Comparative planning for port cities in Southeast Asia and Persian Gulf

The present-day challenge is the inability of most coastal cities to absorb rapidly expanding port developments and population growth. Today, the city and the port are cut off from each other. Ports seem to become less and less dependent on their geographical location. They have no historical or cultural ties to the host city and base their decision solely on managerial or financial considerations. As a result, the former role of ports in local urban life has faded, and ports have lost any sense of local identity. This paper highlighted the complexity of comparative urban planning for port cities in Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf based on the existing literature on the economic, environmental, and physical aspects. The authors develop a perspective on comparative planning research's value and methodologies in this article. Through comparative study, similarities and differences between planning cases and experiences can be disentangled. This opens possibilities for learning across planning systems and possibly even transferring the best planning and policy practices across systems, places, or countries