TOWARDS A SENSORY METROPOLIS Everyone has his or her own image of a Mediterranean city. Above all, it is a series of sensations: the intense blue sky, the sparkling sea, the pine trees swaying in the breeze, the laundry hanging from the corners of apartment windows, the particular sound of the wind, the clacking of petanque balls, the too-noisy motorbikes, the conversations that float through the air until late at night, the smells that waft amidst the streets. [ + ]
TOWARDS A SENSORY METROPOLIS
Everyone has his or her own image of a Mediterranean city. Above all, it is a series of sensations: the intense blue sky, the sparkling sea, the pine trees swaying in the breeze, the laundry hanging from the corners of apartment windows, the particular sound of the wind, the clacking of petanque balls, the too-noisy motorbikes, the conversations that float through the air until late at night, the smells that waft amidst the streets. Impressions such as these do not easily find a place in manuals of urbanism. They are, however, what makes Mediterranean cities so unique and beautiful. Well beyond their territorial and administrative divisions, cities in the Mediterranean arc share similar cultural and experiential features. From Genova to Barcelona, through Nice, Marseille and Montpellier, the ten million inhabitants of the area each embrace the same landscape—that is, one that faces the sea, and is most often flanked by the pronounced reliefs of the hinterland. They bask in the same climate that creates similarities in their rhythms and their daily preoccupations.
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Imagine a city that is not just a single entity, but a place that absorbs, transforms, and expresses a whole, from Barcelona to Genoa. The word “city” is incapable of describing it, because “city” is much too small, narrow and old a term. [ + ]
Imagine a city that is not just a single entity, but a place that absorbs, transforms, and expresses a whole, from Barcelona to Genoa. The word “city” is incapable of describing it, because “city” is much too small, narrow and old a term. Imagine a spatial and social phenomenon of another type altogether, for which we would have to use the word “urban”, despite the difficulty of employing it as a noun since it has been an adjective for so long. Yet we must get used to using this word in order to better understand the geographical reality that has come into play over the course of the last few decades of generalized urbanization. This activity, it must be remembered, has in such a short time imposed its ways of life and its related spaces as a reference point. The world is being built with a new urban pervasiveness. Indeed, urbanization has become much more than a demographic movement. It has managed to replace the mode of reference of social organization (the industrial city that reigned from 1800 to 1950 and that was once one of the instruments of European domination) with another: the urban sphere, whose diffusion contributes to and is an expression of globalization and its new geographies of power. The word “city” thus no longer applies to what it seems to designate. In order to accept such an affirmation, the following question must be considered: Why do human beings build specific modes of arrangement of social reality that were once called cities, and that today are called urban formations? A geographer would respond that both terms refer to the possible material and ideal configurations invented by societies to address the issues of separation and distance, whilst managing to combine the major spatial strategies of co-presence, mobility, and more recently, telecommunications.
Michel Lussault
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