The Industrial Seaport

Abstract

The skylines of most large seaports in the world are characterised by impressive container cranes, and chimneys and refining columns belonging to industrial plants. The development of industrial complexes in most of the seaports in the world has been driven by technological and institutional developments. Five main phases of the industrial seaport are discerned that show a distinctive spatial development related to the port-city and reflect a development starting at the centre of the historical port-city and ending also in districts near the city centre. The sites where these industrial seaport developments took place were referred to as maritime industrial development areas (MIDAs). The scale of the new facilities and the new technologies which are available, together with very low costs for feedstock and energy, further undermines the competitive advantage of the MIDA-type petrochemical complexes of the 1960s in the ports of Western Europe and Japan.