Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks

Ports have been and continue to be critical in not just the global movement of goods, but also the global movement of ideas, social change, and cultural phenomena, including architecture and urban form. The connected points of a multi-faceted network, ports profoundly affect both each other and the cities and regions to which they belong. Shipping and trade networks have created a legacy embodied in the street patterns, land use and buildings of interconnected port cities. Multiple forces are at play: technological requirements, elite preferences and working class needs, urban policy and globalization.

Port Cities brings together original scholarship by both well-published and younger scholars from multiple disciplines and builds upon long-standing research on the international exchange of architectural and planning ideas. A carefully selected series of essays examines comprehensively and globally the changing built and urban environment of selected port cities. They explore similarities, dissimilarities, and how sea-based networking has influenced urban landscapes and architecture, socio-economic and cultural development from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

The first section examines global networks linking ports and cities and explores the effect of inter-continental transfers on architecture and planning. The second part focuses on interconnected port cities in regional contexts, analyzing socio-economic structures and urban and built form. The third section examines the built environment of selected cities in view of their response to changing technology, transforming socio-economic networks and political contexts, as well as evolving design concepts. Overall, the book proposes a networked analysis of the built and urban environment, arguing that international maritime networks are paradigmatic for the creation of dynamic, multi-scaled, and interconnected "port cityscapes."

Carola Hein is Professor at Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania) in the Growth and Structure of Cities Department. Her current research interests include the transmission of architectural and urban ideas along international networks, focusing specifically on port cities and the global architecture of oil.