From polarization of container traffic to spatial concentration: the example of european & mediterranean ports[De la polarisation du trafic de conteneurs à la concentration spatiale : l'exemple des ports d'Europe et de la Méditerranée]

Nowadays, ports are strategic entities and represent driving force of the world economy. This trend increased with the containerization. The Euro-Mediterranean ports are involved in a battle to become key actors on a regional scale, by trying to attract the most important part of the traffic coming from Asian ports. We propose, in the euro-Mediterranean scale a quantitative analysis of the traffic evolution of the various ports through the data of containerized traffic with a multiscale approach between micro (port), meso (maritime gateway) and macro (European and Mediterranean). The objective is to measure different trends of proximity and spatial polarization in the traffic distribution of our 129 ports over the period 1990-2010. The results confirm slight deconcentration of the containerized traffic in the global scale but hide a different reality with a concentration of traffic in the meso scale, that of the maritime facade. This results in a strengthening of the spatial traffic concentration coupled with a polycentric structure of the containerized traffic. Through the achieved results, we were able to see the evolution of some ports, which influence was exponential over the last twenty- five years, following the example of Gothenburg, Saint-Petersburg or Tanger Med. These ports took advantage of economic and geopolitical evolutions as well as of the proximity of the other large ports with which they are linked by transshipment.