Land-Sea Spaces and Infrastructures: the Mediterranean as an Edge, a Continent, a Cluster

Beatrice Moretti; Francesco Garofalo; Davide Servente

doi:10.6092/issn.2612-0496/16879

Authors

Beatrice Moretti DAD, University of Genoa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0214-991X

Architect, PhD, Assistant Professor at DAD Department Architecture and Design, UniGe. Since 2015, she is part of the Integrated Studio “Coastal Design Lab”, led by Prof. C. Andriani. Moretti is author of the books “Un colle, un transatlantico, un nome. Tre storie sul porto di Genova” (Sagep 2018), “Beyond the Port City. The Condition of Portuality and the Threshold Concept” (JOVIS 2020), “A Landscape Infra-structure Research. Roma Tuscolana Pilot Project” (ListLab 2022, with G. Tucci). Currently, she is Principal Investigator for the project "PULSE - The Port-clUster LandScapE: Developing a Spatial and Design Approach to Port Clusters" funded under NextGenerationEU.
Francesco Garofalo Openfabric

Born in France in 1983, he moved to the Netherlands in 2008 where he founded Openfabric in 2011, an international urban/rural design practice based in Rotterdam and Milan, with projects ranging from small installations up to the large geographical scale of regional strategies. He is Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture Master at Politecnico di Milano and Visiting Lecturer at London Metropolitan University.
Davide Servente DAD, University of Genoa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5937-9639

Architect, PhD, Assistant Professor at DAD Department Architecture and Design, UniGe. He founded the multidisciplinary research collective ICAR65. His research focuses on the relationship between public art, urban spaces, ordinariness in architecture and strategies for coastal heritage reuse. In 2020, he published for Sagep the books “Il Museo PopUp. Arte pubblica e spazio urbano” and “Abitare nel Tempo. Venti ville del Novecento” (with A. Canevari).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2612-0496/16879

Keywords:

Moving Edge, Migrating Landscape, Port Clusters, Solid Sea, Liquid Continent

Abstract

Looking for new visions and tools for land-sea integrated planning, the article aims to reason on a reconceptualization of the contemporary Mediterranean through exceptional cases of design and representation. Whether they are utopian projects from the early twentieth century, such as Atlantropa (1928), or up-to-date critical mappings, such as Migrating Mediterranean (2022), they are works aimed at capturing the heterogeneity and at the same time compactness of this millennial water basin. If the utopian project of Atlantropa took the coastal edge of the Mediterranean as its main area of action, irreversibly modifying its morphology through new infrastructures, the critical map Migrating Mediterranean reverses the interpretation by focusing on the aquatic surface and, actually, on the multiple ways of settlement and circulation on and across the sea. Through these interpretations, the Mediterranean is seen time to time as an edge, a continent and a cluster. In the latter meaning – the Mediterranean as a cluster – its relational potential emerges proposing it as a key area for experimentation in the field of infrastructure and osmotic land-sea circulation. The perspective offered by the cluster regime turns the Mare Nostrum into a quintessential workspace for testing the new tactics offered by spatial clustering.

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Land-Sea Spaces and Infrastructures: the Mediterranean as an Edge, a Continent, a Cluster

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