Port Centers and port reputation

Hilda Ghiara is Tenured Researcher and Professor in Maritime Traffic, Ports and Regional Economies at University of Genoa (Italy). She has been member of AIVP network of experts for almost 10 years. She attended on July 2, the AIVP webinar on Port Centers and provides a perspective that complements the webinar quite well. Read her opinion below. There are two issues that I believe will be very important for the Port Centres in the years to come: port and maritime jobs and notably in which measure and ways the sector will be invested from the knowledge economy ; what I would like to call the “port reputation" issue. Port jobs As far as the first issue has always represented a central aspect of the Port Centres’ activity, it is evolving rapidly. The Port Centre of Genoa - at its opening in 2009 - used as an iconic image the list of port jobs in order to stress the following message: the port is not only dockers but also freight forwarders, shipping agents, customs officers, pilots, captains, yacht captains, terminal employees, teachers, journalists, brokers, insurance brokers, harbour masters, coastguard employees, shipbuilders, ship chandlers, craftsmen, IT specialists, engineers, etc. The idea was to point out the knowledge economy in order to understand its characteristics and criticalities with reference to the port sector; in this sense, exploratory experiences related to the concept of knowledge port have been developed by Port Centres around the word during the past years (see for example the “port of knowledge” project). It's been a long time, but I think a deep understanding of this topic is still to be developed. The focus is still on automation, but innovation dynamics are wider. In a sharp comment on the WEF -Future of Jobs document (2018), Sergio Bologna highlights the change of technological paradigm from automation to connectivity, something quite different. The kind of innovations in which companies intend to invest (more than 80% of the companies analysed in…