THE PORT CITIES' CENTRALITY AND INTERMEDIACY: CONSTANȚA, DÜSSELDORF, LINZ, AND ROTTERDAM
THE PORT CITIES' CENTRALITY AND INTERMEDIACY: CONSTANȚA, DÜSSELDORF, LINZ, AND ROTTERDAM

Summary/Abstract: In the 1990s, two ideas emerged regarding cities' centrality and intermediacy. These concepts are still applicable today, particularly for multi-scale analyses of port cities. Due to the ports' connections to more distant regions, port cities are both central and intermediate in their region. Thus, in her dissertation, the author created two indices to assess port cities' centrality (a measure of urban function) and intermediacy (a measure of port function). The European Union (EU) has the most consistent system for classifying regions and sharing data. The indices can, therefore, only be applied to EU port cities. The author calculated the indices for four port cities in this paper: Constanța, Düsseldorf, Linz, and Rotterdam. All selected cities had the necessary data for calculating the indices, but certain national maritime data only applied to seaport cities. Therefore, the intermediacy index results from the selected riverport cities, Düsseldorf and Linz, were nowhere near accurate. As evidenced by Düsseldorf, the most central city studied, riverport city data did matter in the normalisation process of the data used to calculate the centrality index. Despite this, Rotterdam was the most important port city among those examined, scoring highly on both centrality and intermediacy due to its status as the EU's largest and most significant port. Consequently, the author confirmed the paper's hypothesis that Rotterdam will be ranked first. This paper concludes that Rotterdam has experienced greater urban and port growth than Constanța due to its high scores. Even though Constanța is a strategic location, its scores for centrality and intermediacy were low.

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