Not Only Waterfront. The Port-City Relations Between Peripheries and Inner Harbors

The paper tackles the issue related to the sea-rail intermodal transport Important but often conflictual relations have for long times related cities and their ports. In particular, the mutual evolutions of cities and ports drew very often the attention on waterfronts and on the older port areas and facilities that are abandoned or converted to urban uses and functions. There is little attention, on the contrary, towards the newareas becoming important for ports, as the inner harbors, that host increasingly important operations that are vital for linking ports and their hinterlands in order to free quays for freight handling on the seaside. These operations include, among others,warehousing, modal shift, block-train assembly. Similarly, cities are living a complex relation among their centres, the focus of policies and attention by policymakers, and their where, on the contrary there is a general lack of services and communities suffering for deprivation and little access. These areas, furthermore, become more and more the ideal location for transport and port-related activities and facilities, among them, ideally, disused commercial and industrial sites. Such transport and logistic-related activities, however, not always are inserted into urban and transport plans, but also very often being carried on by privately-owned companies. The paper is focused on the definition of a method for highlighting the inner relations between peripheries, semi-peripheries and inner harbors, proposing a methodological analytical framework for spatiallylocating the spatial pressures and potential for development. The research started from the local cases of Cagliari, Catania and Trieste as starting points for the observation of these phenomena, to extract analytical and research points for further evolutions on national and international cases.