Cultural diversities in the Mediterranean city: urbanscape amid local diversities and global transformations

The most complete cultural definition of landscape -a complex of transformations produced in the countryside by a community that lives there - has become the main item of theoretical and practical debate on urban planning and architecture. The architect-planner, playing the role of "Demiurge", shouldn't forget that his creative action needs to be interpreted from the perspective of two conceptual triads: the Vitruvian paradigm firmitas-utilitas-venustas and the interaction architecture-planning-society. The city isn't an expression of one or more individuals but is a social event created and developed by a combined action of plans and free-will activities, political wishes and human needs, radicalisms and intercultural fusions, venustas and utilitas. Anthropic landscape, in general, involves a problematic relationship between local identity factors and global transformation dynamics. Due to pervasive globalisation, urbanscapes appears even less consistent with local character and native populations: cities have become "ports" that receive and distribute people, goods and data from all over the world. (Beguinot, 2008) When these movements will have mixed endogenous and exogenous identities, as the Lorenz butterfly effect exemplifies, we could have erratic consequences. Our thesis is that identity in the city resides in the way the "built city" - the city of stones, streets and other physical elements - reacts to different cultural influences in a changing society, generating humus to nourish the same concept of identity. (Esposito De Vita, 2008) The built city (city of stone) is the typical expression of a historical cultural stratification and is today under the pressure of social transformations that have occurred, in particular, as a result of migratory flows. The break in equilibrium has left the city on a crest between two dualities: crisis/sustainability and identity/globalization. Transferring that approach to the Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean area could be considered a border or a bridge among two worlds. Furthermore, Mediterranean landscapes represent characteristic expressions of complex identities which have been moulded by encounters of a multiplicity of cultures. These aspects of the Mediterranean should be considered both critical factors as well as resources for building a process of landscape recovery and remodelling which is oriented to redefining an inclusive identity. This research process focuses on a methodological definition of multicultural semantic values of the city in order to define guidelines for a new architecture "of dialogue and for dialogue" that can provide "new useful connections" in the existing city, encouraging interactions between diversities to build a new cultural footprint: a transforming identity.