Coastal cities are complex spatial systems shaped by intertwined economic, environmental, demographic, and governance pressures. This study develops a multidimensional comparative framework to analyze coastal cities in the Black Sea basin across five dimensions: physical–morphological structure, demographic scale, economic–functional profile, transportation and accessibility, and urban quality–governance. To address cross-country data heterogeneity, an ordinal (0–1–2) indicator system is employed and analyzed through multiple multivariate techniques, including Gower dissimilarity, NMDS, Ward hierarchical clustering, MCA, Spearman rank correlation, network analysis, and rank-transformed PCA. Findings indicate that Black Sea coastal cities do not form a single homogeneous typology but cluster around distinct structural patterns. A major axis of differentiation separates port–industrial production-oriented cities from tourism–service-oriented cities, while a considerable group of multifunctional and transitional cities exhibits moderate values across several dimensions. Results show that city typologies are shaped less by national planning regimes than by structural dynamics such as port scale, economic specialization, accessibility, and spatial pressure. By integrating non-metric and metric approaches, the study proposes a context-sensitive and multi-criteria comparative methodology. The findings highlight the need for multi-scalar and multidimensional planning perspectives to better understand structural differentiation in coastal urban systems within semi-enclosed marine regions such as the Black Sea.
Sipahi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.