Maritime Globalization, Network Externalities, and Transport Impacts on CitieS – MAGNETICS

The MAGNETICS project aims to further understand the circular causality between local socio-economic development and transport activities, more precisely in the case of the port and maritime sector. While empirical studies on the economic impact and connectivity of ports are numerous, they remain dispersed and divergent by their methods, sources, and results. An untapped database (Lloyd's) on the merchant marine fleet navigation from 1880 to nowadays will allow us to construct the global maritime network. Extracting road and railway segments from old and recent maps will serve to build the land-based network. Both networks will be combined and fed by the harmonisation of four urban databases on cities' population since 1880. Using graph theory, we will search for the mechanisms linking these three components based on the theoretical model of Fujita and Mori (1996), not yet applied, on port-related growth in an urban system.
In the more recent period (since the 2000s), we will use the previous results to work on more detailed regional indicators about employment, firms, and regional productivity. Complementary methods such as spatial analysis, spatial econometrics, and autocorrelation shall evaluate the intensity and directionality of port-region influences in various contexts. Such analyses will include original variables such as the centrality of cities and regions - port and non-port - in the global sea-land network.
Finally, the analysis of socio-economic impacts will be complemented by the one of environmental and health impacts. The quantitative part will analyse the feasibility of a modal shift from road to short sea shipping, to attenuate congestion in large hubs, reduce the carbon footprint of landside detours, and favor the development of peripheral port cities. It will also propose a new analysis of port traffic impacts on the urban environment and the health of local populations, based on indicators such as congestion, air quality, and demography (e.g. mortality). An intensive fielwork will complement the quantitative analyses by in-depth case studies of selected French and Italian port cities.