The Port -City Threshold: a new conception of the city-port interface

Dr. Beatrice Moretti, author of the book “Beyond the Port City. The Condition of Portuality and the Threshold Concept” (JOVIS, 2020) During the coming weeks we will focus on goal 8 of the AIVP Agenda 2030, concerning the Port City Interface. In the border between port and city is where some of the interesting projects take place, combining uses and creating new synergies. We start this discussion with a reflexion by Dr. Beatrice Moretti on the condition of the port-city interface and its potential as threshold and design border. She shares with us some thoughts motivated by her research, published in the book "“Beyond the Port City. The Condition of Portuality and the Threshold Concept” (JOVIS, 2020)". «The port-city interface is a phrase that would not have been understood in past times when an interdependent city and port shared a common identity. [...] As ports and cities have developed new roles within contrasted but interrelated and interdependent systems at local, regional and global scales, a new interface between port and city has emerged [...] as a major concern of many people and organizations over the past fifty years. » With these words the maritime geographer Brian S. Hoyle stated the existence of an intermediate zone between city and port that takes the mutability of urban organisms into consideration and presupposes transition and movement. A field in which, as flows and forces converge and diverge, the identity and character of communities and places condense. The port dimension has always assumed a certain aptitude for change. Due to the incessant technological and infrastructural evolutions and the global maritime-commercial dynamics, the structure and syntax of the port city are often asked to undergo profound cycles of transformation. Each phase of the process has been confronted not only with physical precedents but above all with traces of urban and human memory accumulated through overlapping actions. These are mostly decommissionings of obsolete areas and artifacts, renovation and assimilation of instruments and mechanisms, and the linguistic alteration of building codes. In this complex framework, the most evident intermingling condenses along functional and…