St. Petersburg Port through Disasters: Challenges and Resilience

Abstract

Port cities are useful sites for thinking about resilience, as their location at the junction of sea, river, and railway routes is of prime importance to traders, governments, and other actors: these cities are rapidly redeveloped after disasters and create extensive measures to withstand such shocks in the future. This article concerns the main challenges facing the St. Petersburg port and city and how they were resolved from its origin in 1703 to date. It first tracks the city’s resilience from the age of sail, when it was a port for trade, through the age of steam, when the port infrastructure completely changed as it was transferred from the historic center of the city to its outskirts. The second part of the article examines how St. Petersburg withstood specific challenges, both natural and man-made: ice, floods, shallowing, fires, and wars.