13TH WORLD CONFERENCE CITIES AND PORTS

You were unable to participate at the 13th AIVP World Conference or you would simply like to remember some of the good ideas which were discussed there. You can now find on our site the daily news bulletins of the conference which were published between Monday 16 and Thursday 21 June. And naturally, within a few days, all the interventions as well as a photo gallery will also be put at the disposal of the participants.

As a preview to the Conference, 34 Internet contributions are henceforth now available. A first source of information for you to discover 3 days before the opening of our World Conference. Amongst the latest contributions on line :

1. Pre-feasibility Study. Analysis, Development and Implementation of a comprehensive development model for the construction of a port and its road network in the province of Arauco / Jorge BEYER & Karem Valentina URZUA MALDONADO, CENTRO DE INVESTIGACION MARITIMO PORTUARIO, Chile

2. Large port works at the service of territorial development / Sylvie DELATTE, Directrice des Relations Portuaires et Infrastructures Logistiques, COMMUNAUTE URBAINE DE DUNKERQUE, France

3. Ports systems and mega-regions : towards the emergence of cooperative gateways ? Practices in French ports regarding to the Paris Basin / Anne GALLAIS BOUCHET, Chargée d’études, INSTITUT SUPERIEUR D’ECONOMIE MARITIME, France / Romuald LACOSTE, Chargé de Recherche, Division Villes et Territoires - Groupe Intermodalité, CETE OUEST, France

4. 3D and digital technologies for navigation safety / Michel LE VAN KIEM, , BORDEAUX PORT ATLANTIQUE / Jean-Pierre SABATIER & , Eric MONCEYRON, COMMUNAUTE URBAINE DE BORDEAUX, France

5. City-river port interfaces : Spaces under tension at the crossroads of urban and port issues ; Case studies of Lille and Brussel / Kristel MAZY, Service BATir, UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES, Belgique

6. Trieste, gateway city between Europe and the Mediterranean / Gabriella PULTRONE, Researcher in Town Planning, , , UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI MEDITERRANEA DI REGGIO CALABRIA, Italy

7. City - Port interface policy - the example of the Rouen agglomeration / Régis SOENEN, Directeur de l’Aménagement Territorial et de l’Environnement, PORT DE ROUEN, France

8. Tall ships and sail training : bringing the city to your port / Peter CARDY, SAIL TRAINING INTERNATIONAL, Gosport, United Kingdom

You can discover the 14 new internet contributions published as a prelude to our World Conference. You can read them and then come to discuss with the authors who will be present during the event. A simple, congenial and efficient way to enhance your own projects ! Put on line this last week :

1. Buenos Aires : new functions for the port and new urban waterfront. Some working hypothesis / Margarita CHARRIERE, Presidente de la Comisión de Urbanismo y Medio Ambiente, CONSEJO PROFESIONAL DE ARQUITECTURA Y URBANISMO, Argentina

2. How to commnicate the port today to build the port of tomorrow ? The Port Center Activities in Genoa / Hilda GHIARA, Professore, Dipartimento Di Economia e Metodi Quantitativi (DIEM), UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI GENOVA, Italy

3. New land by the Sea : economically and socially, land reclamation pays / René KOLMAN, Secretary General, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF DREDGING COMPANIES, The Netherlands

4. Nantes-port and metropolis - Perspective to 2030 / Yves LAINE, Président de l’Association "Les transbordés", CONSEIL DE DEVELOPPEMENT NANTES METROPOLE, France

5. The Dredging Charter for the Brittany ports. For sustainable port development / Jean Yves LE DRIAN, Président de la Région Bretagne - Ministre de la Défense, CONSEIL REGIONAL DE BRETAGNE, France

6. Port Authorities, clusters, and territorial governing bodies : a new look at the port triptyque / Laurent LEVEQUE, Maître de conférences associé, CENTRE INTERDISCIPLINAIRE DE RECHERCHE EN TRANSPORT ET AFFAIRES INTERNATIONALES, France

7. Palermo waterfront renewal / Barbara LINO, Researcher for Urban and Regional Planning, UNIVERSITY OF PALERMO, Italy

8. A City / Port partnership for a new socio-economical and environmental dynamics / Laurent MARTENS, Directeur Général, PORT AUTONOME DE LA GUADELOUPE, France

9. Multytime-city / Emanuela NAN, PhD Architect, UNIVERSITY OF GENOA, Italy

10. Organisation and evolution of the Algerian port system. Presentation of the masterplan for development / Mohamed NEMOUCHI, Expert Consultant, Algérie

11. Solutions based on dialogue at Lisbon Metropolitan Area / Pedro RESSANO GARCIA, Arquitecto - Department of Architecture, LUSOFONA UNIVERSITY, Portugal

12. Avilés - The "Isle of Innovation" / Pilar VARELA DIAZ, Alcaldesa, AYUNTAMIENTO DE AVILES, España

13. Individuality or Adaptation - Local Culture and the Re-Invention of the Port-City / Günter WARSEWA, Direktor, Research Institute Arbeit und Wirtschaft, UNIVERSITY OF BREMEN, Germany

14. European Port City Regions as dual knots in the space of flows / Anne WIESE, Research Assistant - Chair for Spatial and Territorial Dvpt, Faculty of Architecture, Technische Universität München, Germany

Bernard Reichen, French urban-planner and “Grand Prix” of Urban planning in 2005, is one of the specialists in the rehabilitation of old industrial buildings and in particular of port building heritage. He will speak in the opening session of AIVP 2012 conference and give his vision of the challenges of urban planning that port cities are facing today. In addition to its presentation, we will also assist to the opening remarks of Géraldine Knatz, CEO of the Port of Los Angeles and Suren Erkman, world specialist in industrial ecology and Ronan Dantec, one of the representatives of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) at Rio +20.

Only three weeks from the opening of this World Conference, the moment came to open the debates and let you consult the first internet contributions. Are already available for consultation and download :

1. Insertion of an industrial activity into a dense urban zone under renovation : the example of Port Sérurier in Paris / by Anne Laure BERAUD, Chargée de Mission pour le Développement et la Valorisation des Canaux, Direction de la Voirie et des Déplacements, Ville de Paris, France

2. When river ports offer their own rail services. The german river ports and their rail freight subsidiaries / by Antoine BEYER, Maître de Conférence - UFR de Géographie et Aménagement, Université Paris Sorbonne, France

3. Waterfront Manifesto : from urban regeneration to "fluid city" planning / by Maurizio CARTA, Professore di Urbanistica, Universita di Palermo, Italy

4. Site-specific approaches in contemporary European harbour transformation / by Lisa Babette DIEDRICH, Architect, Germany

5. Digital technology at the service of economic development : POSEIDON, towards an electronic port single window in Bordeaux / by Michel LE VAN KIEM, Chef du Département des Systèmes d’Information, Direction de la Stratégie et du Développement, Bordeaux Port Atlantique, France

6. The impact of the existence of a maritime strait on urban and harbour temporalities / by Jean Luc LODS, Directeur Europe et International, Direction Europe et International, Conseil General du Pas de Calais, France

7. City and port meet at the "Bassins à Flot" / by Karim MESSAI, Urbaniste, Département des Etudes d’Environnement, d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme, Bordeaux Port Atlantique, France

8. Port cities : conditions for European development on the Atlantic coast / by Charles NICOL, Chargé de Mission aux Relations Internationales, Communauté d’Agglomération de la Région Nazairienne et de l’Estuaire, France

9. The inland ports of Ile-de-France, a sustainable land opportunity for metropolitan logistics / by Elsa PAFFONI, Doctorante, IFSTTAR, France

Enjoy your reading !

Be careful, the booking system that you can find at present on the conference website will close on Monday, June 4th at 6pm, French time (4pm GMT). We advise you to book your hotels before this date for your stay in Saint-Nazaire (rooms available for the nights of the 17-18-19 of June) and in Nantes (night of June 20th). After June 4th, rooms’ availability will not be guaranteed. If you had any difficulties regarding this subject, feel free to contact our partner by phone : +33.272.640.479 from foreign countries.

You can now consult the detailed programme of the Conference. Session by session, get to know about each speaker and consult the resume of his presentation. Query our speaker database online to list the presentations bearing on a particular port city, to look for a speaker by name or by the organisation to which he/she belongs, learn about the themes, etc. This "Speakers" database is put on line for you : you can already optimise your participation and compose your own programme. Naturally all this information will be updated daily.

More than 225 delegates coming from about thirty countries registered yet to our conference. To see who is coming, from now on you can consult the interactive list of delegates updated in real-time. Thanks to this, you can spot your partners, customers, prospects and decide to join us and meet them. To register, download a registration form or use the electronic form online. Hoping to see you soon in Nantes and Saint-Nazaire.

Five specialised magazines are associated today with this World Conference of AIVP. They will strengthen its international audience and will be participating in an active manner towards the circulation of the ideas defended by AIVP and in the presentation of the initiatives taken all over the world to reinforce the vitality of our port cities :
- GreenPort provides business information on environmental best practice and corporate responsibility centred around marine ports and terminals, including shipping, transport and logistics. It provides analysis of the latest trends and opinions, offering case studies, interviews and project based features.
- Since 2003, Port Strategy has been the respected source of commercial port development information. This has been achieved by providing readers with authoritative editorial prepared by contributors who are experts in their field.
- Navigation Port and Intermodalité (NPI) is a monthly review dealing with European and French port and logistics activities both by waterway and sea.
- Printed bimonthly, Baltic Transport Journal is an international magazine focused on transport in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) with its nine countries : Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
- Supply Chain Magazine is the leader in logistics information in France with hard copy monthly, a website, and a daily newsletter consulted by 50,000 managers and heads of industry, distribution and services.
AIVP are also in contact with the American magazine "Seaports", the international magazine "Ports and Harbours" and, for France, the "Journal de la Marine Marchande", the "Place Publique" review, and the "Moniteur des Travaux Publics et du Bâtiment".

Not less than 6 workshops will enrich the debates of our conference. With the program :
• City – port blend
• The new city port economic dynamics
• Citizen dialogue as a means of action
• 30 years of waterfront : regards and prospects
• The port city, laboratory of industrial ecology
• Federating ambitions around "port center"
Discover as of today the various international speakers who will animate them. For this don’t hesitate to click on the various sessions of the synopsis of the conference.
You can now also download the complete program of the conference taking again the plenary sessions, the workshops, the technical visits, etc.

Within the framework of the program of the conference, a last round table remained a source of debates as for the topic which it would approach. It will be finally the culture and this roundtable will thus be entitled "Cultural dynamics of the contemporary port city, diverse stakeholders’ perspectives". Here some lines in introduction to these debates :
"Lights, sounds, colours, atmospheres, reflections, movements… port cities remain places of inexhaustible inspiration for contemporary artists. For several decades, culture has taken possession of quays, seawalls, dock basins or warehouses for the greatest joy of the citizens and visitors. The infrastructures are emphasized by smart lighting effects, magic performances invade unlikely places, and artistic expression is everywhere. The cultural dynamic is also becoming the surest ally of every port city.
Institutional and economic stakeholders, artists, urban planners, port workers, and citizens …in this round table, everyone will be able to testify to the wealth of cultural initiatives having the port city as framework without however forgetting to underline the inevitable constraints and difficulties in their implementation to be conquered."

With three months to go before the opening of the conference, the programme is becoming even more precise. The various speakers who will intervene during the three plenary sessions on Wednesday 20 June are now practically all known. I invite you to discover them :
• Plenary session "The era of the entrepreneurial port" : the floor will be given amongst others to the port cities of Morocco, of Lille (France), of the USA, and of Nantes Saint-Nazaire (France)
• Plenary session "The era of the citizen port" : the presentations will notably bear of Stockholm (Sweden), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Nice (France), Houston (USA) and Conakry (Guinea)
• Plenary session "The era of the urban port" : in this session the discussions will be nourished by the examples of Hamburg (Germany), Toulon (France), Dublin (Ireland), Pasaia (Spain), La Rochelle (France), and Dutch cities. For more details on these sessions, click on www.citiesandports2012.com/en/program/synopsis-en

Registrations (pdf) for the 13th World Conference of AIVP are now open (hotel bookings will open in few days). For several weeks you can benefit from a preferential tariff for registration fees. So don’t hesitate any longer ! The whole AIVP team are naturally at your disposal to help you to make the necessary steps.
• For general information, write to : conference@aivp.org
• For registrations write to : inscription@aivp.org
• For visa requests, write to : visa@aivp.org

The programme of the 13th World Conference of AIVP is gradually taking form. Geraldine Knatz, General Manager of the Port of Los Angeles and President of the International Association of Ports and Harbours, and Suren Erkman, international specialist in industrial ecology have already confirmed their participation for the opening of the event. Ronan Dantec, French Senator of the Loire Atlantique will also speak directly from the Rio +20 Summit.
Besides this, we shall have a plenary session dedicated to each of the three main themes : the era of the urban port, the era of the entrepreneurial port, and the era of the citizen port. Each of these sessions will propose three main speakers and three technical close-ups. In addition 6 workshops will be set up with 4 speakers each. The topics of these will be:
• constructing the city – port blending
• the port city, laboratory of industrial ecology
• citizen dialogue as a means of action
• 30 years of waterfront : regards and prospects
• the new city port economic dynamics
• federating ambitions around a "Port Center"
Finally to complete the programme two round table debates will be organised.

Since the closure of our call for papers, the heavy work of sorting the proposals received has started. This work is guiding us in refining the themes of all the work sessions of this World Conference. Numerous interesting proposals have unfortunately to be left out, the time-spans of the plenary sessions and the workshops not being extensible. We nevertheless hope that these proposals may also contribute to the richness of the debates, and to achieve this we are reflecting on the way to bring them to the knowledge of the participants prior to the Conference. Information on this subject as well as the first elements of the programme will be available during February.

As of today, our international call for papers is closed. The success that it has experienced is incontestable. Indeed we have formally recorded over 150 complete proposals coming from all the continents, whilst around a dozen other actors in the network have sent us proposals which will have to be refined in the next few days. This augurs a quality programme for the great benefit of all the participants. Selection will however be difficult since our programme in fine will only be able to include about fifty speakers, and that we have to respect at the same time balances in geography and in topics. Many thanks to all of you who have responded and have thus testified to the capacity of mobilisation of our network. All the proposals will now be analysed and we shall come back rapidly to each of the authors.

AIVP have recently been in contact with the competent authorities with regard to the "Rio +20" summit to be held next June, 20 years after the first Earth Summit which was already held in the Brazilian port city. Prior to this Summit, AIVP will thus be able to make known their positions and proposals with regard to the stakes of sustainable development for the port cities in the context of one of the themes of the Summit : green economy in the context of sustainable development. Apart from this, the World Conference of AIVP occurring on the eve of the Summit of Heads of State which will close "Rio +20", a video conference will be organised with the personalities present in Rio in order to get up to date on the progress of the debates and on the consequences which the decisions in preparation could have for the future of port cities.

The 13th AIVP World Conference; 550 participants coming from the five continents are expected ; 80 ports and 70 port cities will also be represented at the highest level. To bring together this assembly, 10,000 targeted and nominative prospects are going to be directly approached over the next months in over 1,000 port cities in the world. Several thousands of other persons will be informed by electronic means. By becoming partner of this event, AIVP offer you the possibility to communicate internationally in a targeted and pertinent manner.
Please do not hesitate to download our partner dossier or to contact us directly by telephone +33 235 427 884 or e-mail conference@aivp.org. Attention ! the number of partners is limited. Contact rapidly our partner offers.

This week, AIVP have launched their new Internet site dedicated to the numerous initiatives taken by port cities all over the world concerning discussions with the citizens on port questions. These exchanges currently take many forms : debates, opening to the public, programme of specialised or general visits, working with schools, presence in the social networks, etc…From punctual initiatives, the ports and port cities are gradually progressing in this field to the definition and implementation of a true citizen strategy, with the single objective of explaining the port in all its aspects and in a transparent manner.
The website of AIVP Port Center Network will thus gradually propose an on-line database on this subject and a specific working group comprised of members of AIVP will be put in place in 2012. Naturally, the World Conference of Nantes Saint-Nazaire will be the occasion to present during one of our plenary work sessions a first report of the work undertaken. Specific technical visits could also be proposed for members of the "Port Center" working group.

It is now two weeks ago that our international call for papers was launched and we have already registered proposals from Europe, Africa and the Americas. These proposals cover the three proposed work themes. For their part, AIVP have also made direct contacts with various personalities amongst whom Ellen MacArthur, President of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in favour of circular economy ; Geraldine Knatz, General Manager of the Port of Los Angeles ; Suren Erkman, Professor at the Institute of Land Use Policies and the Human Environment of Lausanne and Chairman of Sofies ; and also Siim Kallas, Vice President of the European Commission, European Commissioner for Transport.
This all augurs for a very international programme of quality. If you also, you wish to put forward a proposal, our call is open until 15 January 2012.

AIVP are studying the possibility of organising, in partnership with Ports of Paris and other members of AIVP, a post tour in Paris following the World Conference and enabling debates and visits around the city port projects of Paris. This post tour could take place on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 June 2012. The final decision on this organisation will be taken before the end of the year. Besides this, contacts are under way with the City of Lorient, situated 170 km to the North West of Nantes to offer delegates interested to be received in Lorient at the village of the Volvo Ocean Race, the most famous of the round the world sailing races with crew

Available in French, English and Spanish, this website is a privileged information source for the content and the preparation of the debates to come during our forthcoming 13th AIVP World Conference, as well as its technical and logistical organization. Month after month, this website will be updated and fleshed out with new sections: program, speaker’s presentation, working sessions’ schedule, technical visits, social and cultural events, registration procedure, accommodation… All the information you will need to prepare your participation in this important event will be at your disposal and updated on a daily basis.

At the present time, the AIVP will be really pleased to count you amongst its main contributors to the work that represents this World Conference. You are undertaking new strategies and are developing innovatory projects? We invite you to make them known to a public of decision makers attentive to your problems and your solutions. To do this, please return your proposal to us at the latest before the 15th January 2012.