Maritime transport largely supports international trade and has long been seen as a vital element of economic and urban development. Since the 1950s, however, the emergence of containerization is generally believed to have transformed the spatial and functional organization of human settlements. Increasingly powerful global transport actors combined with the skyrocketing size of containerships led to unprecedented optimality, concentration, and selection among port cities. The latter are thus both constraints (land-use, congestion) and facilitators (production, consumption) of port and shipping activities nowadays. This chapter wishes to further understanding how have cities maintained their position in the global shipping network. It complements a wider reflection about places, scales, and networks by an empirical analysis of global shipping flows in relation to urban population, testing the hypothesis that cities and container shipping remain mutually essential nowadays.