César Ducruet

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · UMR 7235 EconomiX

This paper examines how spatial distance affects network topology, on empirical data concerning the Global Container Shipping Network (GCSN). The GCSN decomposes into 32 multiplex layers defined at several spatial levels by successively removing connections of smaller distances. This multilayer decomposition approach allows studying the topological...

This paper studies the distributional and aggregate economic effects of new port technologies developed in the second half of the 20th century. We show that new technologies have led to a significant reallocation of shipping activity from large to small cities. This was driven by a land price mechanism; as new port technologies are more land-intens...

While the spatial and functional relationships between ports and cities have been put in question in the last decades, the continued importance of urbanization and maritime transport in global socio-economic development motivates deeper research on their interaction. The global trade network is often studied at the country level and all transport m...

Port–city relationships have attracted paramount attention from a variety of scientific disciplines for several decades, such as geography, history, planning, regional science, sociology, and economics to name but a few. Yet, the extent to which maritime traffic specialization obeys the same spatial distribution than other economic activities remai...

Ships are often considered as the backbone of the global economy. A fundamental unresolved problem is how to best operate fleets, given a sudden increase in demand, such as that reported following the first months of the COVID19 pandemic. Advancing our knowledge of the supply chain's delicate equilibrium between demand and supply, requires analyzin...

Seaports facilitate the fast flow of goods across space, but ports also entail local costs borne by host cities. We use the introduction of containerized shipping to explore the effects of port development. At the local level, we find that seaport development increases city population by making a city more attractive, but this market access effect...

The main objective of this research is to analyse the connectivity of cities in a coupled network composed of planar (railways) and non-planar (maritime) topologies. It examines the state of the network during the 1880–1925 period, namely in the context of the first globalization wave (1880–1914), when trade and urban development were closely tied...

The main objective of this research is to analyse the connectivity of cities in a coupled network made of planar (railways) and non-planar (maritime) topologies. It takes the state of the network during the period 1880–1925, namely the context of the First Globalization wave (1880–1914), when trade and urban development were closely tied to progres...

Shipping networks witnessed a surge of interest from scholars in recent years. This chapter proposes a systematic and critical review of more than 200 journal articles on the matter published since 2007. It reveals that while the corpus is extremely diverse in terms of disciplinary background, research themes, and analytical methods, a majority of...

In a world where most international trade is carried by sea, each port can be seen as a unique chokepoint competing to attract ever more traffic and economic activities. However, ports can also be seen as parts of a wider system, which can be defined as a system of two or more ports located in proximity within a given area. Their fate and governanc...

Despite its wide use in port studies, the concept of port system remains relatively vague and ill defined, ranging from a geographic or administrative area containing two or more ports to an interconnected set of port nodes in a given network. Based on a corpus of no less than 268 articles, this chapter investigates how port systems have been stu...

Since the second half of the twentieth century, maritime transport has been characterized by specific dynamics. There has been an unprecedented growth of freight flows, in a context of decolonization, rapid globalization (second wave), and rise of emerging countries through production delocalization. Ports are key players in the global supply chain...

Abstract Despite the skyrocketing growth of environmental studies in recent decades about ports and shipping, the local health impacts of ports remain largely under-researched. This article wishes to tackle this lacuna by assembling untapped data on global shipping flows across nearly 5,000 ports in 32 countries between 2001 and 2018. The differen...

This research focuses on the accessibility of inland cities to maritime trade. A quantitative analysis of 64 inland capital cities situated in coastal countries is proposed based on indicators that relate to ports, transport, trade, and urban factors. The identified trends suggest that there is a trade-off between remoteness from the sea and trade...

This research investigates the determinants of ship turnaround times at about 2,300 container ports between 1977 and 2016, based on nearly 3 million daily vessel movements. It adopts a multilevel approach combining territorial and network indicators to characterize ports, and proposes a new methodology calculating shipping delays. Main results reve...

North Korea is experiencing a deepening economic and political crisis since the early 1990s. Although it is not commonly seen as a shipping nation, its major cities are coastal, and it hosts nine international trading ports. However, little is known about the role of maritime transport in North Korea's development. This article uses vessel movement...

A port system is a system of two or more ports, located in proximity within a given area. In literature, various geographical and functional scales have been identified ranging from complete coastlines to the notions of a ‘range’ and a ‘multi-port gateway region’. Not only does the spatial scale create confusion on the true functional delineation o...

Based on untapped shipping and urban data, this article compares the diffusion of steam and container shipping at the port city level and at the global scale between 1880 and 2008. A temporal and multi-layered network is constructed, including the pre-existing technologies of sailing and breakbulk. The goal is to check the differences a) between in...

This research examines the similarities between port traffic structure and economic structure of French port cities. Based on the combination of Automated Identification System (AIS) data and employment data, it performs complementary analyses of the mutual specialization between ports and cities. Main results show that while larger cities handle m...

Maritime transport is often overlooked in urban network studies, just like cities rarely appear in shipping network analyses. However, this particular vector carries the vast majority of international trade volumes, and two-thirds of the world’s population resides in coastal areas. From a complex network perspective, this article tests the interdep...

This article reviews the multiple approaches to the spatial dimension of maritime transport. It covers a wide range of perspectives, from flow mapping, network analysis, actors’ strategies, and local socio-economic determinants. It differs from classic descriptions of main routes, port traffic, and the evolution of the shipping industry by question...

In this chapter, we apply conventional graph-theory and complex network methods to a sample of port and inter-port shipping flows at and amongst the top 50 European ports in 2017. Such methods help to detect the main topological and geographic structures of this network in order to answer three main questions. First, why are certain port nodes bett...

This chapter recalls and demonstrates deep changes in the way maritime transport had been reorganised with the ongoing advent of containerisation in the past decades up to the present time. This multifaceted approach to containerisation is not so common as often, specific aspects are well covered and analysed by scholars and professionals but witho...

70 000 years ago, Homo sapiens left Africa to colonize the world. 6,000 years ago, he founded the first cities. Today, in the era of city networks, he is creating increasingly wide and complex metropolitan regions. From prehistory to the era of metropolises, man has occupied the earth's space in an infinite variety of ways, under the influence of a...

After a brief background about the development of containerization in recent decades, this chapter reviews the current characteristics of liner shipping networks under three main themes. First, it provides an overview of the different service types of shipping lines and dynamics in liner service configuration and design. Second, a global snapshot o...

Affected by climate and natural conditions, cruise activities have obvious seasonal characteristics. For a cruise ship, seasonality consists of the systematic, although not necessarily regular, movement of a cruise ship in a selected time. To examine more specifically the natural factors of the seasonal characteristics from a microscopic perspectiv...

While ports of the world are more or less diversified, the influence of traffic diversity on the global port hierarchy and maritime network is not yet well understood. This research uses a complex network approach to analyze the interplay between no less than 20 shipping traffic types connecting more than 1,600 ports. A database covering about 1550...

Despite early cartographical and graph-theoretical analyses of maritime flows in the 1940s and 1960s, it is only from the 2000s onwards that maritime network analysis had grown apace, backed by newly available shipping data, increased computational power, and renewed conceptual frameworks to study networks in general. The evolution of maritime netw...

Cruise tourism is an obviously global industry in different dimensions. From a geographical perspective, cruise ships are mobile and capable of being repositioned at a company’s notice, which forms the inherent basis for its global spatial layout. As a branch of the cruise industry, the world cruise is clearly globalizing in geographical space by o...

The concept of urban network implies a certain degree of interdependency among cities that are connected by various linkages at different spatial scales. Geographers, but also many other scientists, have theorized the urban network, leading to a wide diversity of definitions and empirical studies. This entry reviews existing approaches through thre...

In geography, the spatial dimension of networks has long been taken for granted. This is not the case in natural sciences, of which physics distinguishes between spatial and nonspatial relationships. The core element at stake is thus distance, resulting in time and cost to travel the network and/or to create new links and nodes. Yet in many discipl...

COSCO and China Shipping Container Lines (CSCL) merged and reorganized as COSCO Shipping Lines in 2016. Through using a complex network methodology, we analyze the spatial patterns of their shipping networks before and after the merger. We evaluate the integration effects based on two main dimensions: network and hub economies. While complementarit...

This chapter explores the long-term evolution of the maritime networks of African continent with focus on Asia. Starting from the observation of historical trade statistics, we confirm that the major trading partner of Africa have always been European countries. Then, we explore the historical trends of minor intercontinental trade with America, As...

This chapter looks at an initial approach to the long-term evolution of African port hierarchies. This analysis of port hierarchies is based on throughput volumes (import and export trade) taking into account the mix of cargo, in order to observe the relative position of each port. Secondly, this paper also explores the degree of centrality of seap...

In this research, the effect of local exogenous shocks on seaports and maritime networks is assessed throughout three case-studies. The Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and hurricane Katrina triggered a shock on Kobe, New York and New Orleans respectively and led to temporary port failures. A global database on vessel mo...

European cities, like most of the world’s cities, are to some degree dependent upon maritime transport for their development, as more than 90% of seaborne trade volume is carried by sea. This also applies to Europe’s external trade. While cities possessing ports play a crucial role in the distribution of goods traffic in such a context, the maritim...

Transport infrastructure facilitates the fast flow of goods and people across space, but it also occupies extensive amounts of land. This may drive up land rents and crowd out other economic activity. Using the introduction of containerized shipping – a relatively land-intensive technology –, we find an important role for this crowding-out effect....

Created in 1993, the particularity of Journal of Transport Geography (JTRG) is to put ‘transport’ at center stage in human geography, long after similar initiatives about cultural, tourism, political, urban, and rural geographies. The goal of this research is to estimate JTRG's relative importance of (and interplay between) ‘transport specializatio...

After the the Belt and Road initiative launched in 2013, Chinese terminal operators invested in ports situated along the “21st- century Maritime Silk Road (MSR)”. Identifying which ports are important is made possible through applying complex network methods and GIS analysis. This paper thus identifies strategic hub ports and investment strategies...

After the the Belt and Road initiative launched in 2013, Chinese terminal operators invested in ports situated along the "21st- century Maritime Silk Road (MSR)". Identifying which ports are important is made possible through applying complex network methods and GIS analysis. This paper thus identifies strategic hub ports and investment strategies...

Taiwan and the Chinese mainland face each other across the sea, and maritime transport is the most important means for the exchange of goods between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. Affected by international politics and trade patterns, since the middle and late 19th century, the transportation links between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits...

For millennia, the Mediterranean has been one of the most active trading areas, supported by a transport network connecting riparian cities and beyond to their hinterland. The Mediterranean has complex trade patterns and routes--but with key differences from the past. It is no longer an isolated world economy: it is both a trading area and a transi...

This article tackles the longstanding issue of intermodality head on. From a geomatics perspective, we model both maritime and road networks connecting port and non-port cities taking into account crucial features such as physical geography, shortest paths, and transport costs. This creates the opportunity to study a hybrid network – both planar an...

China’s global shipping connectivity had been somewhat overlooked as the bulk of related studies predominantly focused on the throughput volume of its own port cities. This article tackles such lacunae by providing a relational perspective based on the extraction of vessel movement archives from the Lloyd’s List corpus. Two complementary analyses a...

Container shipping gives a rise of international trade since the 1960s. Based on navigation data start from the mid-1990s to 2016, this paper empirically analyses the spatial pattern of China’s international maritime linkages along the “twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road”. We interpret such evolutionary dynamics in terms of growth, hierarchica...

The last two years 2016 and 2017 have been particularly productive in terms of large-scale, edited publications about maritime-related topics. All of them condense such a vast quantity of contributors, questions, sources, methods, and operate across so many scientifically disciplines, geographic areas, and historical periods that summarizing their...

This article is the first-ever analysis of cities in relation to maritime transport flows from a relational, or network, perspective. Based on untapped vessel movement data covering the last 120 years, this articles sheds new light about the interdependencies at stake between urban hierarchies and port hierarchies overtime. Main results point to th...

https://www.routledge.com/Advances-in-Shipping-Data-Analysis-and-Modeling-Tracking-and-Mapping-Maritime/Ducruet/p/book/9781138280939

https://www.routledge.com/Advances-in-Shipping-Data-Analysis-and-Modeling-Tracking-and-Mapping-Maritime/Ducruet/p/book/9781138280939

Studies on global shipping network show mainly the very relative weight of Africa in the world and the growing impact of Asia in Africa’s connectivity, at the expense of Europe. However, this global view overlooks the role of the international transportation stakeholders, especially the one of ship-owners, in the insertion of Africa in global flows...

Preliminary outputs and prospective research questions on the evolution of African port systems in the long run.