The relationships Malaga has established with its port have changed over the centuries, conjuring up a variety of scenarios and circumstances. The past and present are closely linked phenomena in this case study where the porosity of the port‐city fabric has marked the city’s development and constitutes a key issue in the current and future challenges it faces. Malaga provides a particularly interesting example of a post‐industrial city that has reopened its port to its inhabitants’ acclaim while maintaining port activity. However, the growth tourism has seen in recent years has come to dominate the local economy. Cruise ships have taken on a significant role and have brought about important changes in the dynamics and flows between the port and the city, unsettling the balance between the two. This profile explores port‐city development through the lens of boundaries and flows, demonstrating how their dynamics have determined Malaga’s spatial, functional, and social development over time and how they continue to do so to this day. This article reviews the transformations the city has undergone and its future opportunities to achieve a balanced and sustainable port‐city relationship.

In recent years, cruise tourism has increased the negative effects caused by touristification in many European port cities. Despite this, these cities are in a great competition to be a destination, a tourist-port. Cruise tourism has come to stay, and a steady growth can be expected in a post-COVID-19 scenario, but at what cost? The tourist-port demands highly effective planning answers occurring simultaneously, and the global pandemic crisis provides a buffer of time to seek best practices, combining the expected economical (re)development with social, environmental, and cultural sustainability. This paper proposes five different strategies that contribute to finding a sustainable coexistence between tourist ports and their cities. To this end, trans-scalar strategies developed in previous research from different disciplines have been studied and categorized in a port-city context, in order to provide a holistic viewpoint on the measures carried out to maximize the benefits and limit the negative impacts of cruise tourism on cities.

City riverbanks usually have great landscape value and are iconic public spaces. However, there are many cities with large abandoned industrial buildings, such as power plants, on their riverbanks. Such buildings run the risk of being demolished in order to recover the surrounding natural landscape, despite having an important presence in the collective memory of the citizens and in the history of the city. This article seeks to analyse the reuse and refurbishment of industrial power plants on riversides from a modern artistic/recreational approach in order to restore and enhance the landscape value of the site by regenerating the environs and turning them into hubs of activity. Two case studies from different locations are considered in order to extract the information. A methodology is used that allows us to analyse and study a complex reality in a straightforward, concise and direct way. That means it can be used by many agents currently involved in those reuse processes to compare and to monitor the different cases over time. This research has sought to highlight the power plant typology, its relationship with the riverside, and subsequently, to extrapolate the criteria used to study other industrial buildings.