![]()
1 Research on Mediterranean cities
A short introduction of the interdisciplinary perspectives
The Mediterranean city and culture
My city is pierced by the Mediterranean Sea. The smell of the sea anoints the stones, the lattices, the tablecloths, the books, the hands, and the hair. And the sea sky and the sea sun glorify the roofs and the towers, the garden walls and the trees. Where you cannot see the sea you can guess it in the victory of light and in the air that rustles like a precious cloth. In my city from the time we are born, our eyes are filled with the blue from the waters. That blue belongs to us as a portion of our inheritance.
(Miró, 1941, p. 214)1
In 1921 the poet Gabriel Miró describes his city, Alicante, and strongly evokes the centrality and relevance of the Mediterranean Sea in the formation of the city and its citizens. The Mediterranean Sea is described as “piercing” the city; it does not only touch it. Where the sea cannot be seen, it is still nevertheless perceived.
The Mediterranean is “a plural area”, as defined by Zouain (2010, p. 186) or, according to the well-known description by Braudel (1985), “a thousand things together. It is not a landscape, but countless landscapes. It is not a sea, but a sequence of seas. It is not a civilisation, but a number of civilisations, piled one above the other” (pp. 7–8).2 Braudel (1985, p. 8) also evokes the image of a “Great Mediterranean”, a sea without precise boundaries.
The Mediterranean can be considered time and again a complex crossroads of people, cultures and events (Cancila, 2008). This sea can come across as a “frontier” which unites and at the same time can feel “as much as a divide” (Cassano, 1996, p. 22). It is therefore possible to talk about a “Mediterranean culture” that intimately binds all cultures, people and events. Holding the sense of unity and complexity together, this culture, rooted in the Mediterranean territory and in its people, provides them with a sense of identity. As Zouain (2010) wrote,
the continuous trace that the Mediterranean has left on people is constituted by a deep overlapping of cultural layers, behaviours, philosophies and shared religions that, although they have often opposed each other, have always ended up rediscovering and mingling in that common magma formed by the Mediterranean Sea and the lands included in the limits of its geographical space.
(p. 186)
The Mediterranean city is part of this culture. Inevitably and strictly linked to the sea, Mediterranean cities are the result of centuries of history that can be read through the cultural narratives built by their inhabitants and stratified over time. The Mediterranean culture is the common denominator of a wide space of local and global interrelationships where the city becomes the meeting point historically approached by the sea.
In recent decades there have been numerous studies on Mediterranean cities and their development from an urban, social and economic point of view (for instance, Leontidou, 1990; Cardarelli, 1987, 1990; Pace, 1996). However, is it possible to talk about “the Mediterranean city”? What elements characterise it? Is it ascribable to a single model? The answer seems at the same time both direct and complex. Following the reflection by Pace (2002), despite the presence of a great variety of heterogeneous Mediterranean urban realities and overcoming the “Mediterranean Myth” based on a mythological, romantic or vernacular heritage, it seems possible to propose the existence of a Mediterranean city on the basis of common physical, morphological and architectural elements, but also social and cultural.
Mediterranean cities often underwent accelerated urban development, frequently due to complex migratory movements, with the consequent creation of tensions in the territory and the application of unsustainable development models. This book was born from the belief that the Mediterranean city is the bearer of an extraordinary wealth, the result of a historical cultural mix and permanent territorial tensions – highly relevant issues nowadays. These tensions can be enriching, but require strategies to place human beings and their health, in the broad sense, at the centre of interest. In order to analyse the Mediterranean city as a healthy and sustainable space, an interdisciplinary perspective is necessary to help us define those elements that, within an incontrovertible complexity, allow us an accurate approach to the aims that the United Nations establish for sustainable development.
The AEDIFICATIO International Working Group
The present volume is the result of a close collaboration between researchers in different fields and countries belonging to the AEDIFICATIO International Working Group. In 1996, with the aim of coordinating research on the management and preservation of architectural heritage, the author of this short introduction, supported by the University of Alicante, convened an informal international working group, later registered in 2008 as the AEDIFICATIO International Working Group for Construction, Technology, Research and Development, coordinated from Milan, New York, Granada and Alicante.
The group is the result of an interdisciplinary approach and consists of around 30 researchers working in various fields ranging from architecture and preservation of the architectural heritage, engineering, urbanism and city planning, geography, sociology, history and art history. While some of the group’s members are self-employed, others are staff members of the following institutions: Universidad de Alicante, Universitat Politècnica of Valencia, Universidad de Granada, Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Politecnico of Milan, The City University of New York–Hunter College, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotà, Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana (Cuba) and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (Museo Storico e Parco del Castello di Miramare, Trieste).
About the contents of this book
The 12 essays comprising this volume present the most recent and interdisciplinary research on the Mediterranean city, developed starting from the case study of L’Alfàs del Pi (Spain). L’Alfàs del Pi represents a municipality of great geographical uniqueness, with a population made of a mixture of local inhabitants and Northern European residents attracted by good weather conditions and sea.
Despite the complexity of the wider Mediterranean context, the book is the result of varying approaches to the subject and looks at diverse aspect of the Mediterranean city: the sociological analysis of its territory; the analysis of its environmental and cultural heritage elements; the examination of its urban design and landscape character; the assessment of its public health and sustainable mobility; the use of new technologies as development tools; and citizen participation.
The general aim of this research is to design a sustainable, healthy and innovative city model, which could offer high standards of living and a global reference in the Mediterranean area. As mentioned at the outset, the main characteristics of the research are interdisciplinarity, which allows an integral analysis of the territory and an international approach, thanks to the participation of universities and researchers from different cities and countries.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Context of the Research: A Theoretical-Methodological Approach”, of a general nature, tries to establish the theoretical and methodological tools to analyse a specific territory of the Mediterranean coast, including social, cultural and economic structures, as well as heritage elements of both a tangible and intangible nature. The methodological strategy is always made starting from an interdisciplinary approach and considering the framework of health, wellbeing and sustainability in the development of cities. In the second part, “Technical Reports and Proposals of Intervention in the Territory”, an analysis of specific aspects is exposed, often using a Mediterranean city – L’Alfàs del Pi (Spain) – as a concrete case study, and presenting various methodological tools.
In Part 1, Pablo de-Gracia-Soriano et al. discuss the relevance of the analysis of the social, cultural and economic structures as a basis to understand the territory where the activity of the city takes place. On the other hand, a paper by Carlos Arturo Puente Burgos et al. examines interdisciplinarity as a tool of irrevocable importance in this research work, focused on the territory as a complex space of coexistence with kaleidoscopic and changing elements in a local and global field.
The study for the preservation and promotion of the tangible and intangible heritage brings us closer to those elements that make up the identity of a territory. As discussed by Carlo Manfredi et al., the heritage – intended in a broad sense – helps us understand and contextualise the life of people who inhabit the Mediterranean city. “The practice of the sociological imagination requires an awareness of these popular stories of the personal issues of lived experience, and the construction of connections with the account of the epoch” (Bauman, 2014, p. 5). Identity is a social construction that structures our way of life. Identity and memory are necessary concepts in understanding our Mediterranean DNA.
In this first part of this book, the concepts of Smart City and healthy destinations are also explored. A paper by Raquel Pérez-del Hoyo focuses on the use of new technologies for a sustainable contemporary development of the Mediterranean city, while Carlos Arturo Puente Burgos et al. define the idea of “healthy destination” in the global and particular context of the Mediterranean Sea.
In Part 2 Diana Jareño-Ruiz et al. examine the citizen participation as a strategic axis of the work methodology, which is useful to build democratic and active cities and understand the needs and perceptions of people who inhabit the territory. Through the analysis of mental maps, Pablo E. Vengoechea explores the environmental, cultural, patrimonial etc. elements that are uniquely perceived by the inhabitants of the territory, thus establishing strategies for the subsequent intervention and enhancement, such as the future transformation of Route N-332 into the Great Boulevard of L’Alfàs del Pi.
A paper by Armando Ortuño Padilla and Jairo Casares Blanco focuses on the urban and interurban mobility in the municipal area of mid-size Mediterranean cities with the aim of achieving a healthy and sustainable city. Strategies associated with green corridors and quality spaces in urban and interurban mobility are established. The agricultural and historical landscape as a cultural element is analysed by Francesco Carlo Toso as part of the identity of the territory and in relation to the inhabitants and their ancestral roots connected to the Mediterranean area.
Laura García et al. present a direct application in the field of wellbeing and health discussing the monitoring of domestic environment useful to optimise the resources available within the private sphere, while Giacomo Sorino et al. describe methodologies for the preservation of the architectural heritage. In particular, the BIM methodology generates an efficient documentation for an adequate constructive intervention in building something of historical value. In the final paper, Lorena Parra et al. present the use of new technologies for the management of water in urban environments, in order to optimise this basic and scarce resource in most cities of the Mediterranean coast.
The Mediterranean city represents a space that must be preserved and constitutes, at the same time, a fundamental educational tool. In fact, the ancestral network of routes across the Mediterranean Sea – “from Algeciras to Istanbul”, as Joan Manuel Serrat sings (see Figures 1.1. and 1.2) – and endless connections between cities make up an extraordinary learning space for new generations. Connected by water, the traveller saw the city from the “waterfront”, which identified without any doubt the place where he came. A place full of content: the Mediterranean city.
The Mediterranean city can be used as a useful educational resource. The discovery of the heritage of an initially unknown city is capable to generate in citizens attitudes of tolerance, respect, admiration and solidarity, which are indispensable values in achieving true solidarity and cooperative education.
Figure 1.1Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
Figure 1.2 View of the Strait of Gibraltar from Gaucín, Serranía de Ronda, Andalusia.
The Report to UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century (1996, Learning: The Treasure Within) indicates that the four pillars on which the education of the 21st century should be based are: learn to know, learn to do, learn to live, and learn to be. “Knowledge is the food of the soul”, said Plato, and “We learn not in school, but in life”, Seneca would say. We find therefore a privileged learning space in the Mediterranean and its cities, its people and habits. The health of the body and soul of each individual is the centre of the present volume; the broad stage is the Mediterranean Sea and more concretely the city is the space where life should become sustainable.
Notes
