Archinect - RETHINK PORT URBANISM

CHANGING DYNAMICS OF PORT TOWNS

2016-06-07T17:52:12-04:00

Through history, the majority of larger cities have been located on the coast, as ports and harbors were the hubs for most forms of trade, investment and innovation. Port cities are now on the front-line of a changing global urban system. There are problems from restructuring of trade, logistics and ship-building, creating economic dependency, social exclusion and cultural destruction. Meanwhile, there exists new opportunities in heritage tourism, cultural industries and ecological restoration, but these opportunities often have negative impacts. as a result, many ports have lost their historic functions and suffer rapid decline. However, the port city as a ‘hotspot’ of decline can also offer opportunities as a hotspot for sustainable innovation, based on creative conjunctions of physical, social and economic resources.

In a wider context cities are hubs for resource consumption and climate change pressures, but they also offer possible solutions for low impact living. The...

PORTS IN IMAGE AND WORD

2015-04-22T11:52:39-04:00

‘Not until the city at length reached the dimensions of a metropolis was there any problem of congestion around the city’s gates, causing the trading population there to back up, with inns, stables, and warehouses of their own, to form a merchant’s quarter and entrepot, or “port”.’

- Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961.

‘….the best way to move something heavy from here to there was and is to float it there. This truth is as true now as it was in the days of Homer.’

- John Szarkowski, A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories, 1997.

The role of ports in concept and development of the city, the story of ports – is that of civilization itself. ‘Metropolis’, ‘gates’, and ‘port’ reaffirm the centrality of the idea of a ‘port’ to civic life: a gateway for trade and ideas between an ordered human settlement and wider, partly watery, worlds. The idea of such a gateway was central to city ports until the 1960’s and the architecture of ports reflected this...