This article explores the concept of ‘green’ in architecture and urban design through the lens of port cities. Due to global pressures such as climate change, energy transition and soil consumption the planning of port cities requires new scenarios for achieving equilibrium between nature and water systems. Despite the fact that the concept of green is widely shared in both academic and professional fields –who could possibly oppose green?– it can be argued that the concept is also widely misused and misunderstood. This article uses the “Building Green” TU Delft Architecture master’s elective course (academic year 2021/2022) designed and coordinated by Carola Hein as a starting point for a larger discussion of whether the term green is helpful for achieving sustainability in port cities and at what scale. The course analyzes the concept of sustainability through time, arguing that people built green “by necessity” before the industrial revolution and it explores contemporary attempts at building “green by desire”. Finally, it asks for approaches of building “green by design”. The course argues that these diverse approaches to building green and the contemporary needs of sustainability are highly relevant for port cities. It challenges students to analyze a port city in light of its sustainability practices and to develop scenarios for sustainability.@en

Numerous actors have been involved in the planning of the port and city of Naples. National and local authorities—namely central government, the Region, the Municipality of Naples, and the Port Authority—act upon the port at different scales, according to diverging interest and by using different planning tools. Each entity has different spatial claims and contrastive views on what port city integration can be. Their diverse goals have led port and city to develop into separate entities, from a spatial, cultural, economic as well as administrative perspective. The different scopes of their planning are particularly visible in the areas at the intersection of land and water, where the relationship is characterized by waiting conditions across different dimensions and scales. The separation between port and city in Naples originates from history. This PhD thesis looks at the past as a resource, sometimes as a problem in the way it produces inertia, but certainly as a heritage made of signs, traces, and cultures, written and rewritten on the urban palimpsest. Using and challenging the concept of path dependence—defined here as a resistance by institutions and people to change patterns of behavior and to repeat previous decisions and experiences— this PhD thesis argues that in order to overcome inertia, it is important to recognize the interests and spatial claims of all the stakeholders involved port city planning and to identify shared goals and values as a foundation for future design. @en

Water has served and sustained societies throughout history. Understanding the complex and diverse water systems of the past is key to devising sustainable development for the future with regard to socioeconomic structures, policies, and cultures. Today, past systems form the framework for preservation and reuse as well as for new proposals. In this course, you will learn how to identify the spatial, social and cultural aspects of water heritage in your environment. You will investigate real situations, assess specific issues and evaluate the impact of potential measures, following existing expertise on water heritage and water management traditions as a model for your own practice.@en

Port city regions are at the forefront of many urgent contemporary issues such as migration, climate change, digitization, etc. Addressing these challenges and developing sustainable solutions, requires more than technical interventions, it requires rethinking and redesigning the basic spatial and socio-cultural paradigms that prevail at present. In this course we will analyze examples of port cities from a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural perspective. You will develop the skills to identify and address the challenges port cities face now and into the future.@en

Port cities and metropolitan port territories are experiencing a profound transition as a consequence of radical spatial and governance changes mainly led by logistics’ dynamics. Contemporary spaces between ports and cities have often become a collage of wastescapes: marginal territories resulting from the current uneven growth of port cities. This contribution developes a new methodological approach by stating that neglected spaces represent a precious resource to initiate circular and resilient regenerations of port cities through metabolic transformation processes. The article points out the wastescapes of the port of Naples as network of resources that allows decision-makers and urban planners to combine the logistical strategies and the enhancement of the port cultural heritage through synergistic interventions@en

Since 2016, the reorganization of the Italian port legislation through the decree n.169 has introduced port systems, as a new institutional umbrella helping improving ports efficiency. However, this new entity challenges the goals and interests of local stakeholders, which have their own tradition and have independently developed spatial patterns and governance arrangements. The current separate development paths—or to use a term from the political sciences: path dependence—have cemented in physical spaces, such as infrastructures and buildings. The Naples case stands exemplary. The new Central Tyrrhenian Sea Port Authority—as an entity overseeing the ports of Naples, Castellammare di Stabia and Salerno—exemplifies how institutional change can create both new opportunities for cities and the region and be restrained by existing spatial and governance interests. This is evident in the decisions that today see the municipality and the port authority, among others, unable to identify a solution that holds together economic development and enjoyment of the coastal landscape. Therefore, the recent port reorganization requires a new conceptualization of the role that space can play in institutional realignment, a rethinking of existing patterns of behavior as well as of the longer-term plans of all actors in the region. The article therefore presents a spatial-institutional analysis of the Naples port city region asking to what extent the ports merging represents a tool to overcome institutional and spatial inertia. In doing so, it combine policy document analysis with the results of interviews conducted with planning authorities at the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport in Rome, municipality and port authority of Naples.@en

Historical paths matter in port-city regions. Here, spatial patterns and governance arrangements are path dependent to the point that once certain paths have been established, these become hard to change. This defines a condition of institutional inertia that plays a significant role in preventing any form of spatial change. Naples is an exemplar of how different actors have historically developed their own routines and planning tools, resulting in the spatial and governance separation still visible today. How do path dependencies influence the port–city (and regional) relationship we are experiencing today? Nowadays, ports operate in an increasingly changing environment where spatial and economic developments can be better understood as the results of actors’ interactions across different scales. In order to cope with global urgencies, such as energy, economic and societal transition, European infrastructure policies are driving many port authorities towards infrastructural integration and governance cooperation. This offers significant opportunities to improve relations among ports, but it mostly leaves out the interconnections with cities and larger regions. Moreover, it also challenges consolidated beliefs and planning cultures which have planned ports and cities as disconnected entities, at least since industrialization. In Naples, local and national authorities find it difficult to define a sustainable consistency of interests. Today, the Central Tyrrhenian seaport system is the new institutional umbrella overseeing the three main ports of the region: Naples, Castellammare di Stabia and Salerno. This paper investigates whether this new governance entity results in either an opportunity for change or a reinforcement of existing path dependencies.

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Cities and landscapes around the world are the result of many centuries of human interventions. They are a spatial palimpsest of events and processes that have modified the formation of landscapes and cities and, in some cases, even erased what others had previously done (Corboz, 1998). The insertion of spaces of oil into the existing territory used existing patterns and created new ones, giving rise to a palimpsestic global petroleumscape that links production and management of industrial flows through a particular configuration of space (C. Hein, 2013, 2018). Throughout the twentieth century, as oil became a key player in the transformation of space, it helped the emergence of diverse spaces, ranging from industrial sites to headquarters and cultural facilities. In the network of oil spaces, port cities have taken on a particular role. The petroleum industry used the ports to access the hinterland. They built oil related structures, such as oil tanks, pipelines and industrial and sometimes administrative buildings nearby, often in the vicinity of dense urban environments (C. Hein, 2013). These landscapes are characterized by fragmentation, a term proposed by the urbanist Bernardo Secchi (B. Secchi, 2000) to describe a spatial condition that belongs to the contemporary cities. Here, left-over of contaminated industrial landscapes form a set of fragments with a high potential for change. In this situation, utopian scenarios designed to present possibilities of change can help envisioning a reality better than the current one (B. Secchi & Viganò, 2009). Previous design experiences have been carried out for the cities of Rotterdam and Dunkirk (C. Hein, 2017, 2019; C. Hein & De Martino, 2018). In 2018, the studio built upon an ongoing collaboration with Michelangelo Russo from the Department of Architecture of Federico II in Naples. The students from TU Delft took their analysis notably to the eastern part of Naples. Historical choices, urban activities and socio-economic relationships characterize a strategic area in Eastern Naples, where the city becomes landscape (Russo, 2014, 2016). In this area, the port faces a problem of relationship with the city, resulting in discontinuity and fragmentation for the waterfront areas. East Naples, and specifically the area of oil storage of Q8 called “Ambito 13”, is a critical area as it covers a huge space in between the city and the peripheral residential areas of Ponticelli and Barra (previous image). The oil refinery and oil tanks in this area separate the city center from the rest of the Eastern city. Here, commercial and oil flows intertwine with heavily urbanized areas. However, this mosaic of different landscapes and relations also has great potentiality for redevelopment (next image). Both the Naples Municipality and the Central Tyrrhenian Sea Port System [1] are vying for this site. Their competing interests present an opportunity to rethink the port-city relationship, to redevelop the abandoned oil-related industrial areas, and to re-launch East Naples as a new place for urban living. The studio therefore asked the following question: How can port and city use the container port extension – beyond the presence of the oil sites – as an opportunity for an era beyond oil? @en

Ports have historically followed a linear model of growth. Formation, expansion,
reallocation, abandonment, and redevelopments are just some of the steps that are followed over time by ports from all over the world. Circularity – a goal that both ports and cities hope to achieve in the near future – is not a new topic anymore. Although the global pressures to achieve this goal are immense, it can be stated that most port cities still have not yet made serious steps towards new circular models of growth. On the contrary, ports are still expanding, and they still generate serious amounts of waste, while also leaving networks of left-over territories that lay in states of wastefulness: port-city wastescapes. Two cases regarding these wastescapes are discussed. Naples, which is used to show land in limbo, while Rotterdam is used to show a port in transition. This article argues that a circular regeneration of these wastescapes can play a crucial role in re-imagining a new form of integration between the port, the city, and the metropolitan territory.@en

Design matters. Historically, architects and urbanists have created the spaces of oil and the imagination that goes with it. Today, the same professionals can foster more critical thinking, dreaming and curiosity as they imagine and design the necessary new spaces, forms of urbanity, buildings, and transitions for a period ‘beyond oil’. Educational institutions have an important role to play in developing new ideas. Our built environment has been shaped by and for the flow of oil and its products, and by and for its financial flow as well. The resulting global petroleumscape (which we explored in The Beam #4) of industrial sites, transportation infrastructure, business districts, gasoline stations, cars, refineries and ports, is the manifestation of the omnipresence of oil and our dependency on it. In addition to supplying oil, the petrochemical and building industry collectively developed a huge range of new synthetic and hybrid materials and building elements: from plastic bathroom units to electric cable insulation, from insulation material to plastic windows, from furniture to domestic appliances and toys. These materials and products enthused designers and users alike and have since become standard. The (positive) feedback loop between the global petroleumscape and the way in which it has been represented has influenced the minds of citizens in their everyday life.@en

Since the mid-19th century, the history of Dunkirk has been closely related to the ebb and flow of oil streams transiting the city; since the mid-20th century, just two major oil companies, BP and Total, have shaped the form and function of the city. Their continual reorganization of the port and its fore-and hinterland—partly in response to changing oil flows and in competition with other ports on the North Sea and in France—has created economic and spatial challenges to local economies and decision-makers. How, specifically, have actors in Dunkirk engaged with and adapted to changing economic and spatial conditions in the past? What kind of oil spaces have they created? These historical precedents shape the ways in which local stakeholders respond to contemporary challenges created by the emergence of new technologies, new work forms and the transition towards new forms of energy systems. Moreover, understanding these dynamics, and the long-term impact of governance and the built environment in Dunkirk, can help us prepare for urban and social system transformation in other (port) cities in North Western Europe and around the world. This chapter draws on a diverse range of materials to piece together a comprehensive understanding of these interventions, as private companies have not done so. In examining how oil companies have shaped Dunkirk, this chapter shows the enormous spatial and economic impact of petroleum trade and transformation, and demonstrates the challange of overcoming that impact. In conclusion, it presents some recent design proposals which imagine how Dunkirk might nonetheless move beyond oil. @en

A sunny Helsinki was the backdrop for the 13th biannual conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). The EAUH was established in 1989 with the aim to create a common platform to historians, geographers, sociologists, planners, and other scholars working with a multidisciplinary approach on urban history in different time periods. The first EAUH conference took place in Amsterdam in 1992 and the next one will take place in Rome during 2018 (for further information about EAUH, please visit the website: http://www.eauh.eu/). The ambitious theme of the 13th conference was Reinterpreting Cities. For planning historians, this theme held ample promise on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical levels. With 592 participants, 44 main sessions, and 30 specialist sessions, we decided to look at the conference through a specific lens. Based on a selection of relevant panels, therefore, we formulated two questions: first, how can a reinterpretation of cities lead to new theories on the city and connect to existing theories in other disciplines? And second, how can a reinterpretation of urban history connect to the ‘real world’, for example, planning practices? This conference report explores the ways in which this conference actually reinterpreted the city, in particular, how it connected to the spatial dimension and planning history.@en

The relationship between a city and its port, is undoubtedly one of the most conflictual both because of its complexity and because of the diversity of laws, rules and actors involved in the cultures and planning logics of both, the city and the port. They are the result of different historic traditions and practices as well as different geographic and political contexts. These factors, which over the centuries have given shape to an urban puzzle1 and to a spatial and social separation, have become key elements in attempting to understand the delicate city-port relations. The concept of archipelago2, as used here is a planning and methodological instrument, that includes, on the one hand the idea of the difficulty of coexistence, the difficulty of keeping things together in their diversity and on the other hand the will to work on existing spaces, practices and logics to modify them and build, like in an archipelago, new geographies and systems of spatial relations. So working between the city and the port forces architects, city planners and legislators to rethink both their planning logics, which consider the city and port as two separate elements, and areas of competence, identifying the intersecting elements of the different scales, within which to imagine scenarios of change and possible hybrids. The case of Rotterdam can stand as an emblematic example. Rotterdam could be read as a large port attached to a city if one considers that some of the new expansion of the former is about 40 kilometres from the urban centre. So the city and the port are separated from both physical and spatial points of view. However, this separation has been compensated for over the years by close collaboration among the local and national institutions, private subjects and research institutions to define a shared planning agenda that looks on the port as a strategic element of the city’s infrastructure, but at the same time one that can recreate a contact in the collective memory of its inhabitants.@en

Since 1960, global pressures and functional needs pushed the ports to move away from the city. The technological revolution of maritime transport, the container traffic and the relocation of port activities outside urban centers, have radically transformed the relationship between city and port. However, the contemporary debate comes back on some unresolved issues and pushes forward to the possibility and necessity to use these areas in a different way, experimenting new hybridisms and creative processes, as a first step towards sustainable development of ports and port cities. This paper asks the following question: how does the process related to new port functions located at the edge of the city and the regeneration of the historic port, rewrite the relation between city and port? City and port need a paradigm shift. There is the need to establish new relationships between the large-scale of the infrastructure and future urban development dynamics. Next economy means an urban, local and green economy. It is a new economic paradigm. It represents a transition from a stable to a flexible economy. These areas, today, are living this transition and they need a new economy that means, a starting point for a new way of thinking. The example of Rotterdam highlights the great potential of some areas and their ability to create new economies, re-stablishing a connection with the local identity. Port Authority, Municipality and University are working together with the aim to improve the quality of those spaces, convinced that this can be an added value for both, city and port. @en

Petroleum flows have shaped landscapes, cities and buildings around the world in tangible and intangible ways. Industrial structures such as refineries and oil depots, as well as headquarters of oil companies, gas stations, and road infrastructures, are the tangible result of petroleum power. Their emergence has created new landscapes. Analysing them it will provide new insights to think about a post petroleumscape. Petroleumscape is an interesting concept from a design perspective, used to explain the relationship between production and management of industrial flows, and their impact on the urban settlement and the configuration of the space. Understanding the relation between production and space will allow to evaluate the state of the territory, its transformative potential, and finally, to identify strategies for the regeneration of the city, infrastructure, the environment, and landscape as a whole. At the beginning of the 20th century, the national government opted to make Naples into one of the most important industrial cities. East Naples, located at the edge of the city and on the only urban expansion axis toward a wider metropolitan area, has historically assumed the character of an industrial urban periphery. East Naples, part of a Region in the past defined as “felix”, is nowadays a place of waste, a brownfield. It is a place in transition, sad result of an obsolete economic and land use model that needs to be changed. The coexistence of industrial spaces and one of Europe’s densest urban settlement system gives rise to a landscape in which, nowadays, the interstitial spaces become available to the definition of new hybridisms and possibilities of interconnections. @en

Ports have the characteristic to be both infrastructural hub and cultural identity core within a city. This specificity produces a wide complexity in the definition of contemporary urban planning strategies. Very often, preserving the features of port activities, hinder the social desire to live and perceive the waterfront as integrated part of the coastal city. The research purpose provides port areas, and in particular, the areas in-between city and port, as especially suitable places to rethink the port-city development towards next economies. This multidisciplinary approach is based on the transformation of resources in new economies through a sensitive and ecological perspective. Repair, reuse and upgrade the existing elements of the city is a renewed way to improve resilience in port-city development focusing on adaptive planning actions related to local practices and cultural environment. In this regard, the sustainable development strategy copes with external disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental changes and, assuring the need of common grounds in the contemporary cities, it can also represent the starting point for a new way of thinking about the waterfront as public space. The research deals with the well-known issue of the renewal of historical waterfronts towards the next economy strategy in the case study of Naples in Italy. Naples port-city interface is a conflictual space shaped by complex decision-making processes among actor networks with different tools, ideas and goals. These aspects have led port and city to develop into separate entities, from a spatial, functional as well as administrative point of view. Therefore, the interstitial area between city and port became a place of contradictions that gathers different actors and interests and where often the lack of dialogue and strategic vision has transformed the port in the main element of separation between city and sea. Since the second half of the 19th century, the relation between city and port in Naples has changed dramatically. The transition to the modern port and its containerization processes definitively interrupted the historical and functional integration of port and city. These processes altered also the perception that people have of the city and port as a whole. The historical city has gradually lost the contact with the sea and today new roles for these areas in transition are required. Nowadays, investigating port-city relations in Naples, entails to think about the crossroads of these two complex elements, the infrastructure and the urban core, which evolve with different timings and dynamics. The research aims to offer a new perspective dealing with issues like the coexistence of different functions, the re-using of common goods and the re-shaping of the maritime identity. Cultural heritage as the palimpsest of tangible and intangible elements, can play an important role in defining new economies and new quality of the public space in-between city and port. The latest Italian reform of the port system represents the background of rules through which analyse the contemporary public debate around the evolution of the port stressing the need to find new ways to rethink the port as part of the landscape as well as infrastructure at different levels of scale. @en

Petroleum flows have shaped landscapes and cities all around the world in tangible and intangible ways. The architecture of oil such as refineries and oil storage along ports, as well as headquarters of oil companies, gas stations, bridges, rail and road infrastructure, are the tangible result of petroleum power. The concept of the global palimpsestic petroleumscape (Hein 2013, 2016, 2017) and ongoing mapping of relevant spaces around the North Sea demonstrates the largely unknown extent of petroleum’s impact on the shape of our cities in the last 150 years. Demographic explosion beyond the historic geographical boundaries, distortion of social relationships, climate, environmental and economic changes, are the tangible result of how oil has profoundly altered the contemporary society. Research indicates that petroleum and other carbon-based energy sources will become obsolete at some point in the future, despite growing discussion of circular economies and new energies, the oil era will probably not end soon. Changes in the energy landscape will require a process of dismantling, transformation and reuse of important parts of existing oil-based industrial cities, their infrastructures, refineries, or docks. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring about yet unknown technological progress, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing and quantum computation that affect our energy landscapes. This process is already underway, and it will revolutionise all fields of knowledge as well as those of logistics and transport, reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. The end of oil and the insecurity about how our environment will be in the future, are two scenarios of great uncertainty. This contribution examines the ways in which petroleum has shaped our built environment as a foundation to start for planning the transition process for going Beyond Oil. @en

Numerous actors have been involved in the planning of the port and city of Naples; actors who have different ideas and goals, different tools, and even time-frames. The European Union, the Italian nation, the Campania Region, the Municipality of Naples, and the Port Authority act upon the port at different levels of planning. Each entity has different spatialities and temporalities. Their diverse goals have led port and city to develop into separate entities, from a spatial, functional as well as administrative point of view. The different scopes of their planning are particularly visible in the zone between port and city. Using and challenging the theory of path dependency, this paper explores the diverging ways in which a range of different institutions have planned for port and city starting from nineteenth century until today. It studies how the introduction of different institutions and their evolution has influenced plan making over time. The case of Naples shows the challenges that arise from the palimpsest of plans and goals associated with port and city, and that are particularly visible in the port-city interface in Naples.@en