IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p714.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Greek Port Cities in Transition: Regeneration Strategies, Waterfront Development and the Role of Cultural and Tourist Resources

Author

Listed:
  • Nicholas Karachalis
  • Evangelos Kyriazopoulos

Abstract

Greek port cities find themselves in a profound and encompassing change as they try to improve their image and confront the competition for advanced port services and facilities and the need for urban revitalization. As port functions are increasingly relocated towards the outskirts of port cities, disadvantaged neighbourhoods and docks are turned into modern housing and commercial areas or cultural quarters that reinforce the identity, the appeal and the competitiveness of the city. Policies and practices that consider the regeneration of derelict areas and seafronts are at the top of local agendas with culture and leisure resources (cultural infrastructure, mega-events, tourist facilities, etc.) holding the key role. The main goal is the creation of new city images and environments that are attractive for residents, investors and visitors. Hence, these new policies have various spatial and economic effects, leading to prestigious waterfront developments, cultural clustering (e.g., Wit de Wittestraat in Rotterdam, Ladadika in Thessaloniki), increase of tourism, etc. On the other hand, regeneration projects affect the traditional spatial urban hierarchies and often lead to the displacement of activities and residents. So the main issue is how port cities can avoid the negative effects and in which way these strategies affect the economic and portal services. The paper intends to present the most important policy changes of the major Greek port cities and to evaluate the role of culture and leisure within these policies. Characteristic examples of European port cities redevelopments based on culture, such as the ones of Bilbao, Rotterdam and Hamburg, will be compared to the efforts of Greek port cities. Special emphasis will be given to the Cultural Capital of Europe event that has had a great impact on Thessaloniki (1997) and is expected to have a long term effect on Patras (2006). The main research questions that are being addressed are the following: Which are the spatial, economic, social and environmental effects of the new port city strategies and which role do the cultural resources hold? Is an effective cultural and leisure policy a panacea for port cities in order to adjust to the contemporary competition? How are Greek port cities responding to these new circumstances?

Suggested Citation

  • Nicholas Karachalis & Evangelos Kyriazopoulos, 2006. "Greek Port Cities in Transition: Regeneration Strategies, Waterfront Development and the Role of Cultural and Tourist Resources," ERSA conference papers ersa06p714, European Regional Science Association.
  • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa06p714
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa06/papers/714.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Konstantinos N. Konstantakis & Theofanis Papageorgiou & Apostolos G. Christopoulos & Ioannis G. Dokas & Panayotis G. Michaelides, 2019. "Business cycles in Greek maritime transport: an econometric exploration (1998–2015)," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 19(4), pages 1059-1079, December.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa06p714. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gunther Maier (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.ersa.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.