Browsing by Author "Aatra, Satu"

Port-cities and ports are globally in transition due to urbanisation, which as one of today’s complex challenges brings questions of the production of urban spatiality, urban identity, and the culture of governance to the strategic development of cities. In port-cities, founded as and around port functions, strategic urban development focuses often on the use of port areas, neglecting or sidelining the port’s value as part of the current and past urban heritage. By exploring strategies and urban plans as narratives, this master's thesis examines port-related spatial representations in port-cities, and how the port as an urban actor is either valued and legitimised, or excluded and stigmatised in the strategic discourse of the port-cities. Utilising Foucauldian discourse analysis, this thesis asks what kind of value ports have in the spatiality of the port-cities, how the value is presented in the discourse, what kind of arguments are made and what is the nature of the dialogue between the port and city in the discourse. The values can be presented and manifested by acknowledging the port as an urban actor, legitimising the port functions, and by giving appreciation and prestige to the current and past port-related heritage such as tangible objects and intangible references and meanings. Studies show that there are several ways to approach ports in port-cities, and that the approach can be reflected in the culture of the governance in the port-cities, in the social practises and relations between the city and the port, and in the symbolic representations of the port within the strategic and planning narratives. The specific objective of this thesis is to bring diversity and understanding to the discussion of spatial production and how various spatial layers can be utilised in the construction of urban narratives, and how the port-related discourses are both structured and structuring. The qualitative research material was collected from two port-cities, Helsinki and Rotterdam, and the material is openly available on the Internet. The primary material consists of politically approved city strategies, urban spatial plans, and port strategies from 2016 to 2023. The discursive contextualising was done by utilising previous research and the theory of Foucauldian discourse analysis. The results of the study show that the construction of the discourse follows two temporally recognisable patterns, which both affect the legitimacy of the port heritage: that of a transforming urban identity, and that of an identity continuum. The pattern is identifiable in three inter-connected discourses, which are the discourse of power and governance, the discourse of urban identity and the discourse of port-related symbolic representations. The discourse of power and governance constructs a picture of the governing of the urban sphere in the port-cities, and is reflected in the discourse of urban identity, which shows the temporal pattern of the identity narrative, and finally, the discourse of port-related symbolic representations, which finds references in the culture of governance and the identity discourses. This thesis shows that urban values are not mutually exclusive, and that the production of sustainable urban spatiality has value when it is place-related and locally acknowledged and legitimated, and when the values are structured into the strategic urban narratives.