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THE SEA AND THE CITIES
Welcome to the “Sea and the Cities”.
The Fondazione Mediterraneo has developed
its activities through a specific and comprehensive collaboration
with the major Euro-Mediterranan cities and has created for this
purpose the co-partnership, “Euromedcity”.
In its own way, every city lives on its memories, and this is probably
truer of the Mediterranean cities, where the past is always in competition
with the present, than elsewhere. The future in these cities more
frequently reflects the former rather than the latter. Around the
entire shore of this “internal sea” the representation
of reality is frequently confused with reality itself.
The Mediterranean city is usually described in
terms of its history, geography, architecture and urban planning,
but its reality does not stop there. It is also enhanced by the
evocation of a variety of reminiscences and attitudes. The “approach
to things” and the way of “talking about things”,
however, are neither unified nor uniform. They trace the manner
in which Marco Polo might have described to the great Kublai Kahn
the cities he had encountered in his travels. Italo Calvino writes
about “Invisible Cities “ and offers some very valuable
recommendations: “we should not confuse the city itself with
the description we make of it, even if there is an evident relation
between the two”.
The idea of a Mediterranean made up of a series of maritime and
overland routes presupposes a series of departure points, destinations,
ports of call and stopping places, or as the historian Braudel would
say: “a network of cities that are directly linked”.
These are places that are constantly changing, even if they preserve
their most recognisable features. Their transformations give rise
to a sense of nostalgia, at which the discussion of the Mediterranean
city takes on a sentimental character, and this is equally true
for the collective consciousness that goes with it.
Some scholars maintain that the Mediterranean cities do not arise,
as they have done elsewhere, from the development of a village,
but on the contrary, they themselves generate all the villages around
it and determine their functions. There exists a rather standardised
list of elements, particular phenomena and characteristics of the
function of the polis: buildings institutions, statutes, ceremonies,
administration, plans, flags, coats of arms, seals, public squares,
towers and citadels, stairs and “abstractions”.
We should make a clearer distinction than we normally do between
the typical coastal cities and those that are true ports. In the
former the ports have often been built out of sheer necessity, whereas
in the latter they have appeared in a manner that is totally natural.
The former are nearly always confined to being points of embarkation
and landing, while the latter develop into places with special characteristics,
and sometimes become almost autonomous worlds. It is impossible
to imagine the Mediterranean without such ports.
The cities “follow us everywhere”, even in our dreams,
as the poet from Alexandria wrote. “The city does not possess
that form of absolute uniformity that some ascribe to it”.
This premonitory consideration comes to us from antiquity and was
formulated by “Stagirites” (as Thucydides named Aristotle).
Three days after the fall of Babylon in his “Politics”
Thucydides again recalls that “an entire part of the city
was not aware of the event”. Cities that have excessively
heterogeneous or isolated elements are doomed. In another warning
in Plato’s “Republic” we read: “the city
should never extend beyond the confines which, even when they are
expanded, preserve its unity”.
Today these recommendations are seldom heeded.
Both in their past and present evolution the Mediterranean cities
have lost and regained their unity and coherence. Their splendours,
as well as their eclipses, bear the scars of these changes. Today
the maritime cities share many of the problems of cities that are
far from the coast, and which are related to conservation and administration,
lack of space or excessive expansion, urban and territorial planning
and the protection of the environment, the phenomenon of unauthorised
and unchecked construction, problems relating to immigration or
rejection, the insufficient communication between their inhabitants,
between their “old inhabitants” and those recently arrived,
and of the changing “statutes if the cities”
Some of these problems depend on more general issues present in
the whole of the Mediterranean area, though they are, at times,
rather more specific. The more ancient cities are affected by a
more complex vertical stratification, which makes for planning and
administrative problems. Internal communications with one or more
historical centres coexist with traditional or more modern connections
with the city’s port.
As far as the horizontal urban characteristics of the cities is
concerned, the risk here is of a loss of the city’s identity
though excessive extension and uniformity. Hence identity of being
(architecture, customs and languages) is no longer sufficiently
linked to an essential identity of doing.
In this jumbled interplay of form and content the city often takes
refuge in its memories, so as to remain true to itself. The majority
of the Mediterranean ports no longer have the same importance as
they had in past. Some of them have resigned themselves to being
solely tourist ports, while others have reorganised in response
to contingent needs, and without the proper respect for their specific
characteristics.
The “oil cities” in the southern part of the Mediterranean
did not arise from a mature response to the relation between production
and population, but from a set of unexpected and almost secondary
circumstances. While writing the present text, I have learned of
the existence in various parts of the Magreb coastline of neologisms
such as “bazaar-isation” or “sukiz-isation”.
It is not uncommon for practising Moslems to complain that in modern
cities the medina no longer occupies the same importance as before
(in the Koran the word medina is mentioned seventeen times, to underline
the importance of a sedentary habitat in contrast with a nomadic
one). Some texts on urban planning that have been published with
the help of the oil-rich countries lament the “dualism”
manifest in “hybrid urban models that are insufficiently respectful
of the Islamic Code or of the “Shari’aha”, and
demand “the conservation of the cultural network of the Moslem
nations”. These transgressions, if we can so define them,
are not only the results of the misdeeds of colonialism, as a walk
through Tunis, Algiers, and above all Istambul (Taksim Meydani)
and even Tripoli would make plain.
We have had occasion to hear similar complaints from practitioners
of different religions, both Christians and Jews: the religious
space has decreased in comparison to the past as much in Athens
as in Naples, in Barcelona and in Dubrovnik. In these cases is it
a question of a sort of secularisation of the cities, which in the
past have been, and even today still continue to be haunted by the
spectres of fanaticism and intolerance? This would seem likely,
and therefore we should not complain so much.
Whichever way one looks at it, it will not be easy to find ideal
urban models. “it is men who make up the cities, not the walls,
nor ships without passengers” Thucydides reminds us , writing
from the dawn of recorded history. The men of which he wrote have
become amalgamated in the course of millennia. No form of “ethnic
cleansing” would ever be able to fully distinguish them from
one another.
Is it possible to imagine the city without recalling the cities
of the Mediterranean? They are so firmly fixed in our memory that
no matter what level of degradation they underwent woud never be
able to cancel them, or even make them unpleasant.
Michele Capasso
President of the Fondazione Mediterraneo
Predrag Matvejevic'
President of the Scientific Council
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