Mediterraneo: Entre el puerto y la ciudad.

Resumen

Mediterranean port areas present three peculiarities: plurality, centrality and mobi/ity. The relationship between port and city in Mediterranean coastal cities must be tackled avoiding the speculative trend opposed to the rigid separation and mechanical integration of both territories.The cohabitation of both territories and their reciprocal insertion are possible thanks to the clarification of their differences, analogies and "tuning", matured through decades of coexistence and common use of infrastructures. These differences are physical and spatial, but also cultural and social; they are based on different political and economic management, but also on the inertia of two different imaginaries. Only by preserving and clarifying their uncompromising diversity, can the landscapes of wharfs, streets and squares touch once more without forming residual gaps. Large Mediterranean port cities are complex and compound locations, and as a radical alternative, should avoid the monotony of the model of large American and Oriental ports, where immense squares proposed for the movement of containers and polished ports for mass tourism are alternated. These are places where architects can surprise, generate scale changes, resonances between different and distant spaces . Therefore it is an integral idea of city, and not simply a problem of modernisation awaiting the chance to transform Mediterranean ports.