Port cities occupy a special place in history as nodes of transition and exchange and as special space for connections and networks. At the same time, they trigger the imagination, past and present. The costal location defines the port cities’ function for regional and international trade and production as well as for channeling local and global flows of people and of migration. As a result, port cities as urban sites around the Mediterranean became a symbol for a special kind of cosmopolitanism, with divers multi-ethnic, -religious and - cultural populations. While all these features defined over the centuries the special role of port cities, in recent years the effects of climate change and its impact on coastal geographies also challenge the very conditions of survival and functioning of port cities, adding yet another level of complexity. Covering a long and transformative period from around the 16th to 21th-century port cities along the Mediterranean, the course looks at port-cities a) systematically, in terms of morphological similarities in socio-economic, cultural and political terms and b) exemplarily at selected ports. To this end, the course offers thematic introductions to the most pertinent aspects of port cities and will study a selection of some port cities as exemplary cases, covering the variety of Mediterranean cities, in their East-West, and North-South direction. These include Marseille, Alexandria and Tunis, Thessalonica and Trieste, Izmir/Smyrna and Beirut.
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