Abstract
In recent years, with the development of society, the awareness of environmental protection for people has been increasing. While ports promote the economic development and employment levels of port cities, they also have a negative impact on the environment of port cities. The sustainability of port cities is increasingly valued. Port cities face huge challenges, and their sustainability needs to be better understood. The purpose of this article is to review research on the sustainability of port cities. We used content analysis to classify and analyze the existing relevant literature, to learn about the hotspots and deficiencies of past research, and to propose future research directions. We found that port sustainability has become an increasingly important research topic during the past ten years. From the perspective of geographic research areas, European port cities are the hot spots for sustainability research. Regarding research fields, technologies, methods and measures to promote the sustainability of port cities are popular research topics. In terms of research methods, qualitative research plays an important role in the study of port city sustainability. Finally, guidance for future research on port city sustainability is proposed according to the review results.
Highlights
With the global population growth and increasingly destructive character of human activities toward the environment, sustainable development has become a global consensus
The most adopted definition of sustainability was given in the report of ‘Our Common Future’ for the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [1]
Since this study only focuses on the sustainability issues of port cities related to ports and port industries, after reading and summarizing the abstracts of the 514 pieces of literature, we found that the current research fields related to this research topic were mainly focused on these aspects: the impact of ports’ and cities’ interactions on the sustainability of port cities, a sustainability assessment of port cities, the impact of stakeholders on the sustainability of port cities, and sustainability issues and the solutions of port cities
Summary
With the global population growth and increasingly destructive character of human activities toward the environment, sustainable development has become a global consensus. Sustainable development mainly includes three components: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability. Its connotation emphasizes the coordinated development of the environment, economy and society, and effectively combines environmental protection and human development [2,3,4]. The city itself plays a key role in sustainability, because it is an important engine of economic growth, and puts tremendous pressure on the environment while facing huge challenges from society [5]. The interactions between urban environmental, social and economic issues, and urban sustainability have attracted increasing attentions [6]
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