The Mediterranean City-World

The essay contributes to the OMB series (Observatory of the Mediterranean Basin) a “Joint Center of Excellence” of UNECE (United Nation Economic Commission for Europe) and POLIS University that focuses on issues of sustainability and resilience in the areas of housing, planning and urban development. The paper elaborates on the notion of 'opposed but accessible shores' at the basis of the emergence of the urban Mediterranean world. After entropic centuries following the dissolution of the Roman empire, Abulafia’s paradigm of the Third Mediterranean describes from a historical perspective the consolidation of a new regime of space-production based on urban centers around the venerable basin. In the twelfth century, the Mediterranean is, according to Abulafia, a crossable surface contained by narrow edges dotted with towns and cities. Shores opposed by overt religious and political conflicts are connected by myriads of commercial fluxes. Tolerated since mutually beneficial, the commerce is vector of ideas and expressions between permanently distinct cultures. These intense interactions imprint an urban system onto the coastal topographies of southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. The global switch from a polycentric to a diffusive settlement mode, that is from urban to regional space production, has been commented by an extended literature alongside the demise of the sensed border between city and countryside. In the face of the global diffusion of extensive regional settlements, an urban-based attitude in space-production at the geographic scale is still recognizable around the Mediterranean. Bearing on the medieval travelogues of Ibn Jubayr and Benjamin de Tudela, this paper elaborates a design-oriented narrative on the space-production regime introduced by Abulafia’s model of the Third Mediterranean.