Ports in a World Maritime System: A Multilevel Analysis - Methods for Multilevel Analysis and Visualisation of Geographical Networks - page 118

terminals equipped with modern and costly cargo-handling facilities ( Slack , 1985 ).
Given the aforementioned freedom of circulation, shipping networks have become
increasingly footloose, selecting ports based on various factors such as centrality
and intermediacy ( Fleming & Hayuth , 1994 ). Centrality refers to the landward
position of the port with regard to hinterlands, markets, and intermodal arrange-
ments, while intermediacy corresponds to the seaward position, facilitating the
implementation of hub-and-spoke strategies with other ports. Such dynamics have
fostered competition among neighboring ports, resulting in traffic concentrations at
a few load centers and hub ports and traffic dispersion due to diseconomies of scale
and the preference of ocean carriers for brand new facilities created on greenfield
sites ( Slack , 1999 ).
Thus, our traditional conception of port-development processes has radically
changed in the last few decades ( Olivier & Slack , 2006 ). While ports and supply
chains are “terminalized” by ocean carriers and terminal operators acquiring global
portfolios ( Slack , 2007 ), the factors contributing to port growth or decline seem to
have shifted in the hands of the shipping lines. No longer is proximity to a market or
a densely occupied hinterland sufficient to explain the distribution of traffic along a
maritime range, although it is clear that despite a few exceptions for terminals built
in the “desert” for transshipment purposes, most of the world's container traffic is
concentrated within large urban agglomerations, and this trend is actually increasing
( Ducruet , 2008b ) 1 . For instance, Europe's largest container ports tend to be located
as close as possible to the megalopolis ranging from London to Milan; the northern
European range is a perfect example of high port concentration near Europe's core
economic region (i.e., the Rhine). Nevertheless, the maritime component of port
evolution has gained unprecedented importance. The focus of this chapter is to
determine new ways of measuring and comparing this importance worldwide.

8.2.3 Possible Improvements

Two main approaches in the literature on ports and maritime transport are essential
to an understanding of the positioning of ports in shipping networks.

Functions and performance of seaports

The first approach is concerned with the geographical functions of ports. Depending
on the quality of their insertion into maritime networks, container ports can be

1 Ducruet ( 2008a ) calculated that the proportion of world container traffic at ports located in urban
areas of over one million inhabitants has increased from 66 % in 1980 to 77 % in 2005. Of course,
these increases are influenced by the inclusion of many hub ports for which transshipment traffic
is counted twice, such as in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Busan.