Port Development

Towards a Better Port Industry provides professionals in freight transport and maritime logistics, and specifically the port industry, as well as students in these fields, with a better conceptual understanding of the port industry. It includes key insights and best practices for port management and development, and an overview of new trends and developments relevant for developing winning strategies. After an introduction, Chapter 2 offers a new perspective on port governance, in which public interests, corporatization, state-ownership, and shareholder policies take a central role. Chapter 3 explains how new trends and developments affect port development and argues that assuming ‘business as usual’ often leads to major port development mistakes. Chapter 4 deals with port development and discusses all major port development challenges, including granting concessions, developing a port vision, crafting stakeholder support, choosing port performance indicators and creating a port innovation system. The final chapter deals with port development strategies and includes themes such as strategies of port development companies, pricing and business development. This book will broaden professionals’ conceptual understanding of the ports industry, and provide insights on the latest developments in this area. For students, this book provides an industry-focused and non-technical ‘essential reading’ for gaining a deep understanding of the ports industry.

This book illustrates and discusses the main characteristics of port-city development dynamics with a focus on the fast-growing city-states of the Middle East, which are emerging as key players in logistics and the global supply chain. Maritime ports and the cities hosting them have long fascinated scholars – geographers, economists, architects, urban planners, sociologists etc. – as they become centres of exchange where different social and urban environments meet, at the intersection between land and sea. Given that the current body of literature on the topic is biased – mainly concerning the Western world and East Asian region – with mono-disciplinary tendencies, this book outlines a theoretical basis from a wide range of literature, linking port-city studies, globalization theories and logistics, and adopts a multidisciplinary perspective. The main target audience of the book includes scholars and graduate students in urban studies, spatial planning, urban and regional economics, logistics, geography and transport geography with an interest in studying port geography and the port-city interface, port infrastructure development and port hinterland dynamics; it will also benefit policymakers and urban planners whose work involves these topics.

Port Development and Competition in East and Southern Africa analyzes the 15 main ports in East and Southern Africa (ESA) to assess whether their proposed capacity enhancements are justified by current and projected demand; whether the current port management approaches sufficiently address not only the maritime capacity needs but also other impediments to port efficiency; and what the expected hierarchy of ports in the region will be in the future. The analysis confirms the need to increase maritime capacity, as the overall container demand in the ports in scope is predicted to begin exceeding total current capacity by between 2025 and 2030, while gaps in terms of dry and liquid bulk handling are expected even sooner. However, in the case of many of the ports, the issue of landside access—the ports’ intermodal connectivity, the ease of international border crossing, and the port-city interface—is more important than the need to improve maritime access and capacity. The analysis finds that there is a need to improve the operating efficiency in all of the ESA ports, as they are currently less than half as productive as the most efficient ports in the matched data set of similar ports across the world, in terms of efficiency in container-handling operations. Similarly, there is a need to improve and formalize stakeholder engagement in many of the ports, to introduce modern management systems, and to strengthen the institutional framework to ensure the most efficient use of the infrastructure and to be able to attract private capital and specialist terminal operators. Finally, given the ports’ geographic location and proximity to main shipping routes, available draft, and the ongoing port-and-hinterland development, the book concludes that Durban and Djibouti are the most likely to emerge as the regional hubs in ESA’s future hub-and-spoke system.

Maritime-Port Technology and Development contains the latest research results and innovations as presented at the 2014 International Maritime and Port Technology and Development Conference (Trondheim, Norway, 27- 29 October 2014). The volume is divided into a wide range of topics: Efficient and environmentally friendly energy use in ships and port