We all know the one about the city people who move to a quaint village to enjoy life in the countryside, and then complain about the church bells on Sunday morning, the cockerel crowing, tractors blocking the roads or the smell of the pigs. Translate this to the port environment; many aspire to waterfront living, and the “romance”of a real live port operation to watch might even add to their enthusiasm.<\/p>\n
Once they experience the noise of container loading operations, trucks’ reversing horns and ships’ generators,the wind blowing the wrong way just when a dusty cargo is being unloaded, or the reality of harsh, intrusive lights required for night operations, it may be a different story.<\/p>\n
Next come the residents’ committees, the statutory nuisance notices and the planning objections and suddenly ports which have sold off land or buildings for residential development find the new residents successfully opposing a key port development plan. “It is a real problem not only for the new residential project but for the whole city-port interface,”says Olivier Lemaire, executive manager of the International Association of Cities and Ports.”Everywhere in the world, it’s now up-to-date to get a flat in the port-city interface.<\/p>\n
IACP members know this issue very well.Port authorities can’t fight against it – they have to manage it carefully.” Mr Lemaire agrees that residents have too much of a romantic image of port operations.”The gentrification phenomenon of these urban spaces means new population demands and much more urgent issues regarding the local environment,” he says. “We have exactly the same problem the countryside has on the city-port interface. The port reality, as the countryside reality, is often far away from the citizens’dreams.<\/p>\n
“Of course,nobody will advise the would-be buyers of a loft on the port-city interface about the port reality.” Where the land is not under its control, the port authority must negotiate with the local stakeholders involved in such urban developments in order to prevent problems, says Mr Lemaire. “It could be fantastic to live close to the port activities. But candidates for this way of life have to understand the fact that they will be living in a professional environment with the specific drawbacks this brings.<\/p>\n
Local stakeholders should inform the population honestly about the realities of port activities – but maybe that’s quite bad for business!” IACP is the scientific coordinator for an EU-funded project named “Plan the City with the Port:Strategies for Redeveloping City-Port Linking Spaces”. The idea is to define good practices and that means defining clearly what kind of port activity it is possible to develop in an urban context in order to prevent conflict.<\/p>\n
A seminar on the subject is being organised next March in Le Havre, the city which is leading the project. Meanwhile, members of IACP continue to exchange experience, and the association’s next international conference will be held in Sydney next month.<\/p>\n
It’s a subject that has also occupied the members of Port-Net, another EU-funded initiative that brings together 20 ports to discuss best practice and ways of creating better operational structures and capacities. At its September workshop in Elblag, Poland focusing on Urban\/Port Development, Environment and Cultural Aspects, one of the scheduled speakers was Hamburg’s director general for regional and urban planning, there to outline the challenges and solutions in Hamburg and the HafenCity development project. Halfway house<\/p>\n
Steps can be taken on both sides to reduce conflict between port and residents:<\/p>\n
From the port side:using new technologies for noise reduction on terminal tractors and container handling equipment; turning off reversing horns; changing from air-cooled to water-cooled engines; changing from airactivated to hydraulic brakes; improving spreader rails to reduce rattling and banging; managing lighting; encouraging cold-ironing to eliminate the noise of ships’ generators; and investing in better dust suppression equipment.<\/p>\n
And from the city side: Special noise isolation measures are required from investors who want to build mixed-use housing and office buildings on Hamburg’s HafenCity site.Ways of reducing the impact of port operations on residents include well-built houses featuring noise-proofing and double-glazing (although none of these help if you want to sit outside on the balcony).<\/p>\n
But perhaps the most obvious first focus should be a sensible buffer zone – and that, says Franc Pigna, managing director the US-based Aegir Port Property Advisers, is becoming increasingly critical.<\/p>\n
“Ports must be careful that by selling off land they don’t put themselves out of business,” he says. “You have real issues regarding noise pollution and contamination – but the biggest challenge is security, with issues such as dirty bombs.<\/p>\n
“If you are a city, you really don’t want citizens near a port.Increasingly you need a buffer area – and not only because of the possibility of an accident.”<\/p>\n
Mr Pigna says privatisation has intensified the debate; where port authorities in the old days were busy operating ports, today many are simply asset managers no longer involved in port operations, and their biggest asset is the land they own.<\/p>\n
“The port authority has often become the estate manager for the stakeholder, which is typically the municipality,”he says.<\/p>\n
When it comes to selling off land, a cost-benefit analysis must be done, he warns.The future land needs of the port, its customers and the wider port-related community must be considered.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the money made by selling off land can be used to start shifting port operations to a different site downriver, or to create efficiencies. But often, there is nowhere else for the port to go.<\/p>\n
Olivier Lemaire of IACP adds: “The port authorities have to preserve their working tools: the land for developing port activities now and in the future.<\/p>\n
“Just a fact to keep in mind: in less than ten years, experts are predicting a doubling of cargo between Asia and Europe. If that happened now, no space would be available for it.Port authorities have a very short time to find a solution to keep competitive – considering sustainable development factors, it would be much easier to move residential areas than to build other port facilities, sometimes on protected coastal areas.”<\/p>\n
Out of sight, out of mind?<\/p>\n
Hamburg’s HafenCity has been held up as an example of good practice – as Patrick Verhoeven, secretary general of ESPO,points out,the revenue generated by the sale of prime waterfront locations at the old port area near city centre was used for the financing of the Altenwerder container terminal on the south bank of the Elbe.<\/p>\n
However, moving ports “out of the way” can be considered a negative thing too, he says. “The waterfront development phenomenon has occurred everywhere in Europe but has in many cases driven a wedge between cities and ports. An uninformed stranger visiting a city like Rotterdam or Antwerp will not immediately realise that these are major seaports. The visitor will only see a river with tourist launches and occasional barge traffic and redeveloped docklands with historical warehouses turned into trendy lofts.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You have land excess to operational needs, so why not cash in on the demand for trendy waterfront apartments? But Seller Beware- your new neighbours just might form a committee. Felicity Landon reports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":6767,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concessions-investments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6766"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}