Port Cities, Creative Cities

This essay describes a project launched by the authors in 2020 in multiple port cities. Part manifesto, part interim report, the essay advances three claims about the distinctiveness and potentialities of port cities. First, they share both positive and negative characteristics. On the negative axis, port cities struggle with environmental crisis, susceptibility to epidemics, and endemic forms of crime, poverty, and corruption. On the positive axis, they are distinguished by high levels of multilingualism, social relationality, cosmopolitanism, and creativity. Crossing both axes, water is a key force, as metaphor, energy, and threat. Second, port cities are typically exceptional to the nations to which they pertain, frequently occupying the status of a “minor” city in any given national or regional imaginary, even while part of colonial and postcolonial tensions. As such, they function as nodes across a global network of minor realms. Third, their capacity for resilience and their potential for survival in the face of existential challenges are derived from a concentration of “organic connectors.” The authors define the concept of the “organic connector” and argue for its role in positive social and cultural change. Having established this set of characteristics, the essay lays out a methodology for activist, collaborative research.