Yi Kwan Chan
TU Delft
The port summons different views. For some, the cranes, like a forest of steel, roar with progress and human ingenuity. For others, the same cranes shudder, heavy with pollution and the relentless demand for economic growth. Both views are real, yet they belong to different worlds of experience. This diversity of perspectives reflects the port city itself—a place built on difference, where many lives coexist, yet not always connect.
This difference is rooted deeper than we might expect. The biologist Jakob von Uexküll proposes a fundamental concept in the study of animal behaviour: umwelt. Adapted from a German word meaning “environment”, it refers to the unique sensory bubble every animal inhabits. Every creature perceives the world differently because its sensory systems shape how it experiences reality. A human, a cat, or a bee may inhabit the same world, but each experiences it through a different filter. Our perceptual environments differ.
Though the concept of umwelten comes from biology, it is equally revealing in social and cultural life. Our upbringing, identity, and experiences profoundly shape what we perceive as real, important, or even visible. We live in our bubbles—some overlapping, others opaque to one another. Yet as humans, we possess the rare capacity for self-reflection: to look inward and examine our emotions and behaviours. In other words, we are both enabled and limited by our perception, but we can, to some extent, step into another’s social umwelt.
If every person’s perception is partial, then to understand a shared place like a port city, we need to look through many lenses, many stories. Each inhabitant, each worker, lives within their own umwelt of the port city.
In Rotterdam, as with many post-industrial port cities, these different umwelten take the form of a widening port-city gap. Though the port has moved westward, it continues to generate economic gains and new job opportunities. Whether or not we ever set foot on a ship or inside a terminal, our lives are quietly shaped by the port, or more precisely, by the rise of container-based shipping. We may live in the city, but we also live with the less visible costs of port activity: polluted air, murky rivers, and neighbourhoods carved out for freight flows rather than human needs.
One might ask: if the port and city are separating, why not let them go? Imagine what a growing port-city gap would mean in practice. The port leverages global connectivity and becomes increasingly automated. Though still part of the city, its role in transnational networks dwarfs its local links. Tremendous in scale, triumphant in efficiency. Meanwhile, the city reshapes its waterfronts for leisure, housing, and innovation. Society moves forward—the maritime remains in its roots but is no longer written into its future.
Such a separation might seem convenient. It could even be justified as a simple “division of labour”. Each could pursue its own logic: efficiency for the port, liveability for the city—without the friction of negotiation. Yet, in the long term, the undercurrents will surface. The port, as a megamachine short of social legitimacy, expands in a cultural vacuum, while the city loses its material connection to the global trade and influence over the forces that shape its economy and environment. They become islands: a port without a public, and a city without a pulse. But these are not just logistical shifts; they change how people experience and interact with the port city itself.
More significantly, the gap is not only economic or spatial. It’s cultural: a gap in understanding and connection. As automation and distance transform the port-city relationship, people need to make sense of what these changes mean for their identities, livelihoods, and sense of belonging. Through stories, we start to glimpse the diversity of how the port’s presence is felt differently, perhaps as livelihood, as pollution, as heritage, or as abstraction.
The widening gap between port, city, and people also signals a rupture in the broader societal fabric. In times of rupture, words like “resilience” surface often. Cities invoke it as a promise of future-proofing under climate and economic uncertainty. It makes sense: a system is only sustainable when it is resilient. We need to be able to adapt to change, bounce back from shock, and prepare for what lies ahead. Yet resilience cannot be engineered by design alone. It also depends on how communities interpret change and on the local capacities that allow them to act together. If we wish to bridge these disconnections between systems and senses, between infrastructures and imagination, we must learn to see resilience not as recovery, but as renewal.
Seen through the lens of umwelt, the resilience of culture—expressed through shared values, identities, heritage preservation, collective action towards change, and more—goes beyond absorbing shock and bouncing back. It is about broadening the field of perception: about recognising that resilience lives in the diverse experiences of people on the ground, and in the collective practice of sense-making. One way to nurture this is to learn to see the port city through multiple eyes and stories. When we share experiences, we enter each other’s perceptual worlds, if only briefly. We begin to recognise the intertwined realities of labour and leisure, economy and ecology, industry and intimacy.
Diversity, in this sense, is more than something to celebrate. It is a living resource—a pool of talent, a source of vitality, and a wellspring of pride. Yet as diversity brings change and complexity, it also demands the willingness to embrace difference as part of our shared environment. Diversity and the effort to make sense of it are always a work in progress. Cultural resilience, therefore, grows from this unfinished process: from the capacity to translate between umwelten, to weave multiple worlds into a common horizon, and to imagine futures that are not only efficient or liveable, but interconnected.
About This Essay
This essay is part of the forthcoming book My Port City Rotterdam: Navigating Identities in a Sea of Cultures. Drawing from an academic research project, the book invites readers to journey across Rotterdam through 18 walking routes, each inspired by the life story of someone who has navigated the space between arrival and belonging in the port city.
Together, these stories reveal how diverse lives, memories, and encounters shape Rotterdam’s cultural fabric and its ever-changing relationship with the port. The project is developed with the support of PortCityFutures and the Resilient Delta initiative.
Acknowledgments
This blog post has been written in the context of discussions in the LDE PortCityFutures research community. It reflects the evolving thoughts of the authors and expresses the discussions between researchers on the socio-economic, spatial and cultural questions surrounding port city relationships. This blog was edited by the PortCityFutures editorial team. The author thanks Maurice Jansen for his review.