Cities
Mediterranean cities have been historically heterogeneous spaces. Density, mixed uses, and their growth attached to ports and the sea have seen them as vibrant places of social interaction and movement of people, commodities and ideas. However from Cerdà to Le Corbusier, from Braudel’s portrayal of these enclaves as trading cities to their Fordist articulation with closed nation-states, the historical (uncompleted) insertion of Mediterranean cities in to capitalist social relations through functional forms of modernist planning and industrialisation and flows of immigration towards Northern Europe, brought to several of them to an awkward relation with the sea, the downplaying of their alleged (if ever existed) Mediterraneity, and set their visions to the North.
Yet, in recent years the urban sphere has been one of the main drivers for the recovering of the concept of Mediterranean. Settled in a new global scenario where cities must envision their identity and future in the socially constructed word of competitiveness, Mediterraneity has become a “unique selling point.” Thus, we see cities opening back to the sea with mega-regeneration projects of their shores, the coming back of pseudo-Mediterranean styles in architecture, the revival of the "Mediterranean lifestyle", the commodification and thematisation of their cultural identity for the sake of tourism, and co-operating in creating urban and regional corridors based on their belonging to a shared sea. At the same time, the urban morphology of these cities is becoming radically transformed towards a more “northerner” model. Downtowns rather than city centres, devoted to business, tourism, housing for the poorer and the richer, mass tourism congregates next to casual workers, leisure resorts stand next to refugee and detention camps, while car-dependant middle classes head towards suburban sprawl.
These processes and contradictions are further entrenched with the increasing importance and volume of mobility in the area: from migration flows coming from both the Global South and North, the circulation of commodities and resources, to the new demands of city sprawl. Cities around the globe are less zones of occupation as theorised by the Chicago School than a range of networks composed through the journeys and movements of people.
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