A Call for Value Literacy in Port City Transitions

Over the last decades, values have been re-addressed in planning, policies, businesses, heritage and education. While these fields seem to agree on the importance of values, it is often unclear what actors mean by values, and how they use these values to shape decisions. A decade after a global financial crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic, and on the eve of global climate emergencies, difficult choices need to be made to safeguard a sustainable future. These choices call for value-driven deliberations, especially in the globally connected, multi-problem environment of the port city. To do that, however, stakeholders need to know what they mean when they talk about values, and how to deliberate them. In other words: they need to be value literate. In this article, we study the concept of value and values in the context of port cities in the past, present and future. After an analysis of historical uses of values in port cities, we assess six projects that explicitly and implicitly deal with values in port cities, to explore methods or strategies that can help to elicit values in different phases of decision making processes.