ABSTRACT
Half a century of change in ports, shipping, and trade has profoundly reshaped relationships between ports and their cities. The concept of disconnection has been used to describe the process whereby once tight physical, economic, and institutional relationships between general cargo ports and their cities have changed with the introduction of containerization and other shipping innovations (Hall 2007). Disconnection has had profoundly negative consequences for city-regions containing ports; as the (private) benefi ts of increased cargo throughput have become more widely dispersed geographically, the (social) costs are concentrated locally (Hesse 2006; McCalla 1999). The simultaneous spatial concentration and dispersal of port-related activity shares much with the processes of global city formation that Sassen (1991) and others have related to the changing spatial organization of fi nance and advanced business services.
