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

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.

Keywords

• moving edge
• migrating landscape
• port clusters
• solid sea
• liquid continent