Ports and cities are historically strongly linked, but the link between port and city growth has become weaker. This book examines how ports can regain their role as drivers of urban economic growth and how negative port impacts can be mitigated.

As the material anchors of globalization, North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities, capital, and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions, social structures, and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed, it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new, global organization of production, distribution, and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized, and crucially, reinterpreted, so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how, in these processes, social, environmental, and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public.

Seaports, as part of urban centers, play a major role in the cultural, social and economic life of the cities in which they are located, and through the links they provide to the outside world. Port-cities in Europe have faced significant change, first with the loss of heavy industry, emergence of Eastern European democracies, and the widening of the European Community (now European Union) during the second half of the twentieth century, and more recently through drivers to change including the global Sustainable Development Agenda and the European Union Circular Economy Agenda. This book examines the role of modern seaports in Europe and consider how port-cities are responding to these major drivers for change. It discusses the broad issues facing European Sea Ports, including port life cycles, spatial planning, and societal integration. May 2019 saw the 200th anniversary of the first steam ship to cross the Atlantic between the US and England, and it is just over 60 years since the invention of the modern intermodal shipping container – both drivers of change in the maritime and ports industry. Increasing movements of people, e.g. through low cost cruises to port cities, can play a major role in changing the nature of such a city and impact on the lives of the people living there. This book brings together original research by both long-standing and younger scholars from multiple disciplines and builds upon the wider discourse about sea ports, port cities, and sustainability.

Global trends in policy and technology related fields are rapidly reshaping the port industry worldwide. International in scope, this volume provides multidisciplinary insights into the role port cities adopt in dealing with global supply chains. Throughout the book, concepts of strategic management, supply chain management, port and transport economics and economic and transport geography are applied to offer an in-depth understanding of the processes underlying global supply chains and associated spatial and functional dynamics in port-cities. The book also discusses policy outcomes and implications relevant to port-cities positioned in different segments of global supply chains.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

This book illustrates and discusses the main characteristics of port-city development dynamics with a focus on the fast-growing city-states of the Middle East, which are emerging as key players in logistics and the global supply chain. Maritime ports and the cities hosting them have long fascinated scholars – geographers, economists, architects, urban planners, sociologists etc. – as they become centres of exchange where different social and urban environments meet, at the intersection between land and sea. Given that the current body of literature on the topic is biased – mainly concerning the Western world and East Asian region – with mono-disciplinary tendencies, this book outlines a theoretical basis from a wide range of literature, linking port-city studies, globalization theories and logistics, and adopts a multidisciplinary perspective. The main target audience of the book includes scholars and graduate students in urban studies, spatial planning, urban and regional economics, logistics, geography and transport geography with an interest in studying port geography and the port-city interface, port infrastructure development and port hinterland dynamics; it will also benefit policymakers and urban planners whose work involves these topics.

Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa analyzes the 15 main ports in East and Southern Africa (ESA) to assess whether their proposed capacity enhancements are justified by current and projected demand; whether the current port management approaches sufficiently address not only the maritime capacity needs but also other impediments to port efficiency; and what the expected hierarchy of ports in the region will be in the future. The analysis confirms the need to increase maritime capacity, as the overall container demand in the ports in scope is predicted to begin exceeding total current capacity by between 2025 and 2030, while gaps in terms of dry and liquid bulk handling are expected even sooner. However, in the case of many of the ports, the issue of landside access—the ports’ intermodal connectivity, the ease of international border crossing, and the port-city interface—is more important than the need to improve maritime access and capacity. The analysis finds that there is a need to improve the operating efficiency in all of the ESA ports, as they are currently less than half as productive as the most efficient ports in the matched data set of similar ports across the world, in terms of efficiency in container-handling operations. Similarly, there is a need to improve and formalize stakeholder engagement in many of the ports, to introduce modern management systems, and to strengthen the institutional framework to ensure the most efficient use of the infrastructure and to be able to attract private capital and specialist terminal operators. Finally, given the ports’ geographic location and proximity to main shipping routes, available draft, and the ongoing port-and-hinterland development, the book concludes that Durban and Djibouti are the most likely to emerge as the regional hubs in ESA’s future hub-and-spoke system.