During recent decades, most European river-port cities and also many seaport cities have undergone a major transition towards a service-centred, rather than industrially-based metropolis, offering a high quality urban environment with a revitalised waterfront. Hamburg is one of the few river-port cities that have chosen the course of port expansion instead. This paper discusses the consequences of current global technological, organisational and economic developments for the port. Changing requirements imply rising monetary and land-use costs and environmental and social impacts, and also entail the risk that the port may not be able to fulfil new requirements and could thus lose market shares to coastal competitors. More importantly, the world-wide economic shift towards the service sector has affected port-dependent jobs in two ways: Directly port-dependent jobs have been reduced to a fraction, while many indirectly port-dependent jobs no longer require physical proximity of the port. Those benefits that continue to arise tend to spread over a much larger geographical region, while the port's costs remain locally concentrated. Given the increasing competition between world-wide metropolitan regions that seek to establish themselves in new sectors and attract a qualified workforce, it is particularly relevant for Hamburg to account for these changes and to incorporate an assessment of the port's changing costs and benefits into planning processes. To date, this task has received little attention from the city.
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