Considerations about the evolution of maritime transport and their effects on port-city relationship (original) (raw)

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the world economy has been registering moderate growth levels. Despite that, the maritime transport still maintains an important role in the world trade, sustaining the economic underlying processes to the globalization. In this context, ports continued to detain an important role as a support element to the logistic chains that ensure the goods flows both at global and regional scales. Along with an eminently economic dimension, ports also are linked to territorial organization and most specifically to the development of port cities. The interdependencies established between booth elements (i.e. port and city) promote specific and differentiable characteristics in many dimensions: spatial, temporal, functional and socio-economic. Certainly, and despite the increasing distance between these spaces, their interdependencies can prevail, as Ducret (2008) concludes in his study about the typologies of port-city relations. In order to understand the mutations and specificities of these relations in time and space, it is, however, necessary to carry out multi-scalar analyses. Since a great diversity of aspects (social, territorial and economic) are necessarily involved, they inevitably underlie the port-city relationship. Therefore as previously specified, the communication aims to reveal a consideration on the adaptability of the world port system. The maritime transport industry transformations and the new dynamics of maritime traffic sought to interpret the influence of the port-city relationship. Thus reinforcing the competitive capacity of ports resilience. For this purpose, the analysis is based on empirical evidence (mainly statistical information and case studies) and theoretical systematizations that seek to interpret these processes. An assumption is made that a reciprocal relationship between the port and the city development influences the competitiveness and resilience of the port by trying to understand the multi-scale complexity of this interdependence. To this end, a multicriteria analysis is applied as a contribute to the interpretation of the inherent specificities of these complex systems.