Co-evolutionary dynamics of ports and cities in the global maritime network, 1950-90

César Ducruet (1) , Sylvain Cuyala (1) , Ali El Hosni

1 GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités

The changing fortunes of port-city relationships have mostly been investigated at the intra-urban level where urbanisation and technological evolutions had been most visible along the waterfront. This chapter proposes a global, quantitative measure and visualisation on how cities and maritime flows depended on each other between 1950 and 1990. Main results point to the sustained concentration of flows among demographically larger cities but at the same time, the topology and spatial distribution of the global maritime network as a whole had become less overlapped with the urban hierarchy. A discussion is proposed about the particular evolutions of London, Shanghai, and of numerous outliers stemming from the analysis of nodal regions. This first ever graph-theoretical analysis of port-city linkages at the global scale paves the way towards further dynamical analyses of the territorial embedding of maritime networks – and of spatial networks in general.

Mots clés: maritime transport; urban development; complex networks; port cities; systems of cities

Domaines: Géographie

César Ducruet, Sylvain Cuyala, Ali El Hosni. Co-evolutionary dynamics of ports and cities in the global maritime network, 1950-90. César Ducruet. Maritime Networks. Spatial Structures and Time Dynamics, Routledge Studies in Transport Analysis, pp.351-373, 2015, 9781138911253. ⟨halshs-01374953⟩