The Changing Interplay Between European Cities and Intermodal Transport Networks (1970s–2010s)

Abstract

European cities, like most of the world's cities, are to some degree dependent upon maritime transport for their development, as more than 90% of seaborne trade volume is carried by sea. This also applies to Europe's external trade. While cities possessing ports play a crucial role in the distribution of goods traffic in such a context, the maritime influence exerted by global trade on non-port, inland cities have not been so far studied from a combined sea-land perspective. The results show a differentiation of the European territory in terms of modal specialization, core-periphery, polycentricity, and intermodal centrality / accessibility. We map the maritime specialization of European cities in recent decades, showing that combined sea-land centrality has stable but different relationships according to the type of place considered. The conclusion discusses the outcomes of our results for policy and further research on coupled networks and urban studies.

The geography of maritime networks: A critical review

“…As ports and their belonged (NUTS-3) regions were differentiated by the geographic diversity of their overseas connections, the authors also showed that East Asian forelands are more deeply related with road accessibility and population potential than other forelands. Combining other GIS methods with graph theory and complex methods, it was found in Australia (Berli et al, 2018) and Europe (Berli et al, 2020) that sea-land centrality was more significantly correlated with the urban population of port cities than single (road or maritime) centrality. In Europe, while the spatial distribution of sea-land centrality remained very stable between the 1970s and the 2000s, the correlation with the urban population of continental (nonport) cities regularly dropped.…”

Inland cities, maritime gateways, and international trade

“…Australian inland and coastal cities were compared by Berli et al (2018) according to their centrality within single and combined maritime and road networks. As in the case of Europe (Berli et al, 2020), they concluded that the urban population was more significantly correlated with intermodal centrality than with single-mode centrality. Yet, such studies neitherfocused on particular places nor proposed an index that measured the "maritime dependence" of cities.…”

A computational approach for categorizing street segments in urban street networks based on topological properties

“…Graph theory has been commonly applied to understand USN. The centrality measures derived from network analysis have been applied to extract spatial-structural properties and the topological importance of nodes and edges in the network (Hillier, 1996;Porta et al, 2006;Zhong, Arisona, Huang, Batty and Schmitt, 2014;Berli, Ducruet, Martin and Seten, 2020).…”