Placemaking at a time of changing port city relations

Abstract

Cities around the world, from New York, to London and Hong Kong, lost much of their shipping functions within decades after the opening of new container terminals on their outskirts. Many port authorities and city governments adapted their ports rapidly to maintain their city’s edge in a tight competition. Over the last five decades, as public and private decision-makers around the world built new ports and facilities for the increased transhipment of goods and people, responding to similar challenges and opportunities, developing new ports, dredging waterways, transforming storage and transhipment in response to changing ship sizes, new containers or new commodity flows, the old waterfronts in New York, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Sydney lost their leadership function as global ports. They became ghost districts, challenges to urban development. Spaces that hosted port activities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contain heritage buildings and industrial structures on a scale that can be repurposed for urban functions that are often well connected to urban sites and infrastructure. In recent decades these sites have become hubs of urban growth and tourism. Many cities had to develop new strategies for the inner-city ports that had fallen empty and for the large number of people who had lost their jobs in packaging, transportation and storage.