PORTAL Workshop 01 Completed
Building resilience in port-city systems
From threat-agnostic thinking to practical action
Workshop overview
A shared approach to resilient port-city systems
PORTAL’s first workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to examine how resilience approaches can be transferable across port-city systems while remaining responsive to local geography, governance, infrastructure and operating conditions. Discussions connected threat-agnostic and sustained resilience with digitalisation, decarbonisation, social-ecological-technical systems, port operations and maritime supply-chain disruption.
Key insights
What emerged from the workshop
Start with functions
Commonality is strongest at the level of critical functions and relationships, rather than fixed lists of assets.
Design for adaptability
Modularity, distributedness, redundancy, diversity and plasticity can preserve functions under unexpected disruption.
Map interdependencies
Transport, energy, digital systems, logistics, governance, communities and ecosystems must be assessed together.
Adapt, do not copy
Transferability requires clear system boundaries, local characterisation, recalibration and validation.
Make scale explicit
The port-city is the focal system, while asset-level and wider network effects remain important connections.
Test trade-offs
A measure may strengthen one subsystem while transferring congestion, cost or vulnerability elsewhere.
Programme and contributors
Moving forward
Practical outputs for PORTAL
The discussion produced a focused set of actions to support the project’s research and stakeholder engagement.
A shared vocabulary and characterisation template for port-city systems.
A transferability matrix distinguishing common principles from context-specific parameters.
Nested system boundaries and a data-requirements inventory covering physical, digital, environmental and governance information.
Community of Practice validation and a potential PORTAL–NEORIA demonstration in Vigo.
Workshop moments
Photos from the day
