Shipping canals have supported maritime traffic and port development for many centuries. Radical transformations of these shipping landscapes through land reclamation, diking, and canalization were celebrated as Herculean works of progress and modernity. Today, shipping canals are the sites of increasing tension between economic growth and associated infrastructural interventions focused on the quality, sustainability, and resilience of natural systems and spatial settlement patterns. Shifting approaches to land/water relations must now be understood in longer political histories in which pre-existing alliances influence changes in infrastructure planning. On the occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the New Waterway (Nieuwe Waterweg), the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus universities PortCityFutures Center hosted an international symposium in October 2022 to explore the past, present, and future of this channel that links Rotterdam to the North Sea. Symposium participants addressed issues of shipping, dredging, and planning within in the Dutch delta, and linked them to contemporary debates on the environmental, spatial, and societal conditions of shipping canals internationally. The thematic issue builds on symposium conversations, and highlights the importance of spatial, economic, and political linkages in port and urban development. These spatial approaches contribute to more dynamic, responsive strategies for shipping canals through water management and planning.@en

Following part 1 of Port City Cultures, Values, and Maritime Mindsets, this issue explores how cultures of port city territories are put into words, visualized, and can even be shaped. Continuing the argument that port city territories merit particular attention due to their location at the border of sea and land and the presence of global and local interests and stakeholders of differing sizes, this issue emphasizes once more the role that culture, values, and mindsets can play in understanding the historical relations and socio-spatial features of port cities, their socio-cultural construction, and their future design. The issue emphasizes the value of considering ways of perceiving, defining, and classifying port cities in relation to social context and powerful processes of meaning-making in academia and in the wider society.@en

Port cities are a particular type of territory and are often long-standing examples of resilience, bringing opportunities, wealth, and innovation to their nations and their citizens. They have developed at the crossroads of international trade and commerce and the intersection of sea and land. Flows of people through trade and migration have played a key role in their spatial, social and cultural development. Their strong local identities share legacies of diversity and cosmopolitanism, but also of colonialism and segregation. The Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, Fujian speaks of the exchange between Arabia and China along the maritime silk road. Hanseatic cities stand as an example of far-flung networks with districts for foreign traders—think of the German merchants who established Bryggen, the German dock, in Bergen, now a UNESCO world heritage site.@en