Port management and governance in a post-COVID-19 era: quo vadis?

摘要

The seaport concept has a long history, going back to the early days of civilisation. In very conventional terms, a port is defined as a transit area, a gateway through which goods and people move from and to the sea (Sargent 1938). As such, a port is a place of contact between land and maritime space, a knot where ocean and inland transport lines meet and intertwine, an intermodal place of convergence (Weigend 1958). Ports come in various sizes and functions and cannot be narrowed down simply to the geographical notion of a delimited spatial area. To put things in perspective, a port could be anything, such as a sheltered stretch of sea, protecting a handful of fishing boats somewhere in the South Pacific; a block of cement in a small Greek island, on which a passenger ferry would lower its ramp to disembark passengers; a buoy onto which a tanker would moor to offload its oil through a pipeline; a finger pier alongside which a bulk carrier would unload its coal on a conveyor be a cool port (i.e. a refrigerated facility) in Latin America exporting fruit to Europe; a mega-yacht marina in Monaco or Nice; or just a water taxi that would disembark passengers from a cruise ship anchored in the middle of the sea, outside Amalfi, the picturesque village of South Italy. At the other end, there is the mind-boggling Yangshan Deep Water Port (of Shanghai), or the equally impressive industrial complexes of the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp in the Rhine-Scheldt Delta region, comprising in their domain clusters of thousands of companies, from the large refineries of the oil majors to the small paint shop, inconspicuously hidden under an abandoned bridge (Haralambides 2021).