalization transformed it from national port to international corporate hub, reshaping both port and city. Individual entrepreneurs, local governments, and imperial actions shaped and reshaped the landscape; perforating new access points, creating porous borders, and a new socioeconomic sphere. This process persisted through the Late Ottoman era, the British Mandate, and the Israeli state. From the first Ottoman landfills to the sizeable British harbor of 1933, the market economy led urban planning of Haifa’s waterfront and its adjacent railroad to the current Chinese petrol-harbor project. What were the city’s tangible and intangible borders? How did these changes, influenced by local and foreign agendas, unfold? Tapping into built-environment evidence; archival documents (architectural drawings, plans, maps, and photographs); and multidisciplinary academic literature to examine Haifa’s urban landscape transformation, this article studies the history of Haifa’s planned urban landscape—focusing on transformations to the port and waterfront to adjust to new technologies, capital markets, and political needs. We thus explore Haifa port history as a history of porosity and intangibility—rather than the accepted history of European modernization—building upon theoretical literature on global networks and urban form, regional dynamics of port cities, and tangible and intangible border landscapes.

Acre is a port city in the north-western part of Israel, with a history that goes back more than 4000 years. Being inscribed on the World Heritage List, the Old City of Acre preserves the urban and architectural elements of a historic town. Its outstanding value relies on the Crusader remnants preserved under the Ottoman city, showcasing the dynamism and continuous change of Mediterranean port cities. Moreover, the presence of various religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahai, adds to its complexity, expressed as monuments and religious sites that enrichen Acre’s cultural heritage. The dramatic change in values over the past decades has a direct impact on the built environment and the citizen’s lifestyles, in some cases jeopardising the physical elements and drastically influencing people’s lives. This paper aims to analyse the changes linked to the sea: livelihoods, tourism, and recreational use; and the change of use of the khan, as both the sea and the khan are constant elements in the city. The analysis of these processes serves as the starting point to identify changes in values which can enhance development or promote gentrification, and in the case of Khan Al-Umdan and its vicinity, we aim to recognise the lights and shadows that followed the adaptive reuse evaluation procedure, and the influence of the multiple narratives in its development. The conclusions will provide a solid base on which to develop a methodology on the one hand, identify changing processes, such as gentrification; and on the other, to evaluate adaptive reuse alternatives of cultural heritage in contested societies and changing values.

This article addresses the role and the importance of the 19th-century narratives and depictions of port cities in contemporary architectural design with a specific focus on paintings. In the last decades, cities the world undertook a large number of urban regeneration projects along waterfronts. In this way, vacant sites on waterfront areas became an opportunity to apply contemporary architectural design; however, many of those projects resulted in generic buildings failing to establish relationships with their landscape, environs, and the history of port cities. High-rise buildings, for instance, began to dominate waterfronts in many of the port cities (e.g., in London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Baltimore). The land was simply used as a “site” by developers, and the contemporary architectural design failed to address the specificity of the architecture and caved in to the demands which had little to do with the possibilities of place. This article showcases a library and concert hall project realised in Bodø, Norway, to provide insight into an alternative model, where the architecture is situated specifically in response to the port condition and acts as a mediator between port, city and landscape. An interview with the architect Daniel Rosbottom, founder of the architecture firm DRDH which designed the project, provided insight into the design process. As Rosbottom elaborated broadly, a 19th-century painting of church San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice h, by the English painter J.M.W Turner was used as an inspiration for the design process. The embedded knowledge in the painting informed the project at various levels and turned a site into a place on the waterfront of Bodø. The design process analysis reveals similarities and significance of paired relations between artworks and architectural design and hints that the remedy of the contemporary architectures in port cities may lie in port cities’ own (immaterial) resources.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Riga became imperial Russia’s most successful trading hub in terms of sales volume. This concluded a development which began in the 1860s with the rapid expansion of Russia’s railroad network, the rise of supplies of agricultural products, and the increase of Riga’s trade contacts on a global scale. This article uses historical GIS to display the agglomeration of trade contacts on the supplier side, i.e. central Russia, and the rising demand in Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia. The article’s GIS visualizations allow the study of Riga’s development into a global trading hub and the city’s increased industrialization. The article argues that the sharp increase of sales volume was due to two developments: Riga’s successful expansion of exports, including new products such as eggs and butter, and a rise of imports due to the increased need of various raw materials for Riga’s native industry. The article also uses GIS to demonstrate the variety of ethnic backgrounds of Riga’s business owners, which included Baltic Germans, Jews, Latvians, Russians, and Poles. A micro-study of Riga’s biggest industry at the time, the rubber-processing factory “Provodnik,” concludes the argument underlining the incorporation of Riga into the global trade network prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, Shanghai often serves as a place to introduce and try out new ideas. This is certainly the case with experimental urban planning and design solutions and sustainability transitions. This article identifies and evaluates the role of pilot projects and demonstration zones along the Huangpu River. These clusters and zones are supposed to guide the urban regeneration of the former industrial waterfronts and to accelerate innovative development in Shanghai and the wider Yangtze Delta Region. The Huangpu River as a whole is considered an urban lab and a showcase of ecological civilisation policies, with a strong 'people oriented' focus on improving the overall quality and attractiveness of urban life. Following three decades of rapid urban expansion, Shanghai's urban development model is shifting toward one that emphasizes densification and the reuse of existing elements. The motto of Shanghai's latest master plan is "Striving for an Excellent Global City." One of the pathways to realize this expectation is the creation of thematic clusters for creative industries, financial institutes, AI, and technology, media and telecommunication industries. These clusters are high-density investment projects meant to support and accelerate the transformation of Shanghai into a service economy. There are important similarities between these projects in Shanghai and the role of urban labs in theories of sustainability transitions. Drawing on these theories and those of ecological civilization, this article examines how these so-called 'experimental' urban megaprojects along the river contribute to Shanghai's effort to take the lead in developing sustainable urban transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ports are clearly demarcated structures on land and water. They are fenced in, easily recognizable on satellite and orthophoto images, and they have specific functions. This apparent clarity of ports, their function and outline, in relation to nearby urban and rural areas, becomes more complex when explored through the lens of land use, that is the existing and planned future functional dimension or socio-economic purpose of the land. In contrast to urban and rural areas, where land use has been mapped and defined for centuries, the use and function of land and water in port areas has long been multifunctional and not defined on land use maps. This raises questions about the role and understanding of port territory in relation to neighboring spaces, past, and present. This article first defines land use and describes its historical development. Scholars from various disciplines, including geographers, planners, and economists, have addressed the issue of land use in port areas. Land use patterns have emerged over time and are based on earlier demarcations of port areas and distinctions between port and city. As shown by the historical port city borders in Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Koper, these delimitations can change over time, by location and by function. The land use register has only recently been harmonized at the European level. European and national registers distinguish existing and planned land use in port areas differently. Mixed uses prevail in new port interventions, creating a new kind of permeability or porosity; that is, areas where port, urban and rural functions merge. New land use porosity is a particular state of land use (on both sides of the boundaries of port areas) that goes beyond the physical boundaries marked by fences. Land use porosity effectively creates land use continuity, a functional porosity that serves as a hidden blueprint for future planning. Understanding land use porosity can provide a foundation for novel approaches to the development of transition strategies that are needed to address contemporary challenges, including climate change and sea level rise, digitization, and new work and life practices in port city regions. In conclusion, we note that due to the porosity of land use patterns, the separation between the present port and the city is beginning to crumble. However, this process has yet to be made fully visible and used as a basis for design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships Malaga has established with its port have changed over the centuries, conjuring up a variety of scenarios and circumstances. The past and present are closely linked phenomena in this case study where the porosity of the port-city fabric has marked the city's development and constitutes a key issue in the current and future challenges it faces. Malaga provides a particularly interesting example of a post-industrial city that has reopened its port to its inhabitants' acclaim while maintaining port activity. However, the growth tourism has seen in recent years has come to dominate the local economy. Cruise ships have taken on a significant role and have brought about important changes in the dynamics and flows between the port and the city, unsettling the balance between the two. This profile explores port-city development through the lens of boundaries and flows, demonstrating how their dynamics have determined Malaga's spatial, functional, and social development over time and how they continue to do so to this day. This article reviews the transformations the city has undergone and its future opportunities to achieve a balanced and sustainable port-city relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current waterfront studies focus mainly on a land-based perspective, failing to include the water side. Water is, however, not just a resource for port and industrial purposes and an edge to the waterfront; it is also a feature of the waterfront and the complex relation between water and city. Thus, the article suggests that water-land edges need to be re-contextualised, taking into consideration also their shape, functionality, and evolution over time. This article therefore introduces the concept of urban blue spaces, that is, spaces that include at least one land-water edge, such as a shoreline or river edge. The types and character of these edges define the porosity of urban blue spaces: Spaces with easy connections, such as boulevards or parks, are highly porous, while fenced areas have low porosity. The research first analyses the existing literature on the spatial and functional characteristics of the land-water edge in port cities, and explores existing typologies of urban blue spaces. The results of this investigation are used to examine the most iconic urban blue space of Gdańsk, the Motława river, over the last 1000 years. The case study shows that the porosity of the Gdańsk urban blue space has been increasing over time, in line with its spatial and functional development from an undeveloped riverbank to a 'gated' port and industry area, to urban living spaces today. The article thus presents the whole breadth of urban blue spaces through the case study of the Motława river urban blue space. The spatial evolution of the urban blue space is depicted through the transformation of its land-water edge--from a natural sloping edge to the dominance of vertical edged structures or ones overhanging the surface of the water, to the emergence of spatially 'blurred' sloping, slanted, terraced, and floating structures, partially independent of the riverbank. The transformation of the structure of the Motława urban blue space edges increased its complexity over time, from a single-edge structure to a double and multiple-edged one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructed on its natural bay as a fortified Muslim town in the late 18th century, Haifa's port city transformed into a modern cosmopolitan port city in the second half of the 19th century. Significant technological, administrative, and social changes made Haifa into the transportation and economic hub of northern Palestine: Its harbor, the first in the region, became a gate to the east for commodities, pilgrimages, and ideas. British imperialism enlarged it with landfill areas and added an industrial function, constructing refineries and a connecting pipeline with Iraq. Haifa port served as the main entry port for immigration and goods for the newly founded Israeli state. Privatization and neo-liberalization transformed it from national port to international corporate hub, reshaping both port and city. Individual entrepreneurs, local governments, and imperial actions shaped and reshaped the landscape; perforating new access points, creating porous borders, and a new socioeconomic sphere. This process persisted through the Late Ottoman era, the British Mandate, and the Israeli state. From the first Ottoman landfills to the sizeable British harbor of 1933, the market economy led urban planning of Haifa's waterfront and its adjacent railroad to the current Chinese petrol-harbor project. What were the city's tangible and intangible borders? How did these changes, influenced by local and foreign agendas, unfold? Tapping into built-environment evidence; archival documents (architectural drawings, plans, maps, and photographs); and multidisciplinary academic literature to examine Haifa's urban landscape transformation, this article studies the history of Haifa's planned urban landscape--focusing on transformations to the port and waterfront to adjust to new technologies, capital markets, and political needs. We thus explore Haifa port history as a history of porosity and intangibility--rather than the accepted history of European modernization--building upon theoretical literature on global networks and urban form, regional dynamics of port cities, and tangible and intangible border landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous actors have been involved in the planning of the port and city of Naples. National and local authorities—namely central government, the Region, the Municipality of Naples, and the Port Authority—act upon the port at different scales, according to diverging interest and by using different planning tools. Each entity has different spatial claims and contrastive views on what port city integration can be. Their diverse goals have led port and city to develop into separate entities, from a spatial, cultural, economic as well as administrative perspective. The different scopes of their planning are particularly visible in the areas at the intersection of land and water, where the relationship is characterized by waiting conditions across different dimensions and scales. The separation between port and city in Naples originates from history. This PhD thesis looks at the past as a resource, sometimes as a problem in the way it produces inertia, but certainly as a heritage made of signs, traces, and cultures, written and rewritten on the urban palimpsest. Using and challenging the concept of path dependence—defined here as a resistance by institutions and people to change patterns of behavior and to repeat previous decisions and experiences—this PhD thesis argues that in order to overcome inertia, it is important to recognize the interests and spatial claims of all the stakeholders involved port city planning and to identify shared goals and values as a foundation for future design.

This study examines shipping efficiency and its influencing factors in 19 Chinese port cities using a four-stage bootstrap DEA approach. Infrastructure, asset investment, and labor are selected as its inputs; cargo throughput and cargo turnover are selected as the outputs. First, in the three-stage DEA model, the SFA regression method is used to eliminate the impact of external environmental factors and random factors on shipping efficiency. Furthermore, the Bootstrap DEA method is applied to correct deviation to solve the problem of the traditional DEA method being sensitive to the number of variables of a chosen sample. Finally, the real shipping efficiency of the port cities is measured. The empirical results show that the shipping efficiency of each port city is affected by the factors of foreign trade, population size, economic development, consumption level, and government support. Additionally, the average efficiency values of port cities in the eastern region is higher than the general average at each stage; on the contrary, the average efficiency values in the central and western regions are lower than the general average. Finally, the study provides policy implications for the future improvement of shipping efficiency.

The port cities of Trieste, Rijeka, and Koper all lie in the northern Adriatic, although in three different countries: Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia. The greatest advantage of this port city region is its geostrategic location: it connects Western Europe with the Danube region, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor. This location is also the greatest threat to the region's stability, for countries, cities, and ports are always struggling for political and economic dominance. This article first defines approaches to urban resilience and various forms of capacity and vulnerability. It then identifies the key factors in the three cities' resilience or lack of it over two thousand years. Finally, it shows how these notions are visible in the more recent past and present of each port city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For forty years, the port city of Lisbon, Portugal, has been trying to be resilient by adapting to technical changes in port activities. Today it continues to seek to formulate long-term strategies to improve the port and create a stronger maritime community. Looking at regional planning strategies, this article analyzes the city's ability to face adversities brought by the decline of the port. Between 1973 and 2013, central and local government authorities proposed a number of plans. Each plan set out to relocate port facilities, and to redevelop and improve waterfront territories for the community and the environment, in order to become competitive enough to attract global stakeholders and boost economic activities. The fate of each plan depended on the central government, regional bodies, the municipalities of Lisbon and surrounding towns, and the Lisbon Port Authority, all part of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area around the Tejo estuary. But the port city has repeatedly failed to carry out most of these plans, and it has not attracted new investment. It has failed to formulate and establish a coherent planning strategy. For over four decades, no one has been able to develop necessary solutions to expand the port, relocate container terminals, and remain competitive. The discussion of each of the five plans presented here will explore why Lisbon has struggled and how those struggles have threatened Lisbon's resilience as a port city, that is to say, its ability to recover readily from adverse conditions, even if in a new form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the small port city of Nagasaki went from the primary gateway for international trade in Japan to a failed treaty port with dismal economic prospects. This transformation is largely seen as a fall from cultural and economic preeminence that relegated Nagasaki to backwater status. However, during these transitional years, Nagasaki residents demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of a rapidly changing world. This article explores four different examples of local agents who tried to seize the opportunities offered by Nagasaki's new role in Japan's dramatic nineteenth century. The successes of these agents demonstrate the ingenuity and diverse mechanisms of adaptation available to Nagasaki residents in the last half of the nineteenth century. Their failures demonstrate the limits of local adaptive capacities in the face of developments in larger regional, national, and international systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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