Abstract
Most port cities have a long history of investment in the waterfront, adapting these spaces to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants and increase the tourist interest of the city, in a 50-year process of waterfront regeneration that started in the late 1960s. Even though one of the drivers of development in today’s port cities continues to be the transfer of knowledge and experiences between different cases, not all these cities have achieved their goals, nor have all done so in a sustainable way. This article exposes a new methodology, motivated by the need to carry out a comparative study of good practices of port–city integration for twelve specific cases. To enable a comparison of intangible realities such as port–city integration, it is mandatory to have a common benchmark to quantify features of cities from different cases. The 3DPortCityMeasure methodology is intended to provide a framework for analysing port-city integration, with results that supply an immediate understanding of each case. This tool enables direct comparative evaluation and provides support for land use planning and urban design approaches. The results show that the proposed approach for measuring intangible factors in the field of the port–city relationship is a very useful tool, novel in this discipline, and fully applicable to other cases and other urban issues.
Highlights
Over the last half century, port cities have undergone major changes that, in many cases, have modified the course of their future development
Most of the studies propose, amend and apply the relative concentration index (RCI) model, such as Ducruet and Lee [46], who propose applying the RCI to determine the type of relation between port and urban functions by examining the correlation between city population and container throughput, or the DCI model proposed by Guo [37], and others develop new methodologies, such as Schiper et al [47], that involve ranking various long-term port plans and port vision documents against a set of social, economic, and environmental key performance indicators (KPIs)
The analysis of the twelve proposed cases confirms, on the one hand, the complexity of the interactions between these two port–city realities that are so difficult to measure, and on the other, that the results are satisfactory. These results demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, which has been developed by enabling the production of comparative graphs to visualize this extremely complex reality
Summary
Over the last half century, port cities have undergone major changes that, in many cases, have modified the course of their future development. The evidence seems clear: with each new industrial cycle, the port spaces of the previous cycle become redundant and are freed up This results in the development of new modern port spaces and the urban or economic renewal of the previous ones in a process that is not immediate but takes place over time [7]. These dynamics of the transformation of old port spaces for new urban uses is what has come to be known since the 1990s as the Waterfront [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. It is essential to learn from the strategies and actions that have improved the quality of life of the inhabitants by increasing the economy and local well-being, compared to many others that have not been so successful
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