A port from the city
A governance model that approaches, recognises and focuses on the city-port-territory interdependence is the first step in aligning the development of the port, the city and the territory and achieving the goals set.
Ports are connecting nodes and demonstrate the tensions at work in the development processes of our society. As noted in the area of the territory and the city, development in recent decades has tended towards deterritorialisation, guided by servicing the global dynamics of production, trade and consumption. Moreover, the unbundling of their service in the host country is exacerbated by the tendency towards a corporatist management model that bases decision-making processes on their service to the transnational economy.
There is a kind of tyranny in global trade—demands for regimented, universally applied logistics and behaviors that can be oppressive.
Keller Easterling
Designer, writer and professor at Yale
This situation means there is a loss of connection between the ports and their managing bodies with the territory and cities in which they are located. It is also impossible to guarantee the realisation of the sustainable development agenda, with which we must be able to reconcile the pursuit of growth with a comparable increase in comprehensive social and environmental benefits.
The intentions about how you use this precious area, to balance the interests of the most number of people, particularly on waterfronts that are publicly owned, should be sought.
Diane Oshima
Director of Planning & Environment, Port Of San Francisco (2017-2021)
Public access to the shore is a principle that's very important. However, in my time working in San Francisco, I've come to think that it's not so much about physical outcomes necessarily, but it really gets down to people, and how people collaborate and come together to have functional conversations.
Diane Oshima
Director of Planning & Environment, Port Of San Francisco (2017-2021)
There is a need for new management and planning models that effectively balance interests to ultimately promote the development of the port and its core service function in the host country. In this sense, the most successful models facilitate collaboration with the city and regional stakeholders, with more horizontal governance models.
Global capital [dictates] the terms in which infrastructures, whether it's extractive infrastructures, or productive ones, or circulatory ones like ports, are located. And I think that is actually one of the more interesting spaces of struggle [...]. When we're looking at a port, there has to be an enormous amount of say by the local authorities on the parameters in which global capital operates in that particular location.
Laleh Khalili
Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London
The port of the future will have to update its management in order to be able to achieve the complex and multidimensional objectives required of it. The goal is to maintain its status as a territorial asset that accompanies transition and adaptation to new realities. Therefore, its leadership must be strategic and its governance model must be defined in an open and mediating way.
When the positions are not dialectical but protective, confrontation occurs. What the study, analysis and development of the environmental impact assessment allows is dialectics, a mechanism to reach agreements. But if you anchor yourself in the idea that something doesn't need to be done, the result is confrontation: it can't grow.
Miriam García García
PhD Architect, landscape architect, urban planner and director of LAND LAB
Key Actions
- Amend the laws and legal framework of the ports to include the powers of municipalities and local governments in management and decision-making.
- Establish a common management framework harmonised with urban and territorial development criteria and prioritising the general interest.
Experts
Diane Oshima
Director of Planning & Environment, Port Of San Francisco (2017-2021)
Keller Easterling
Designer, writer and professor at Yale
Miriam García García
PhD Architect, landscape architect, urban planner and director of LAND LAB
Laleh Khalili
Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London