The Open Conflict Space. Survival Strategies for the Contemporary Mediterranean Town

Abstract

The so-called Arab Spring has conquered the main Mediterranean towns squares turning on unpredictable and intricate decolonization processes necessarily involving and upsetting local and global economies. Nomadic and informal ways of living overcome the colonial patterns by shaping brand new networks inside huge or tiny situations. Planning, by itself, can’t give no more answers: the open conflict space, as a survival condition, becomes the sole available strategy able to set up again the Mediterranean context.
A new sight is needed for the link between two scales defines the open conflict space in which strategy becomes project. The geographic scale allows a study on the geopolitical southern Mediterranean cities upheavals and the borderline condition, although territory marking gives it back its significance; the architectural scale, instead, arranges the open space borders by setting up town’s ownership and management that are useful to the project.
The protests involving a large part of northern Africa, albeit through different circumstances and features, have given back squares an iconic value, since then too much stifled by regimes repression: from Tunisia to Syria, from Libya to Bahrein, from Egypt to Turkey.

The survey shows up the urban changes through these spaces complexities and deep meanings.