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Abstract
Despite the long existence of port geography research, there has been no systematic investigation on its evolution and research trends. Hence, through investigating 155 port geography articles featured in geography journals between 1956 and 2011, this article studied the evolution and research trends of port geography. The article argues that port geography had gradually evolved from a secondary and encyclopedic subdiscipline within transport and human geographies to a primary and specialized one. Such a trend had blurred its “geographicalness,” however, with port geography moving toward the more applied and interdisciplinary transportation. The article also indicates that further research would be required to understand the communication between port geography and other disciplines, as well as philosophical and epistemological issues.
A pesar de la larga existencia de la investigación sobre geografía portuaria, nada se ha hecho sistemáticamente para investigar su evolución y tendencias investigativas. Por eso, mediante el examen de 155 artículos de geografía portuaria aparecidos en revistas geográficas entre 1956 y 2011, para este artículo se estudió la evolución y tendencias investigativas de la geografía de los puertos. El artículo sostiene que la geografía portuaria ha evolucionado gradualmente a partir de una subdisciplina secundaria y enciclopédica ubicada dentro de las geografías del transporte y humana, hasta convertirse en una subdisciplina primaria y especializada. Tal tendencia, sin embargo, ha desdibujado su “geograficidad,” induciendo a que la geografía portuaria se desplace hacia la más aplicada e interdisciplinaria rama de la geografía del transporte. El artículo también indica que se requeriría mayor investigación para entender la comunicación entre la geografía portuaria y otras disciplinas, lo mismo que cuestiones filosóficas y epistemológicas.
Acknowledgments
Notes
*An earlier version of this article was presented during the session “Perspectives in Maritime Geography: Economics and Development” at the 2011 annual meeting of the AAG in Seattle, Washington, 13 April 2011. I would like to thank Dr. César Ducruet, Professor Kevin O’Connor, Professor Brian Slack, and Dr. James Wang for providing very useful advice. I would also like to thank my research assistant, Cherry Man, for searching and categorizing journal articles. The usual disclaimers apply.
1. Twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) is currently the most common standard measurement unit for containers.
2. In his chapter, Heaver (2006) undertook a small-scale review analysis on port articles published in Maritime Policy and Management and Maritime Economics and Logistics.
3. Although analysis on the research trends of port geography would not be meaningful without first understanding port evolution and development, limitations on journal space ensured that a comprehensive review on this issue would not be possible here. For a comprehensive review, see Ng (2011).
4. For example, out of the fifty-one journals being investigated, Pallis, Vitsounis, and De Langen (2010) only included eight geography journals.
5. A good example could be found on the dealings between Maersk and the Port of New York/New Jersey in 1999. Facing the threat of abandonment of the port as the transshipment hub on the East Coast by one of its biggest customers, the Port of New York/New Jersey spent $570 million on improving Port of New York/New Jersey to ensure that the world's largest liners continued to use the port as their transshipment hub. For further details, see Ng (2009).
6. The “geography” identity of journals was mainly based on the information available in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) published by Thomson Reuters (available online via ISI Web of Knowledge Web site at http://admin-apps.isiknowledge.com. According to JCR, geography covered all studies involving the sociocultural aspects of the Earth's surface, emphasizing the human, economic, political, urban, and environmental issues of the discipline, including the history of geography and the study of cartography (ISI Web of Knowledge 2011). Apart from the stated JCR journals, I also included one that clearly fit the “geography” identity as already stated and had featured a significant number of port articles, namely GeoJournal. Furthermore, I excluded those that were still forthcoming but available online during the investigation period. It is also important to note that port-related articles published by geographers could be in other languages. For example, French geographers traditionally published their articles in French-language journals, although publishing in English-language journals became increasingly popular. The list in the Appendix is an illustrative sample of port articles published in geography journals.
7. Such elements of geographical articles included (1) those that seemed to investigate a geographical topic and (2) those authored (or coauthored) by researchers who were professionally affiliated with a university's geography department. In many cases, however, these articles also investigated diversified topics, rather than only addressing a geographical port issue within an article.
8. For example, modern standard containers were introduced by the American transport business Malcolm Mclean in 1955, and the first container shipping service set its first voyage between Newark and Houston on a refitted tanker ship, Ideal X, in April 1956.
9. I tried my best to gather as many representative articles as possible, and the overlooking of any articles, if any, remained my sole responsibility.
The nationalities of authors were identified based on their professional affiliation, rather than ethnic origin, when respective articles were published.
11. For example, deconcentration of power often involved the sharing of responsibilities between national and local governments, whereas the business strategies of multinational terminal operators now often involve global, regional, and local scales. Finally, the institutional and political systems, no matter whether at the local, national, or even transnational (like the European Union) levels, would often have significant implications for port reform and governance (e.g., concession agreements, corporatization of port authorities, etc.). See Wang, Ng, and Olivier (2004) and Ng and Pallis (2010) for further details. From these examples, one can see that management, policy, and governance often involve different spatial scales that were not easy, if possible at all, to deliberately categorize under a particular scale objectively and appropriately.
12. These six areas were relationship of ports with ship costs, issues of port costs and pricing, industrial organization related to ports, the competitive relationship among ports, assessing port performance, and specialized studies.
13. Articles addressing port system and port–city relations had actually increased (65 percent), although the increase was not as substantial as other “novel” areas. One should not overlook, however, that journal publications are much more important in assessing the performance of faculty members and researchers nowadays, and the preparation of articles has been massively facilitated by technological improvement (like personal computers). Thus, such growth seemed to be more “natural” rather than reflecting significant change in interests in the focus of research. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that, despite the dominance of handling cargo rather than passengers, port development had posed significant questions for cities and urban areas, like urban congestion, land use decisions, and waterfront redevelopment, to name but a few (Keeling 2009).
14. For further explanations on the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift in the history of social science and human geography, see Kuhn (Citation1962) and Johnston (1997), respectively.
15. According to Scopus (http://www.scopus.com), by May 2011 this article had been cited fifty-eight times in peer-reviewed journals, with seventeen cites being published in geography journals (self-citation excluded).
16. “Transport and the environment” was a topic that had clearly not been overlooked by transport geographers since the 1990s (Chapman Citation2007). For example, since its inauguration, more than 300 articles addressing this topic had been featured in JTG, including urban transportation (e.g., Farrington and Ryder Citation1993; Han Citation2010), aviation (e.g., Graham and Guyer Citation1999; Hares, Dickinson, and Wilkes 2010), and tourism (e.g., Peeters, Szimba, and Duijnisveld 2007), to name but a few. Such attention on the environment was, however, very scarce among port geographers (and indeed, maritime transport geographers), with virtually no articles mainly addressing this topic being featured in JTG until 2010. Indeed, many ports that investigated port–environment relations were featured in nongeography journals and often authored by researchers possessing backgrounds other than geography (e.g., Wooldridge, Mullen, and Howe 1999; Ng and Song 2010).
17. Olivier and Slack (Citation2006) emphasized the need to reconceptualize ports in this contemporary world, but their main message was to urge researchers to consider ports nowadays as the geography of the port-operating transnational terminal operators. Hence, it was more related to management and governance, rather than philosophical or epistemological based on this article's definition.
18. Of course, one should not deny the possibility that these topics were published via other means, like books. The extent to which philosophical and typological topics had been addressed is subject to further research.