Details
- Publication date
- 1 August 2020
Description
| The seaport concept has a long history, going back to the early days of civilisation. In very conventional terms, a port is defined as a transit area, a gateway through which goods and people move from and to the sea (Sargent 1938). As such, a port is a place of contact between land and maritime space, a knot where ocean and inland transport lines meet and intertwine, an intermodal place of convergence (Weigend 1958). Ports come in various sizes and functions and cannot be narrowed down simply to the geographical notion of a delimited spatial area. To put things in perspective, a port could be anything, such as a sheltered stretch of sea, protecting a handful of fishing boats somewhere in the South Pacifc; a block of cement in a small Greek island, on which a passenger ferry would lower its ramp to disembark passengers; a buoy onto which a tanker would moor to its oil through a pipeline; a finger pier alongside which a bulk carrier would unload its coal on a conveyor belt; a cool port (i.e. a refrigerated facility) in Latin America exporting fruit to Europe; a mega yacht marina in Monaco or Nice; or just a water taxi that would disembark passengers from a cruise ship anchored in the middle of the sea, outside Amalfi, the picturesque village of South Italy. At the other end, there is the mind-boggling Yangshan Deep Water Port (of Shanghai), or the equally impressive industrial complexes of the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp in the Rhine–Scheldt Delta region, comprising in their domain clusters of thousands of companies, from the large refineries of the oil majors to the small paint shop, inconspicuously hidden under an abandoned bridge (Haralambides 2021). Today, the port picture is changing in leaps and bounds: the seaport of today is increasingly becoming a logistics and industrial node in the centre of complex intertwining global supply chains. As such, a functional and spatial clustering of activities takes place in the wider domain of a seaport, all aiming, directly or indirectly, at seamless and sustainable transportation, transformation and information processes within these global supply chains (Notteboom 2016). |
Files
Port management and governance in a post-covid 19 era: quo vadis