Mediterranean Cities
Between history, theory and the present day, a journey through cities of ‘mare nostrum’
Predrag Matvejevic
Split photo Giuseppe Accardo (trakatan)
Every city, to some extent, lives on its memories. Mediterranean cities probably more than others. In them, the past is always competing with the present. The future is seen more from the former than the latter point of view. Around the perimeter of the ‘Inland Sea’, representations of reality are easily confused with reality itself – and very often one replaces the other.
The theme of the Mediterranean city revolves around history and geography, architecture or urban planning, without exhausting the subject. It is nourished by different kinds of renderings or reminiscences, approximations. The ways of ‘approaching’ and ‘recounting’ neither link nor unite. Reiterating the manner in which Marco Polo would have described to the great Kubla Khan the cities he encountered on his travels, Italo Calvino speaks of ‘invisible cities’, and aptly formulates some valuable advice: “We must not confuse the city with the discourse that describes it, as there exists an evident relation between one and the other.
Cities that have excessively heterogeneous or inward-looking components are doomed
The idea of a Mediterranean made from a variety of routes, maritime and terrestrial, presupposes various stopping places: points of arrival and departure, ports and harbours, “a network of cities holding hands”, as the historian Braudel puts it. They are places that change continually, albeit preserving their most recognizable features. These transformations prompt nostalgia. In that sense, the theme of the Mediterranean city becomes sentimental. This is equally valid for the image that accompanies it.
Napoli, photo Jesus O’Bof (trakatan)
Some specialists maintain that in the Mediterranean area cities do not come into being as in other places – namely, evolving from a village – rather, they spawn villages all around and determine their function. A widely shared vocabulary happily advocates and usefully offers diverse series of elements, phenomena or characteristics pertaining to the organization or running of the polis or local politics: buildings and institutions, statutes and ceremonies, administration and land offices, flags, coats of arms and seals, public squares, towers, forts and stairways.
One must be able to distinguish, more accurately than one normally does, the coastal cities in the common sense of the term from the authentic port cities. In the former, the harbours have often been built from necessity, while in the latter they have appeared quite naturally. The former almost always remain jetties for embarkation and disembarkation or mooring, the latter become unique places, sometimes worlds in themselves. It is impossible to imagine the Mediterranean without those ports.
As the poet of Alexandria says, they are cities that “follow us everywhere”: they even follow us in our dreams. “By its nature the city does not possess the absolute unity that some attribute to it”. This consideration, so prescient, comes to us from antiquity, formulated by Aristotle. Three days after the fall of Babylon, Aristotle recalls in Politics, “an entire quarter of the city was unaware of the occurrence”. Cities that have excessively heterogeneous or inward-looking components are doomed. According to another warning, which appears in Plato’s Republic, “the city should never extend beyond the limit in which, though it becomes larger, it conserves its unity”.
Genova, photo Andrea Dapueto
This sage advice has rarely been taken. The Mediterranean cities have undergone their evolution losing or recovering unity or coherence in the past or in the present. They bear the scars of their splendour and, just as evidently, their eclipses. These days they share numerous problems with continental cities, far from the coast. Here there are questions of conservation or management, of scarcity of space or excessive growth, of land use and environmental protection, of illegal or unregulated construction, of immigration and rejection, of communication between citizens, between the ‘old population’ and ‘newcomers’, of mutating ‘city rights’.
Some of these problems, which depend on a more general order of things, are present throughout the Mediterranean area, although from time to time they may be more specific. The more ancient cities are typified by complex stratification: a kind of verticality that is rather difficult to protect and manage. In these, connections with one or more historic districts combine with traditional or new relations that link the city with its port. With urban spread there is the risk of losing discrete characteristics as it extends and renders uniform. Thus an identity of being (architecture, customs, language) no longer manages to find an appropriate, indispensable, identity of doing.
In this jumble of ‘forms’ and ‘content’, the city often takes refuge in memory in order not to betray itself. The majority of the old Mediterranean ports no longer have the same importance they once had on world maps. Some are resigned to being just ‘leisure ports’. Others are rebuilding in response to contingent demands that have little respect for their special nature.
On the southern shore, the ‘oil towns’ have not emerged from a maturing of the relationship between production and demography, but from an almost tentative, unanticipated economic situation. While writing this piece, at different points along the North African coast, I had the chance to learn neologisms such as bazaaring or soukization. More than one practicing Muslim laments the fact that in modern cities the medina no longer occupies the place it deserves (in the Qur’an the word medina is mentioned seventeen times, to emphasize the importance of a settled habitat over nomadism).
Tangier, photo Melania Comoretto (trakatan)
Certain urban-planning texts, published with the aid of rich oil-producing countries, denounce the dualism manifested in the form of “hybrid urban models, barely observant of the Islamic code and the Shari’ah”, and urge “the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of Muslim countries”. The relative transgressions, if that is what to call them, are not just the consequence of the misdeeds of colonialism: a stroll around the streets of Tunis or Algiers, or especially of Istanbul (Taksim Meydani) or even Tripoli is enough to support this statement.
We have already heard similar complaints from the practitioners of other religions, Christians or Jews: compared to the past, consecrated space has diminished, as much in Athens as Naples, Barcelona or Dubrovnik. In this case is it a question of a certain laicizing of cities that have experienced in the past, or still meet with today, the spectres of fanaticism or intolerance? It seems likely. We shouldn’t complain about it too much.
Whatever the point of view, urban models in the pure state will not be easy to find. “It is men who make cities and not the walls alone or ships without passengers”, recalled Thucydides at the dawn of history. Down the millennia the men he was talking about have intermingled. No ‘ethnic cleansing’ could effectively succeed in separating one from the other.
Is it possible to imagine the city without recalling the Mediterranean cities? They are impressed in our memory to the point that whatever ignominy they should undergo it will never be enough to cancel them out, or even render them disagreeable.
