CFP: Port Regionalism: Infrastructural Governance, Futures, and Fragments

A workshop convened by the Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR), supported by the Regional Studies Association (RSA) in partnership with the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp

8-9 June 2026 | Antwerp, Belgium

Convenors: Jean-Paul Addie, Michael Glass, Jen Nelles

Overview

In June 2026, the RSA Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR) is organizing an in-person workshop on port regionalism, with an associated special issue planned for the journal Regional Studies. The workshop seeks to expand and deepen our understanding of different port infrastructures, their governance, and their regional entanglements. We are issuing a call to scholars researching the planning, governance, and maintenance of portscapes, as well as regional infrastructure researchers engaged with the NOIR network, to foster an interdisciplinary discussion on the regional dynamics and politics of port cities and their peripheries as spaces where regionalization processes are both forged and fractured through infrastructural dis/investments, logistics networks, and everyday life.

Thematic Agenda

Ports are more than nodes in global supply chains. International shipping ports, airports, and inland intermodal terminals are placed infrastructures that anchor regional economies, mediate flows of goods, people, and capital, and shape territorial imaginaries (Apostolopoulou, 2024; Hein, 2021; Ramos, 2020). As liminal spaces, they are gateways and checkpoints that connect regions to transnational networks while simultaneously reinforcing regulatory, spatial, and socio-political boundaries (Ramondetti, 2024). Through the lens of ‘infrastructural regionalism’ (Addie et al., 2020), this workshop explores how port spaces are produced, contested, and governed, how they emerge not only from the demands of logistics management but also from regional planning, labor mobilization, securitization and regulation, and environmental conditions (Cidell and Costa-Cordova, 2024; Safina, 2025; Taufen et al., 2024). Through extended portscapes, places can be abruptly linked (or truncated) by networks and forces across incredible distances, opened to economic opportunity (Danyluk, 2018), and subject to environment degradation (De Lara, 2018). Regional spaces and regional futures are defined in relation, or response, to such infrastructures (Krośnicka et al., 2021; Plotch and Nelles, 2023) across both space and time (Addie et al., 2024; Punt et al., 2025). In this workshop and planned special issue, we therefore ask:

•           How do regionalization processes create and sustain port spaces?

•           How do port cities and their surrounding regions co-evolve through infrastructure?

•           What kinds of futures are imagined, promised, or denied through port development?

We are interested in examining how key stakeholders and communities within regional envelopes leverage the presence of port infrastructures and pursue infrastructural-based investments to release desired regional futures. We are also concerned with understanding what occurs to regions defined by port infrastructures and flows but removed from their material benefits, as well as port cities and regions that are ‘left behind’ by the locations of high-value transformation of commodities, and those that are marginalized by their conscious opposition to the transformations that infrastructure can compel. We welcome contributions that engage the following topics from a variety of different disciplinary lenses (geography, planning, public policy, history, etc.):

·       Port city-regional governance: What governance structures, institutions, and actors define port regions, and how do they interact? How do infrastructural entanglements challenge or reinforce regional governance and planning? How do public and private interests converge or clash?

·       Material politics of port infrastructure: How do ports co-constitute their urban and regional contexts? How do physical systems (e.g., dredging, container terminals, intermodal links) and network geographies shape regional dynamics?

·       Regional logistics geographies: What roles do supply chains, data flows, and automation play in regional integration and fragmentation? How do port labor regimes reflect and reshape regional economies, for instance, through labor regimes, containerization, and the regionalization of work?

·       Environmental governance and resilience: How do ports, as sites of infrastructural vulnerability and adaptation, manage ecological impacts across regional scales?

·       Temporalities of infrastructure: How do daily rhythms and extended timescales of port maintenance, obsolescence, and development co-constitute regional space? Who envisions regional port futures, using what tools, and over what timeframes? 

·       Lived port regions: What does it mean to live in a region shaped by port infrastructure? How do communities experience, resist, or reimagine these spaces? Who claims legitimacy in these spaces? How are everyday lives in port regions shaped by processes of territorial regulation and securitization?

An Infrastructural Regionalism Approach to Ports

The concept of infrastructural regionalism, developed through the NOIR network, offers a distinctive lens to rethink how infrastructure shapes not only physical landscapes but also the political and social construction of regional space at a variety of scales (Addie et al., 2020; Glass et al., 2019; Glass et al., 2023). NOIR’s approach encourages interdisciplinary engagement and explorations of cross-border competition and collaboration, alongside attention to the particular insights gleaned from ‘seeing like a region’ and centering the lived experience of regional space. In exploring port regionalisms from this analytical vantage point, we intend to interrogate infrastructural and regional dynamics in peripheral as well as metropolitan regions, building new conceptual tools and opening the conversation to different problematiques of governance, planning, policy, and politics.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please submit a 300–500-word abstract and a short bio to jaddie@gsu.edu by 15 February 2025. To facilitate discussion and maximize the value of the event, we intend to circulate draft papers to participants prior to the workshop meeting.

Thanks to the support of the Regional Studies Association, we can offer financial support to assist with travel and accommodation costs. These funds are limited and prioritize support for students, early career researchers, and scholars from the Global South. To find out more about NOIR, visit the network’s website: www.noir-rsa.com 

References:

Addie, J.-P. D., Glass, M. R., and Nelles, J. (2020). Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: A research agenda. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 7(1), 10-26.

Addie, J.-P. D., Glass, M. R., and Nelles, J. (2024). Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds. Bristol University Press.

Apostolopoulou, E. (2024). The dragon’s head or Athens’ sacrifice zone? Spatiotemporal disjuncture, logistical disruptions, and urban infrastructural justice in Piraeus port, Greece. Urban Geography, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2433968 

Cidell, J., and Acosta-Cordova, J. (2024). Freight mobility justice: pollution, places, and people along North American logistics chains. In A Research Agenda for Transport Equity and Mobility Justice (pp. 133-144). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Danyluk, M. (2018). Capital’s logistical fix: Accumulation, global logistics, and the spatial-temporal fix. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(4), 630–647.

De Lara, J. (2018). “This port is killing people”: Sustainability without justice in the neo-Keynesian green city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(2), 538-548.

Glass, M. R., Addie, J.-P. D., and Nelles, J. (2019). Regional infrastructures, infrastructural regionalism. Regional Studies, 53(12), 1651-1656.

Glass, M. R., Nelles, J., and Addie, J.-P. D. (2023). On fetishes, fragments ad futures: Regionalizing infrastructural lives. In A. Wiig, K. G. Ward, T. Enright, M. Hodson, H. Pearsall, and J. Silver (Eds.), Infrastructuring urban futures: The politics of remaking cities (pp. 188-198). University of Bristol Press.

Hein, C. (2021). Port city porosity: Boudaries, flows, and territories. Urban Planning  6(3), 1-9.

Krośnicka, K. A., Lorens, P., and Michałowska, E. (2021). Port cities within port regions: Shaping complex urban environments in Gdańsk Bay, Poland. Urban Planning  6(3), 27-42.

Ploch, P. M. and Nelles, J. (2023). Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Punt, E. P., Monstadt, J., Frank, S., and Witte, P. A. (2025). Business-as-usual: Exploring port stakeholders' time tactics for mediating recent disruptions at the Port of Rotterdam. Time & Society, 34(2), 276-300.

Ramondetti L (2024) Untangling infrastructure networks through critical cartographies: Mapping the port of Trieste, Italy. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114(8): 1805–1818.

Ramos, S. J. (2020). Biomass logistics: Mythistory and sociotechnical imaginary in trans-Atlantic wood pellet assemblage. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(1), 318-339.

Safina A (2025) The (in)visible face of global infrastructures: An exploration of logistics and informality from the ground up. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1177/02637758251319671 

Taufen, A., Hoffman, L. M., & Yocom, K. P. (2022). Assemblage as heuristic: unveiling infrastructures of port city waterfronts. Territory, Politics, Governance, 12(6), 783–803.