Security of Global Port Cities Conference
April 30-May 2, 2008

Environmental Sustainability and Port City Development

(Gunhild Hoogensen, Stephanie C. Kane, Carlos Barbosa, and Han Meyer)

Gunhild Hoogensen
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Tromsø
gunhildh@sv.uit.no

Intersections of Security: International, State, and Local Perceptions

My paper will examine the relationships between international, state and local perceptions of security. Security is often framed by state interests, and has traditionally taken little interest in the local. The widening security agenda moves beyond the traditional military dimensions but expands to include such areas as the economy and the environment, as well as deepens to include societal and individual security perceptions. The environment has been one area in which the deepening and widening of the notion of security has been both controversial as well as influential. This paper will examine a variety of approaches to environmental security, starting with the increasingly popular "energy" security concept, and then discussing varying evolutions of the "environmental security" concept, through to a human security perspective. Important connections need to be made between different environmental security perspectives, which in turn will have implications with how societies deal with changes occurring in the environment - how do we determine an environmental security issue? Who adapts and how?  The paper will argue for the importance of taking a local security perspective into account when discussing environmental security perspectives. Material taken from feminist perspectives will be used to support this argument.

Stephanie C. Kane
Criminal Justice Dept
Indiana University
stkane@indiana.edu

Water (In)Security: A Cultural Analysis of Urban Infrastructure and Ecology

This ethnographic research examines the relationship between ecology, infrastructure and the politics of possibility in the global port cities of Brazil and Argentina.  Built at the confluence of rivers and sea, port cities are physically located amidst wetlands, estuaries and dunes—areas crucial to ecological and hydrological balance yet restrictively imagined as a source of disease and marginal livelihood. Historically, and even today, destruction of wetlands was/is  considered a public health boon for it eradicates water-borne diseases; in today’s post-Katrina world, people are beginning to understand the protective role that wetlands play in tidal and storm surges and as a generating reproductive niche for aquatic life. (Not that we did not know this before the natural and industrial disaster on the Gulf Coast.)
            Urban aquatic ecology is composed of various dimensions in dynamic, and somewhat disorganized, socially and legally contested, relationship: a centralized water capture, treatment and distribution system; a centralized sewage collection, treatment and discharge system; drainage systems; water and sewage practices independent of, or marginal to, centralized infrastructure; industrial and nuclear facilities and associated systems for diluting and discharging toxic waste; upstream hydroelectric dams and diversions; and, the natural water features and microenvironments—aquifers, springs, streams, bays, oceans—that have become potable water sources and/or sinks.

The engineered dimensions are always in process of dilapidation and reconstruction with significant consequences for local aquatic ecologies and their plant and animal communities, including human. The operational universe of port cities is paradoxical as it occupies, and is governed by, local physical space; and yet, it stretches globally via shipping, digital networking, and international maritime policy; this creates conundrums of scale and purpose more perplexing than an invasive mussel clinging to a container ship’s hull. Such conundrums of scale and purpose are differentially imagined and acted upon according to shifting cultural, legal and geopolitical frames of reference and turns of event. I am interested in analyzing these inter-related elements in such a way that the practice of security integrates ecological and social realities.

Carlos Barbosa
Director of International Projects
Parque Expo 98
cbarbosa@parqueexpo.pt

PARQUE DAS NAÇÕES (Parque of Nations)

• EXPO 98 as an opportunity for rehabilitating Lisbon’s Eastern quarter, occupied by obsolete port and industrial activities until 1993;
• Overview of the reallocated activities and their negative impacts on the security of the city and its citizens;
• How the new project impacted the urban and environmental rehabilitation of the city;
• Review of the prerequisites adopted for the urban project from the perspectives of environmental security, economic development and social cohesion;
• Success factors / knowledge gained and applied in the reuse of port areas and in the ambitof urban strategy;
• The multifunctionality of territories as a security factor for cities.

Han Meyer
Architecture
Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) 
V.J.Meyer@tudelft.nl

Sustainable delta-landscapes – in search for a new paradigm

These days the debate in the Western world about urban development has been dominated by two ‘great themes’: One theme concerns the process of globalisation, which has been regarded as a problematic development in relation to local cultures and contexts. The second theme concerns the relation between urbanization and the natural conditions of the territory, which should be revised in order to avoid a too aggressive exploitation of nature, soil, water and air.  These two themes are as old as the city itself, and especially as old as the port-city. The development of port-cities can be regarded as the most manifest exponents of the general process of modernization. Establishing new relations between the local and global, and between urbanization and nature, is important nowadays because of the scale of these developments worldwide.

The present day processes of exploding economic growth and intensification in port-areas are developing parallel to two other important processes:

• the increasing need for an approach to urban development which pays attention to the specific cultural and historic identity of cities and regions, related to the general desire for local communities with a clear identity, as a counterweight to the processes of globalisation;
• The increasing need for a careful approach of the natural environment, especially concerning the water-systems of rivers, delta’s and sea-coasts. 

The new circumstances concerning water management, port development and urban  development can be regarded as a challenge to create a new approach to the transformation of the urbanizing delta-landscapes, with a new coherence between landscape, urbanization and port development, and between landscape design, urban design and hydraulic engineering.  Port cities and regions have a big responsibility in finding a new balance among the natural territory, including the water itself, the urban system and the infrastructure of the port system.  The design of the new urban waterfronts, the re-conversion of obsolete docklands, the lay-out of new port terminals, the maintenance or repair of vulnerable estuaries and the defence against floods have in their combination the challenge to develop and design new sustainable urban landscapes.

This new approach in planning and designing port regions creates the necessity of reconsidering the existing assignment of duties of planning-institutions and authorities. The existing autonomous position of institutions as port authorities, city planning departments and landscape-organizations should be changed into strong collaborations. And also the existing separations of urbanism, civil engineering, landscape architecture and environmental design should be changed into a close collaboration and interweaving of these disciplines. This is an important challenge for the schools and universities.  All together, to be able to develop a real fruitful approach to sustainable urban delta-landscapes, we need a new paradigm, which will be characterized by disappearance of the strict boundaries between the disciplines.