Liquid infrastructures, solid spatialities: How large-scale infrastructural projects are reshaping the port of Trieste

In recent years, the Mediterranean port-cities have been the target of development projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Next Generation EU. While these initiatives are primarily for enhancing connectivity, promoting market integration, and improving sustainability, they also produce peculiar spatialities deserving of attention. Drawing upon the port-city of Trieste, Italy, this contribution sheds light on the spatial transformations brought about by contemporary infrastructural projects, and the relations the new spaces for logistics and production establish with the existing urban areas. Over the last four years, due to its special regulatory framework, the Port of Trieste has been the target of major infrastructural investment. Consequently, a complete redesign of the Port is currently underway, with the restructuring of existing facilities and the establishment of inland Free Zones. While the logistics platforms and productive sites are being transformed to incorporate new functions and uses, their relationship with their surroundings is weakened by the need to securitize infrastructural borders and ensure smooth port operations. This transformation solicits a reflection on the features of the spaces generated by major infrastructural projects, and their impact on a territorial scale. In Trieste, where the ongoing transformations are reconfiguring the limited space available into a sort of ‘hub and spoke platform’ for logistics, it remains to be seen whether the new polymorphic infrastructure will establish localised, fragmented, or continuous relationships with its surroundings. This poses questions for the planning and design of infrastructural spaces in Mediterranean port-cities, and the need to guide the current infrastructural upgrade towards an effective integration of the emerging technical lands and extraterritorial zones with urban areas.