Port City Borderscapes. Origin, Nature and Evolution of the Administrative Boundary

In the era of globalization and transnational flows, the multiplicity of borders in urban planning and landscape imaginaries is a lens to illustrate changing configurations of the social and political contexts. According to geographical thinking, «in the late 1980s the transition from the concept of border to that of bordering [...] allowed borders to be viewed as dynamic social processes of spatial differentiation» (Brambilla et al., 2015). Besides, «today fast rail links, airports, and motorways are what make cities grow. ‘Magnets’ like these shape and solidify the urban field into one of a number of scares. We shall describe the distortions borders bring to the built environment as ‘border solidifications’ or ‘borderscapes’.» (Harbers, 2005) From these standpoints, it is possible to state the potentiality of borders as fields of research and grasp their dynamic and symbolic character in space and time. Between a city and its port an administrative boundary exists: a consequence of the first port consortiums that were set up as independent entities from the 1950s internationally. Though the urban-port boundary is a separation, «the port- city interface may be described as a system, or as a concept, or as a series of mechanisms that, collectively and individually, link port and city.» (Hoyle, 2006). This intermediate zone is a ‘threshold’ (Crotti, 2000) with mutable thickness and configurations that vary according to multiple factors. Exploring this border organism offers opportunities to set up strategies for the urban- port territories and map the relationships between politics and aesthetic.