Port-City Perspectives


Infographic of the Comparative Analyses on the two Sets of Mental Maps

In the Minds of People: The Case of Rotterdam

Following the geographical ‘Any-Port Model’, urban design has stipulated and enforced the disunion of port and city over the recent decades. In conjunction with other disciplines, the emphasis has been laid at the dislocation of production activities in favour of logistic-productive dynamics. At the same time, the professional focus was on the urban areas where most citizens are. While this practice has led to the redevelopment of abandoned harbour areas too, foremost the approach stimulated stronger physical boundaries between lived city and the remaining and new harbour areas. This article describes the application of the dominant model in Rotterdam over the recent decades, on the basis of literature review, and, it confronts this with the concepts of Rotterdam which are in the minds of professionals-in-training, through the method of ‘mental mapping’. On the one hand, mainly harbour areas are memorised when respondents are asked to draw the port-city of Rotterdam, even though its efficient port infrastructure makes public space in these areas rare, and most harbours are located behind inaccessible borders. On the other hand, civic areas, which have a refined network of public spaces and are places for daily life, reveal also all kinds of tangible and intangible signs and symbols related to characteristics of the port-city when memorised; even more. Various elements, linked to water-land or the flows of goods, people, and ideas, dominate the minds of the people when they think of Rotterdam in general. These outcomes reconfirm the unique unity of port and city and provide a way to find an alternative or supplementary model accepting the complex nature of port-cities.

Read:
Harteveld, Maurice (2021) In the Minds of People: Port-City Perspectives, The Case of Rotterdam, In: European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes (CPCL), Vol. 4, No. 2.

See also:
Maritime Mindsets
Biographies of Places

Maritime Mindsets

Images of Port-City Rotterdam, through the Mental Mapping Methods

This article makes explicit why, at first, we do not usually think beyond water, docks, cargo, moving loads, and ships when we think of port-cities. By reviewing mental maps of port-city Rotterdam drawn by professionals in training, it becomes clear that the adjective ‘port’ modifies the meaning of ‘city’ in such an extent that this echoes in the mind. It does exceptionally when respondents are asked explicitly to draw the ‘port-city’ by mind. Port and city seem to have become conceptual dichotomies. In the case of Rotterdam, the established professional points of views seem to be aligned with this disunion, even though the current trend in practice turns towards a desire to (re)develop the port-city as one. Through similar mental mapping experiments on Rotterdam, yet without adding the label of ‘port-city’ in the question, much richer images of the port-city of Rotterdam are generated. Multi-scalar reviews of such maps help to explicate much more inherited relations between nature and artifice, as well as for example the flows of goods and people. Ultimately, this approach changes the perspectives on the port-city, also for professionals in practice.

Read:
Harteveld, Maurice (2021b) Images of Port-City Rotterdam, through the Mental Mapping Methods. In: Portus, the Online Magazine of RETE (Association for the Collaboration between Ports and Cities), No. 42-2021, Year XXI. RETE Publisher, Venice, ISSN 2282-5789

EN / ES / PT / IT

See also:
Biographies of Places
Port-City Perspectives

Images of Port-Cities

In this video, you will get an explanation on how mental maps help us to (re)imagine port-cities in two steps: First, by explaining generally why people draw what they draw, and second, by explaining how images of port cities, as displayed in mental maps, are rooted and influenced by cultural frameworks of experience, and how they are biased according to the particular background of the beholder.

This educational video is part of the course Re-Imagining Port Cities: Understanding Space, Society and Culture available for free via online-learning TUDelft , and at the EdX MOOC platform. ©️ TU Delft, released under a CC BY NC SA license.

See also: the introduction video on Mental Mapping and the full MOOC on EdX: (Re)Imagining Port Cities: Understanding Space, Society and Culture

Mental Mapping

In this video, you hear more about the concept of a ‘mental map’, the mapping method, or the underlying theory, and why it matters, and how you can use it to educate others.

But before you watch, choose a port-city, and do a small exercise: sketch a map of your port city from memory.

If you have trouble getting started, just imagine you are walking through your port city. What would you see on the way? Are there specific elements or landmarks that stand out? Those are the kind of elements to include in your map. And don’t worry about getting all the details exactly right, it is just a sketch…

  • Do this all by yourself: close your laptop, put your tablet to sleep, turn your smartphone around, do not consult any books, and do not talk to anyone…
  • Draw your map on a blank, unlined sheet of paper, and don’t spend more than ten minutes on this task!

    Don’t worry about details; this map is not meant to be perfect!

    This educational video is part of the course Re-Imagining Port Cities: Understanding Space, Society and Culture available for free via online-learning TUDelft , and at the EdX MOOC platform. ©️ TU Delft, released under a CC BY NC SA license.

    See also: the subsequent video on Images of Port Cities and the full MOOC on EdX: (Re)Imagining Port Cities: Understanding Space, Society and Culture

  • Mapping Maritime Mindsets: Mental Maps

    Imagine: You are asked to draw a port city from memory. What would you put on paper? Do you think of harbours? Water, docks, cargo, moving loads, and ships? If your drawing shows these elements, don’t be surprised. Sixty-five graduate students also took on the challenge. In answering: “draw the port city of Rotterdam by mind”, the drawings of the participants (fig.1) displayed exactly the above features. Of course, this makes sense. A port just happens to be a place on the water in which ships shelter and dock to (un)load cargo and/or passengers. A harbour is a sheltered place too, and in its nautical meaning, it is a near-synonym for sheltered water, in which ships may dock, especially again for (un)loading. So, all the above linguistic lemmas are there and all these are connected to imaginable objects.

    Keep reading on Port City Futures | Leiden•Delft•Erasmus

    Port-Cities: Diverse and Inclusive

    Port Cities as Hubs of Diversity and Inclusivity: The Case of Rotterdam

    9 June 2020

    Article by Carola Hein, Paul van de Laar, Maurice Jansen, Sabine Luning, Amanda Brandellero, Lucija Azman, Sarah Hinman, Ingrid Mulder, Maurice Harteveld (Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures)

    Published on: Leiden Delft Erasmus universities network Magazine, June 2020, and on the website of LDE PortCityFutures

    rotterdam

    Rotterdam, photo by Iris van den Broek

    Port cities are a particular type of territory and are often long-standing examples of resilience, bringing opportunities, wealth, and innovation to their nations and their citizens. They have developed at the crossroads of international trade and commerce and the intersection of sea and land. Flows of people through trade and migration have played a key role in their spatial, social and cultural development. Their strong local identities share legacies of diversity and cosmopolitanism, but also of colonialism and segregation. The Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, Fujian speaks of the exchange between Arabia and China along the maritime silk road. Hanseatic cities stand as an example of far-flung networks with districts for foreign traders—think of the German merchants who established Bryggen, the German dock, in Bergen, now a UNESCO world heritage site.

    Port cities are places that accommodate change —and often thrive as a result. As logistical patterns, economic organization, spatial structures and technological devices have evolved, port cities have consistently provided spaces and institutions to host changing social, cultural and demographic needs and have built their local identities around them. Chinatowns, for example, are emblematic of many port cities worldwide. For many centuries, traders and merchants depended on the interaction between local traders and short- and long-term migrants of all classes. To maintain and facilitate shipping, trade or organizing defenses, traders, workers, and citizens have come together and developed long-term strategies and inclusive governance systems. Built around trade, these shared practices have not always benefitted everyone. Colonial port cities hosted the buying and selling of enslaved people as well as minerals, animals and opium. Many workers lived in squalid conditions in walking distance to the port. The degree of tolerance and inclusion depended on the extent of ethnic diversity overall, the degree of spatial and social segregation in the city, and the economic structure of the urban economy.

    rotterdam

    Waterfronts have been and in some (smaller) cities still are contact zones of people from diverse backgrounds: public spaces bring together dockworkers, displaced people, casual labourers, and trans-migrants waiting to board ships for overseas travel. However, waterfronts have been looked upon as places of otherness in need of social reform even at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, container districts and offshore ports further increased the separation between ports and cities. Following containerization, waterfront regeneration has become a worldwide tool to overcome the range of social, cultural and public health issues associated with the nineteenth century waterfront. Urban renewal and gentrification have been central to many of these programs that took off beginning in the 1980s in most European port cities. Rebranding has been an essential part of bringing new capital and new people into neighbourhoods next to former dock areas, which normally would not have been of interest to private investors. In select cases—such as HafenCity Hamburg—planners and politicians have consciously opted for spatial and social inclusion.

    Rotterdam as a port city reflects the long-term history of migration traditionally related to shipping and trade in all aspects, but since the 1970s the working port is no longer a decisive pull factor. Other international, national and local factors have changed the city’s population characteristics. The past decades have seen increasing diversity in ethnic groups and religions but also increased variation in socio-economic statuses among inhabitants with a migration background. Rotterdam hosts so many ‘minority’ migrants that it is now considered a superdiverse city where 52%, and in some districts, almost 70% of the population have a migrant background.

    toren

    Rotterdam’s hyperdiversity—a term meant to acknowledge the multiple causes of diversity—has challenged existing local integration policies. The city government’s development strategy focusses on a balanced composition of the population and regeneration programs in combination with new residential, sustainable urban planning and branding strategies aim to assure integration. Like other cities with major waterfront revitalization activities, Rotterdam is witnessing a gap between cosmopolitan aspirations boosted by international capital and symbolic waterfront architecture and the existing reality of a hyperdiverse population inhabiting the urban fabric. Redevelopment projects of former waterfront port areas, such as Lloyd Quarter, RDM and M4H stand as examples. Yet, like other cities with major waterfront revitalization activities, the question arises: to what extent is Rotterdam widening the gap between diverse neighbourhoods and gentrified port-city redevelopment projects? There is a potential risk of economic segregation as authorities, educational and cultural institutions aspire to build the post-industrial economy on the port industrial foundations of the past, neglecting those areas where a linkage to the maritime mindset of Rotterdam as a port city is hardly felt let, alone visible.

    Rotterdam needs to find ways to come to terms with political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of its port city. That is one of the major challenges for Rotterdam in becoming an inclusive city. What is needed to connect Rotterdam’s migration narrative (and that of other port cities) to further the inclusive city ambition, using its present hyperdiversity, and acknowledging the value of diversity for creativity, innovation and making the next port city? Exploring the key values of an inclusive post-industrial, hyperdiverse port city drives the research agenda of our multidisciplinary LDE PortCityFutures program.

    The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus PortCityFutures program employs multi-disciplinary methods and longitudinal perspectives to understand and design political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of spatial use in port city regions. It explores how the flows of goods and people generated by port activities intersect with the dynamics of the natural environment, hydraulic engineering, spatial planning, urban design, architecture, and heritage. It examines the spatial impact of competing interests among port-related and urban spatial development needs and timelines. It explores creative solutions and design measures to problems and considers their implications for the future use of limited space that will allow port, city, and region to thrive.

    People, Movement & Public Space

    Improving our ways to urbanise and innovate urbanisation processes are needed in order to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, hence deliver the Quito New Urban Agenda promise. During the Future Days event, participants renewed the listing of urban topics. They bridge the gaps between academics and practitioner. They have presented much more evidence-based policies at the global level and with local examples and test-beds. And, they generated a better understanding of the driving forces of urbanisation and of the needs for better regulating the processes.

    People, Movement and Public Space
    In a keynote at the Future Days 2019 event, themed ‘Legacy and Future of our Cities’, I illuminated the interdisciplinary topic ‘people, movement and public space’, in order to understand assembled complexities of cities which go along with this topic. I introduced a four-step approach: First, a network-theoretical approach in the analyses of path systems, aiming to understand the complex dynamic systems of real cities better. Second, the analyses of personal perspectives on these paths apply more a non-linear approach to understand complex trajectories and interactions in reality. Third, engaged with the human-adaptive approach, analysing the psychology of place helps to understand patterns in the evolutionary inter-subjectivity of being in cities. Lastly, by observing public life, understanding the emergence of life in real cities, and non-equilibria, may be understand from a self-organising approach.
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    Publicly-Known Space

     

    Delft University of Technology
    Oxford Brookes University
    University of Zagreb
    and
    University of Rijeka

    Exhibition

    Hartera/Školjic/Rijeka
    Could it be…. this too?

    on invitation of
    Association of Architects of Rijeka
    Department of Culture
    City of Rijeka

    17-27 October 2014

    Association of Architects of Rijeka
    Ivana Dežmana 2a
    Rijeka, Croatia

    Four European universities explored the revitalisation of the former paper factory in Rijeka within the entire zone Školjić. For a large number of people from Rijeka, this former industrial zones, including zone Školjić does not exist in their mental image of the city or they are perceived as areas without access. The purpose of this exhibition could be seen at least a three-fold: to introduce the younger generation of citizens of Rijeka with its own city throughout its coverage; show them a way of growth and development of the city; affect the development of sensitivity to the construction heritage not only the representational type but that is often considered to be the not worth watching.

    Technische Universiteit Delft
    Oxford Brookes University
    Sveučilište u Zagrebu
    i
    Sveučilište u Rijeci

    Izložba

    Hartera/Školjic/Rijeka
    Moglo bi… i ovako?

    na pozivu
    Društvo Arhitekata Rijeka
    Odjel za Kulturu
    Grada Rijeke

    17- 27 Listopada 2014

    Društvo Arhitekata Rijeka
    Ivana Dežmana 2a
    Rijeka, Hrvatska

    Četiriju europskih sveučilišta istražili revitalizacije bivše Tvornice papira Rijeka i cijele zone Školjić. U mentalnoj slici vlastitoga grada većeg broja Riječana bivše industrijske zone, uključujući i zonu Školjić, ne postoje ili ako postoje, percipiraju se kao zone bez pristupa. Svrha posjeta ovoj izložbi mogla bi se vidjeti u najmanju ruku kao troslojna: upoznati mlađe generacije Riječana s vlastitim gradom u cijelom njegovom obuhvatu; pokazati im jedan od načina rasta i razvoja grada; utjecati na razvoj senzibiliteta prema građevinskom nasljeđu ne samo onog reprezentativnog tipa nego i onog često smatranog ne vrijednim gledanja.

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    Abandoned Area

    Rehabilitation of Hartera

    Only a few people live and work in Hartera. It used to be a vibrant part of the city of Rijeka where hundreds of people were flocking in and out every day. Today, this area largely abandoned. Its famous paper factory closed its doors about a decade ago and since then the area fell into decay. Nevertheless, despite its decline, Hartera is all but forgotten! On the contrary; Hartera is in the minds of many people. Locals will relate the area to its rich industrial heritage, unique buildings and great views to the hills. Some people refer to its annual music festival, current grassroots events, and emerging cultural scene. Although Hartera is known by most people, seldom it is used by many. The challenge for the public government of Rijeka and many other actors is to make this area public with respect to the multiple images people have of the site. This area can become publicly-used, not just publicly-known. A spa facility or entertainment park will not be answers for this particular side, nor will it be for example a shopping mall. Those kinds of development stimulate appropriation of the space by special target groups, blocking the way for others, and/or they change the identity of the area so drastically that people will change their perception of the area and neglect the newly developed as soon as it will becomes out of date again.

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    Spatial Metro

    On Routing and Orientation in City Centres

    The chair of Urban Design at the TU Delft is participating in the Spatial Metro project on routing and orientation in city centres. This project focuses on the improvement of city centres. Other partners are the cities of Norwich, Bristol, Rouen and Koblenz, the University of East Anglia, the School of Environmental Sciences and the School of Computing Sciences, the University of Koblenz and the Swiss Pedestrian Association.

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