ancient cities

for congregation of different population groups,
eavesdropping into the private lives of others,
according to Pierro della Francesca.
The most prominent historian of the
Mediterranean-as-a-bridge, communicating cultural
interaction and technological interconnection,
was Fernand Braudel. He was writing in the first
decades after World War II, partly reacting to the
conventional contrast between Christian and
Muslim cultures, as were anthropologists simultaneously
working in Africa and constructing a view
about a unified Mediterranean. During a later
period, however, they were all criticized by scholars
who considered the Mediterranean as fragmented
or as a sort of political counterreference (us versus
them) of the “advanced” northern Europe.
In fact, the center of Europe would abandon the
Mediterranean after the fifteenth century: The sea
became a border and Europe was redefined vis-à-vis
the others, the outsiders, after the defeat of the Moors
and the Spanish Reconquista by 1492. This very year
Columbus embarked for America, bringing Spanish
and Portuguese ports driving the explorations to
hegemony. A new reality emerged around the urban
Mediterranean. The shift to the north, away from
Africa, followed by half a century the fall of
Constantinople and Ottoman occupation of the eastern
Mediterranean in 1453. The region was divided
into Orient and Occident for about four centuries
after that, and this divide became as rigid as the
north/south one in the fragmented Mediterranean.
Postcolonial and Modern Cities
in the Divided Mediterranean
During the next centuries, all cities of southern Europe
were marginalized and surpassed by northern ports
in Belgium and Holland (Bruges, Antwerp,
Amsterdam), and then London. The remarkable
Industrial Revolution pushed the Mediterranean
down from core to peripheral status in the global
economy in a slow process of decline from the
seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The celebrated
Industrial Revolution—the factory, the railroad,
the capitalist economy—did not take root in the
south. Mediterranean civilizations crystallized
instead around the urban-oriented cultures, which
sought dignity in geographical imaginations of the
city as a space for citizenship, synonymous with
civilization (polis/politismos).
Mediterranean Cities
495
Urbanism has largely accounted for fast urbanization
waves irrespective of late industrialization.
A process of urbanization without industrialization,
or rather, urbanization—triggered by poverty and
insecurity in the countryside, informal work opportunities
in the cities, the memory of the radiant citystates
and the quest for the cultural identity of the
urban citizen—made Mediterranean cities among
the largest in the world. In 2006, population
exceeded 10 million in Cairo (15.8) and Istanbul
(11.6); 5 million in Madrid and Alexandria; close to
4 million in Algiers, Casablanca, and Milan; and
3 million in Barcelona, Athens, Rome, and Naples.
While divisions continued to be emphasized,
scholars also saw Mediterranean unity by reference
to either ease of communications or common physical
features and ecologies. Geographers and urbanists
who have analyzed the Mediterranean during the
twentieth century consider the sea as a single entity
(or a bridge) only within the orbit of environmental
studies. EU cooperation programs did not have much
success or duration and hardly touched the cities.
They have tackled diplomacy and politics, or economy,
considering peripherality and underdevelopment,
but they mostly dealt with the environment,
desertification, water pollution, and energy sources.
There are also tourism cooperation projects.
Although tourism differs radically among Mediterranean
regions and cities, especially after September 11,
2001, the tourist gaze is inspired by memories from
the period when the Mediterranean was a bridge
among cosmopolitan cities and captured by cultural
hybridity. Arabian ruins are protected in both Africa
and the Iberian Peninsula, contributing to Andalusian
cultural identities; antiquity is recycled in Greek and
Italian Christian churches, which are often built with
stones and columns from ancient temples. Although
secular and speculative building has since surrounded
Mediterranean sacred spaces and ruins, it has never
eradicated their presence or attractiveness to residents
as well as global tourists.
Speculation includes illegal building and squatting,
which constitutes a massive urban social movement.
Precarious but popular owner occupation in
illegal self-built shacks ensures that poverty does not
automatically lead to homelessness; shacks may
improve as the family income grows into more solid
popular housing, sprawling onto cheap suburban
land. In this and other ways, modernity has been
diluted in informal modes of living and working.