Session M18 - Writing the Resilience of Port Cities (1800-2000)
Coordinators: Carola Hein (c.m.hein@tudelft.nl), Paul van de Laar (vandelaar@eshcc.eur.nl)
Read Session abstractRecent studies in cultural port history have shown the importance of the waterfront – the land based maritime districts - in shaping urban identities and producing port cultures (see Beaven, Belle and James, 2016). The waterfront, as a productive liminal space and entrance to the city, exemplifies the major economic, spatial, social and cultural transformations of ports, their hinterlands, and their coastal zones. From a prestigious space, the waterfront developed into an industrialist’ place of “otherness”, in need of social and moral reform. The nineteenth century waterfront, however, is more than a microcosm or intercultural contact zone, it represents also the power of empire, colonization and globalization as a central hub of trade, migration and innovation. The post-war port expansion witnessed the development of global transshipment areas spatially dislocated from the city; from the oil based industrial development areas in the 1950 and 1960s to the container terminals since the 1970s. Ports turned either into mega transportation hubs or lost their pre-war position and global standing. The old waterfront turned into a postmodern gentrified place of leisure and cultural heritage. This urban regeneration, however, affirmed “a distinction between the waterfront and the city, which had never previously existed” (Porfyriou, Sepe, 2016; p. 3).
The repeated adaptations of port cities to economic, ecological, environmental and cultural and political changes tell us a lot about the resilience of port cities. Port cityscapes are, therefore, ideal places for studying the major trends of urban systems in the modern and contemporary period. This session focusses on how port cities’ resilience has been constructed in port narratives, as rhetorical means for legitimizing government actions or in service of local business networks. The organizers want to invite scholars from around the globe to present papers on port narratives which deal with the complexities of the relationship between the port, the city and its citizens. Papers may include reflections on:
- How narratives of “moral economies”, progress, port competition, modernism, efficiency etc. have fostered planning practices since 1800;
- How narratives of globalization, cosmopolitism and diversity have shaped an economic motivated kind of local tolerance;
- How narratives of waterfront regeneration has stimulated the global distribution of “copy paste” architecture and urban branding;
- How narratives of local culture, as reproduced in diverse cultural productions (film, literature, oral history, tangible heritage etc. are used as part of a culture of resilience and rebranding of port cities.Keywords: port cities; port cultures; architecture; waterfront regeneration; resilience; planning
Friday 31st August 2018
Room 08 09.00-10.30, 11.00-12.30
PAPERS
Negotiating Modernism and Sanitation in colonial Macao: The Chinese Bazaar New Avenue (1903/1908)
Regina Campinho
Managing risk in the ‘danger zone’: civil defence and public safety discourses on the north east coast of England, 1914-18.
Michael Reeve
Spatial resilience of the port of Belfast: mapping opportunities
Jasna Mariotti
Piraeus Waterfront. Traces of (in/de) industrialisation with the passage of time.
Aikaterini Karadima
“You will always cross … via Calais”: Hovercraft and Calais’ search for port domination.
Jacob Paskins
Maritime museums and historic ships in Hamburg: Staging the past of a port city
Christoph Strupp
Elite and subaltern cosmopolitanism: rethinking the rise of capitalist urbanity through Scandinavian port cities
Pål Brunnström, Johan Pries
Urbanism and Reform. The second life of the Black Sea port cities, 1700-1920
Athina Vitopoulou, Alexandra Yerolympos
Fremantle: ‘reminders of a working port.’
Felix Joensson, Kate Hislop
