Page 22 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 22
plex Gateways
Very recently, a few scholars tried to find new paths, in order to find a
more holistic approach for writing histories of ports and cities as an inter-
connected whole, sometimes looking back to the age of steam (Heerten
2021) and sometimes studying the structure and functions of contem-
porary maritime clusters (Shi et al. 2020). In some cases, scholars meri-
toriously chose the port workers’ positionality inside the new equilibria
of the globalized supply chains and the emerging ‘internet of things’ as
their investigation focal points (Lee 2013; Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness
2018). However, these are still isolated cases and sporadic experiments,
waiting for their structuration inside a reliable research agenda.
In this book, we try to find out our own way to deal with the com-
plexity of the social, technical, economic, and institutional entanglement
defining the history of any seaport. Our common implicit research ques-
tion was: can we use our thinking about the historical identity of the city-
port nexus to find new insights about the possibility of overcoming the
specialized approaches, and have an evolutionary representation of the
symbiotic/syncretic arrangement of the city-port systems, inside the pe-
culiar North Adriatic environment?
We have adopted a transdisciplinary approach, encompassing eco-
nomics, sociology, anthropology, and politics, with the common aim of
crossing disciplinary boundaries and studying the city-port nexus as an
integrated entity.
Over a long-run perspective, the definition of a seaport identity has
resulted from the stratification of many waves of intervention, from the
first institutional definitions of its roles, privileges, and operational are-
as (also in an abstract and theoretical way, as Delogu reminded us) to the
subsequent slow definition of its economic, social, and even cultural and
symbolic values (Janine Schemmer).
One of the things our research has collectively pointed out is that the
oftentimes-supposed independence of a seaport in determining its own
development path is strongly in need of a redefinition. External forces
shaped and directed the possible options, limiting the freedom of choice
of the actors. Firstly, the actions of the international networks in modern
times (Luisa Piccinno), and later at the advent of the supply chains, the
technological development, the transport revolutions, and other exoge-
nous-produced changes were several times more important than internal
decisions in defining the evolutive path of the city-ports we have consid-
ered. In almost all the chapters, the same mechanism repeated itself: the
22
Very recently, a few scholars tried to find new paths, in order to find a
more holistic approach for writing histories of ports and cities as an inter-
connected whole, sometimes looking back to the age of steam (Heerten
2021) and sometimes studying the structure and functions of contem-
porary maritime clusters (Shi et al. 2020). In some cases, scholars meri-
toriously chose the port workers’ positionality inside the new equilibria
of the globalized supply chains and the emerging ‘internet of things’ as
their investigation focal points (Lee 2013; Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness
2018). However, these are still isolated cases and sporadic experiments,
waiting for their structuration inside a reliable research agenda.
In this book, we try to find out our own way to deal with the com-
plexity of the social, technical, economic, and institutional entanglement
defining the history of any seaport. Our common implicit research ques-
tion was: can we use our thinking about the historical identity of the city-
port nexus to find new insights about the possibility of overcoming the
specialized approaches, and have an evolutionary representation of the
symbiotic/syncretic arrangement of the city-port systems, inside the pe-
culiar North Adriatic environment?
We have adopted a transdisciplinary approach, encompassing eco-
nomics, sociology, anthropology, and politics, with the common aim of
crossing disciplinary boundaries and studying the city-port nexus as an
integrated entity.
Over a long-run perspective, the definition of a seaport identity has
resulted from the stratification of many waves of intervention, from the
first institutional definitions of its roles, privileges, and operational are-
as (also in an abstract and theoretical way, as Delogu reminded us) to the
subsequent slow definition of its economic, social, and even cultural and
symbolic values (Janine Schemmer).
One of the things our research has collectively pointed out is that the
oftentimes-supposed independence of a seaport in determining its own
development path is strongly in need of a redefinition. External forces
shaped and directed the possible options, limiting the freedom of choice
of the actors. Firstly, the actions of the international networks in modern
times (Luisa Piccinno), and later at the advent of the supply chains, the
technological development, the transport revolutions, and other exoge-
nous-produced changes were several times more important than internal
decisions in defining the evolutive path of the city-ports we have consid-
ered. In almost all the chapters, the same mechanism repeated itself: the
22
