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Abstract
The notion of a polar gateway has been increasingly adopted in polar social science, especially with respect to the role of tourism. The concept has usually been applied with respect to cities and ports that provide access to polar regions both for tourists and for the flow of resources. The paper provides a review and discussion of some of the main approaches used in conceptualising gateways in a polar context. In examining the concept of a gateway, the paper draws on the historically significant role of economic and transport geography literature as a means of better understanding the importance of polar hubs and entrepôts. A review of some of the different usages of the gateway concept in polar literature is provided along with examples of the places referred to and context. The use of the concept raises significant issues of polar places and linkages to wider networks. It is concluded that a more empirically based approach to polar hubs would provide better categorisation and understanding of supposed polar gateways, including with respect to place competition and positionality in networks.
Acknowledgements
The comments of David Duval are gratefully acknowledged, as is the feedback on the original presentation on which this paper is based.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
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4 Danson, “Debates and surveys”, 869.
5 Mia Bennett, “North by Northeast: Toward an Asian-Arctic Region”, Eurasian Geography and Economics 55 (2014): 71–93.
6 See Per Hallén, Lili-Annè Aldman, and Magnus Andersson, “Gateways and Shipping during the Early Modern Times: The Gothenburg Example 1720–1804” (paper for the Ninth European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC): Session: Commodity Chains in the First Period of Globalization, Glasgow, 11–14 April 2012); Bennett, “North by Northeast”.
7 Roderick Duncan McKenzie, The Metropolitan Community (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933), 4–5.
8 James Bird, “Seaports Are Not Aberrant Cases”, Area 2, no. 4 (1970): 65–8; See also Allan Pred, “Industrialization, Initial Advantage, and American Metropolitan Growth”, Geographical Review 55 (1965): 158–85.
9 W.R. Black, Growth of the Railway Network of Maine: A Multivariate Approach, Discussion Papers 5 (Boise, ID: Department of Geography, University of Iowa, 1967).
10 Bird, “Seaports Are Not Aberrant”.
11 Andrew F. Burghardt, “A hypothesis about Gateway Cities”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 (1971): 269–85.
12 Bird, “Seaports Are Not Aberrant”; Bird, “Seaports as a Subset of Gateways for Regions: A Research Survey”, Progress in Human Geography 4 (1980): 360–70.
13 Jack Stabler, “Exports and Evolution: The Process of Regional Change”, Land Economics 44 (1968): 11–23; Bird, “Seaports as a Subset”.
14 Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Michael Browne, “International Maritime Freight Transport and Logistics”, in Transport Geographies: An Introduction, ed. R. Knowles, J. Shaw, and I. Docherty (London: Blackwell, 2002), 169.
15 Guido Weigend, “Some Elements in the Study of Port Geography”, Geographical Review 48 (1958): 185–200.
16 N.R. Elliott, “Hinterland and Foreland as Illustrated by the Port of the Tyne”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47 (1969): 153.
17 Bird, “Seaports as a Subset”; Bird, “Gateways: Slow Recognition but Irresistible Rise”, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 74 (1983): 196–202; Theo Notteboom, “Complementarity and Substitutability Among Adjacent Gateway Ports”, Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 743–62; Adolf Ng and César Ducruet, “The Changing Tides of Port Geography (1950–2012)”, Progress in Human Geography 38 (2014): 785–823.
18 Carolyn Cartier, “Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City”, Geographical Review 89 (1999): 278–89; T. Chang Chang, Shirlena Huang, and Victor Savage, “On the Waterfront: Globalization and Urbanization in Singapore”, Urban Geography 25 (2004): 413–36; Ute Lehrer and Jennefer Laidley, “Old Mega-projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2008): 786–803.
19 John Rennie Short, Carrie Breitbach, Steven Buckman, and Jamey Essex, “From World Cities to Gateway Cities: Extending the Boundaries of Globalization Theory”, City 4 (2000): 318.
20 Short et al., “From World Cities”, 337.
21 C. Michael Hall, “Geography, Marketing and the Selling of Places”, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 6, nos. 3/4 (1997): 61–84.
22 Scheltjens, “Functional classification” builds on the works of Guido Weigend, “The Problem of Hinterland and Foreland as Illustrated by the Port of Hamburg”, Economic Geography 32 (1956): 1–16; Weigend, “Some Elements”; N.R. Elliott, “Hinterland and Foreland as Illustrated by the Port of the Tyne”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47 (1969): 153–70; and James E. Vance Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); as well as other port classifications, e.g. Gordon Jackson, “The Importance of Unimportant Ports”, International Journal of Maritime History 13, no. 2 (2001), 1–17.
23 Burghardt, “Hypothesis about Gateway Cities”; James Bird, Centrality and Cities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).
24 Scheltjens, “Functional Classification”.
25 Ibid.
26 C. Michael Hall, “The Tourist and Economic Significance of Antarctic Travel in Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Gateway Cities”, Tourism and Hospitality Research 2 no. 2 (2000): 157–69; Sally Poncet and Kim Crosbie, A Visitor's Guide to South Georgia, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
27 Stephen Royle, “Escaping from the Past? The Falkland Islands in the Twenty-First Century”, in Refereed Papers from the 8th International Small Island Cultures Conference, Cape Breton University, 6–9 June 2012.
28 Kathrin Keil and Andreas Raspotnik, “The European Union’s Gateways to the Arctic”, European Foreign Affairs Review 19, no. 1 (2014): 101.
29 Lawson Brigham and Ben Ellis, eds., Arctic Marine Transport Workshop, Held at Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, United Kingdom, 28–30 September 2004 (Anchorage: Institute of the North, 2004); Margaret Blunden, “Geopolitics and the Northern Sea Route”, International Affairs 88 (2012): 115–29; Mia M. Bennett, “North by Northeast: Toward an Asian-Arctic Region”, Eurasian Geography and Economics 55 (2014): 71–93; Berit Kristoffersen, “Securing Geography: Framings, Logics and Strategies in the Norwegian High North”, in Polar Geopolitics: Knowledges, Resources and Legal Regimes, ed. R. Powell and K. Dodds (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014), 131–48.
30 Klaus Dodds, "The Falkland Islands as a “Strategic Gateway” Britain and the South Atlantic Overseas Territories”, The RUSI Journal 157, no. 6 (2012): 18–25.
31 Kristoffersen, “Securing Geography”.
32 PPM Public Policy Management Limited, Canada’s Arctic Gateway. Discussion Paper (Winnipeg: PPM Public Policy Management Limited, Citation2010); Dean Ruffilli, Arctic Marine and Intermodal Infrastructure: Challenges and the Government of Canada’s Arctic. Publication No. 2011-77-E (Ottawa: Library of Parliament, 2011).
33 Transport Canada, National Policy Framework for Strategic Gateways and Trade Corridors (Ottawa: Transport Canada, Citation2009), 5.
34 Ibid., 5.
35 Bennett, “North by Northeast”, 76.
36 Nong Hong, “The Melting Arctic and its Impact on China’s Maritime Transport”, Research in Transportation Economics 35, no. 1 (2012): 50–7; John R. Haines, “‘Ali Baba's Cave’: The Sea of Okhotsk's Contentious Triangle”, Orbis 58, no. 4 (2014): 584–603; Henry P. Huntington, Raychelle Daniel, Andrew Hartsig, Kevin Harun, Marilyn Heiman, Rosa Meehan, George Noongwook, et al., “Vessels, Risks, and Rules: Planning for Safe Shipping in Bering Strait”, Marine Policy 51 (2015): 119–27. Although note the caution of Scott R. Stephenson, Lawson W. Brigham and Laurence C. Smith, “Marine Accessibility Along Russia's Northern Sea Route”, Polar Geography 37, no. 2 (2014): 111–33.
37 Although see the more cautious appraisals by Albert Buixadé Farré, Scott R. Stephenson, Linling Chen, Michael Czub, Ying Dai, Denis Demchev, et al., “Commercial Arctic Shipping Through the Northeast Passage: Routes, Resources, Governance, Technology, and Infrastructure”, Polar Geography 37 (2014): 298–324; and Arild Moe, “The Northern Sea Route: Smooth Sailing Ahead?” Strategic Analysis 38 (2014): 784–802.
38 Elena N. Andreyeva and Valery A. Kryukov, “The Russian Model: Merging Profit and Sustainability”, in Arctic Oil and Gas: Sustainability at Risk? ed. A. Mikkelsen and O. Langhulle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 240–87.
39 Pavel V. Fedorov, “The European Far North of Russia and Its Territorial Constructions in the Sixteenth-Twenty-First Centuries”, Acta Borealia 28, no. 2 (2011): 167–82.
40 Ronald De Geus, “Feasibility of New Terminals in Arctic Russia: Expansion Design for the Port of Arkhangelsk” (Master’s thesis, TU Delft, Delft University of Technology, 2002); Willy Østreng, Karl Magnus Eger, Brit Fløistad, Arnfinn Jørgensen-Dahl, Lars Lothe, Morten Mejlænder-Larsen, and Tor Wergeland, Shipping in Arctic Waters: A comparison of the Northeast, Northwest and Trans Polar Passages (Berlin: Springer, 2013).
41 Fedorov, “European Far North”.
42 PPM Public Policy Management Limited, Canada’s Arctic Gateway. Discussion Paper (Winnipeg: PPM Public Policy Management Limited, Citation2010); Dean Ruffilli, Arctic Marine and Intermodal Infrastructure: Challenges and the Government of Canada’s Arctic, Publication No. 2011-77-E (Ottawa: Library of Parliament, 2011).
43 Fedorov, "European Far North”.
44 Esther Bertram, Shona Muir, and Bernard Stonehouse, “Gateway Ports in the Development of Antarctic Tourism”, in Prospects for Polar Tourism, ed. John Snyder and Bernard Stonehouse (Wallingford: CABI, 2007), 124; following Esther Bertram, “Tourists, Gateway Ports and the Regulation of Shipborne Tourism in Wilderness Regions: The Case of Antarctica”, (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2005), 148.
45 Bertram et al., “Gateway Ports”, 124.
46 Bjørn L. Basberg, Antarctic Tourism and the Maritime Heritage, Discussion Paper (Oslo: Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, 2008).
47 Sylvain Guyot, “La construcción territorial de cabezas de puente antárticas rivales: Ushuaia (Argentina) y Punta Arenas (Chile)”, Revista Transporte y Territorio 9 (2013): 11.
48 Linda Low and Mun Heng Toh, “Singapore: Development of gateway tourism”, In Tourism and Economic Development in Asia and Australasia, ed. Frank Go and Carson Jenkins (London: Cassell, 1997), 246.
49 Gui Lohmann and Douglas Pearce, “Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Nodal Tourism Functions”, Journal of Transport Geography 18 (2010): 266–75. Polar examples include C. Michael Hall, “The Tourist and Economic Significance of Antarctic Travel in Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Gateway Cities”, Tourism and Hospitality Research 2 no. 2 (2000): 157–69; Shona Muir, Julia Jabour, and Jack Carlsen, “Antarctic Gateway Ports: Opening Tourism to Macquarie Island and the East Antarctic from Hobart”, Tourism in Marine Environments 4, nos. 2–3 (2007): 135–50; Sylvain Guyot, “La construction territoriale de têtes de ponts antarctiques rivales: Ushuaia (Argentine) et Punta Arenas (Chili) [The territorial making of rival Antarctic gateways: Ushuaia (Argentina) and Punta Arenas (Chile)]”, L'Espace Politique. Revue en ligne de géographie politique et de géopolitique 18 (2012–2013).
50 Andrea Herbert, “Making Place at the End of the World. An Ethnography of Tourism and Urban Development in Ushuaia, Argentina’s Antarctic Gateway City” (PhD diss., University of Canterbury, 2014).
51 C. Michael Hall and Jarkko Saarinen, “Polar Tourism: Definitions and Dimensions”, Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 10, no. 4 (2010): 448–67. For a land-based network approach, see Jan Lundgren, "The Tourism Space Penetration Processes in Northern Canada and Scandinavia: A Comparison”, in Polar Tourism: Tourism in the Arctic and Antarctic Regions, ed. C. Michael Hall and Margaret Johnston (Chichester: Wiley, 1995), 43–61.
52 Edward H. Huijbens, “Cruise Tourism in Iceland and the North Atlantic: Gateways to the Arctic and the Challenges to Port Readiness Programs”, Tourism in Marine Environments 10, nos. 3–4 (2015): 248.
53 Ibid., 249.
54 Albina Pashkevich and Olof Stjernström, “Making Russian Arctic Accessible for Tourists: Analysis of the Institutional Barriers”, Polar Geography, 37 (2014): 137–56.
55 Agency of Tourism, Report Concerning the Results of the Tourism Development of the Arkhangelsk Region in 2013 [in Russian] (Arkhangelsk: Agency of Tourism, Citation2014), in Machiel Lamers and Albina Pashkevich, “Short-Circuiting Cruise Tourism Practices along the Russian Barents Sea Coast? The case of Arkhangelsk”, Current Issues in Tourism forthcoming.
56 Stephenson et al., “Marine Accessibility”.
57 Northern Sea Route Office, List of NSR transit voyages in 2014 navigational season, 2015, available from: http://www.arctic-lio.com/docs/nsr/transits/Transits_2014.pdf.
58 e.g. C. Michael Hall and Margaret Johnston, “Introduction: Pole To Pole: Tourism Issues, Impacts and the Search for a Management Regime in Polar Regions”, in Polar Tourism: Tourism in Arctic and Antarctic Regions, ed. C. Michael Hall and Margaret Johnston (Chichester: John Wiley, 1995), 1–26; C. Michael Hall and Jarkko Saarinen, “Tourism and Change in The Polar Regions: Introduction – Definitions, Locations, Places and Dimensions”, in Tourism and Change in Polar Regions: Climate, Environments and Experiences, ed. C. Michael Hall and Jarkko Saarinen (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–41.
59 Tara Brabazon, Unique Urbanity?: Rethinking Third Tier Cities, Degeneration, Regeneration and Mobility (Singapore: Springer, 2015); C. Michael Hall, “Will Climate Change Kill Santa Claus?: Climate Change and High-Latitude Christmas Place Branding”. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 14 (2014): 23–40.
60 Katarzyna Kozak, Żaneta Polkowska, Marek Ruman, Krystyna Kozioł, and Jacek Namieśnik, “Analytical Studies on the Environmental State of the Svalbard Archipelago Provide a Critical Source of Information About Anthropogenic Global Impact”, TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry 50 (2013): 107–26; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups 1, 2, and 3 to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva: IPCC, 2014).
61 Mark Longrée and Sven Hoog, “Backbone for Escape, Evacuation and Rescue From Arctic Facilities: A Systematic Approach”, In ASME 2014 33rd International Conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering, Volume 10: Polar and Arctic Science and Technology, San Francisco, California, USA, June 8–13, 2014 (American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2014).
62 Jesica Goldsmit, Kimberly L. Howland, and Philippe Archambault, “Establishing a Baseline for Early Detection of Non-Indigenous Species in Ports of the Canadian Arctic”, Aquatic Invasions 9, no. 3 (2014): 327–42; C. Michael Hall, “Tourism and Biological Exchange and Invasions: A Missing Dimension in Sustainable Tourism?” Tourism Recreation Research 40 (2015): 81–94.
63 Bertram et al., “Gateway Ports”.
64 Ibid., 143.
65 Paul Whitfield, The Rough Guide to Alaska. Rough Guides, 2004.
66 Short et al., “From World Cities”.