Project description
Promoting sustainable development through African port cities
Port cities are important nodes connecting urbanising areas to international trade. However, they suffer from problems regarding logistics, governance and spatiality. Studies of such port-urban interfaces have mostly been Eurocentric. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TIDAL project will study how African port cities function as critical links between global trade and rapidly growing urban areas, focusing on the tensions between port operations and city development. It will examine how space, governance and infrastructure shape these port-urban relationships, using case studies in Mombasa and Djibouti. Through fieldwork and collaboration with local stakeholders, the project will develop new ways of managing port-city interfaces from a Global South perspective.
Objective
African port cities are vital gateways between the rapidly urbanising hinterlands and global trade networks. They are also sites of tension, where global logistics and urban dynamics collide, producing conflicts across capital, governance, and territorial claims. TIDAL addresses this disconnection between port functions and urban dynamics by using the Port-Urban Interface (PUI) as both a spatial framework and an analytical tool to reframe the understanding of port cities. Scholarship on PUI remains heavily Eurocentric, while African PUIs—where such frictions destabilise both cities and maritime flows—are understudied. TIDAL extends the PUI to a Global South perspective.
The project's objectives are: (1) identify territorial configurations and spatial layouts of PUI; (2) analyse governance structures and soft infrastructures shaping port–city development; and (3) develop a platform for knowledge co-production among port authorities, municipal actors, communities, and researchers. TIDAL pursues these objectives through fieldwork in Mombasa and Djibouti—key nodes on the Asia–Europe shipping route and anchors of regional development corridors—and through collaborative workshops.
The project employs an interdisciplinary methodology that combines spatial analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and co-production of research tools. It draws on the researcher’s prior field experience in East Africa and on POLITO’s expertise in infrastructure-led urbanisation and global logistics. A secondment at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) will support fieldwork, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination. TIDAL will create new methods for understanding port cities from a Global South perspective. It will deliver societal impacts by fostering more equitable, collaborative, and sustainable pathways for port–urban development. The research outputs will also consolidate the researcher’s profile as a leading scholar on African and Global South port cities.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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10129 Torino
Italy
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