ABSTRACT
The process of transforming ports and waterfronts has been intimately connected with world-wide economic restructuring, technological change in shipping and cargo handling facilities, and competition among cities in a global hierarchy. During the late 1960s, as economic production systems became organized at a global scale and containerization and other major technological innovations began to take hold, ports moved seawards away from the city centre (Hoyle 1989). And with this move, the close functional and spatial relationship between ports and cities began to break down. More recently, advanced port logistics and trans-shipment of goods in containers have rationalized handling activities and the spatial relocation of functions formerly linked to the harbour (Witthöft 2000; Löbe 1979). With these changes, the interfaces between ports and cities continue to show signifi cant new land-use activities and building stock. I have called these recent tendencies a change “from ships to chips” (Schubert 2001, 131)—that is, a transformation of waterfronts from an era in which the movement of goods and cargo by water was central to one in which globalized information processing economies play an increasingly important role in determining spatial patterns of activities.
