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Globalization, regionalization, urbanization: an analysis of the worldwide maritime network since the early 18th century

Final Report Summary - WORLD SEASTEMS (Globalization, regionalization, urbanization: an analysis of the worldwide maritime network since the early 18th century)

The World Seastems project both confirmed and infirmed numerous conceptions of the maritime and wider economic & spatial dimension of contemporary globalisation between 1890 and recent years. First, it revealed world maritime routes from the most ancient to nowadays using untapped historical data, using state-of-the-art geomatics methods.

Second, it confirmed the uneven impact of major changes (cf. technological transition and wars) on port traffic in various regions, the resilience of certain ship type dominance along some of them depending on natural conditions (e.g. winds), and questioned the famous concept ‘container revolution’ given the observed centralisation of the global maritime network earlier than the 1950s.

Third, our analyses confirmed the importance of cities (or city-systems, systems of cities, urban networks) and landward connectivity (cf. road network modeling). Larger cities often are the most dominant maritime nodes, before the 1990s, when we observed a noticeable chance whereas largest cities are currently served by demographically smaller hub ports such as Rotterdam and Singapore.

As a conclusion, such a new empirical angle of attack helped revisiting a number of stylised facts and commonly approved mechanisms of spatial and functional change in the evolution of socio-economic contexts from the local to the global.