1. The Mediterranean Basin as a point of reference for an emergent region

Recent political and economical shifts can be considered as possible break-offs of Mediterranean nations with in-land identities, and consequently pose an opportunity to advocate Mediterraneanism through the reframing of the sea once more as a common operative territory. If one is to treat the sea as a site – a locus of contestation, economical, recreational and subversive – one could better understand and promote the qualitative jump that port cities and coastal territories might potentially undergo. If we are to consider the region as a super-urban entity, the challenge, addressed by recent research into the rising power of transnational networks, is to frame a native model which would inform future planning motivations.
One model we would like to advocate for is that of the sea crossing. Two maritime crossing strategies have been historically responsible for shaping the Mediterranean port-city and hinterlands as well as advancing its culture and trade:
(1) The cabotage – to sail parallel to the coast, circumscribing the Mediterranean like a blind man feeling around a room, enabled the dissemination of culture and goods as well as local diplomacy and allegiance. That is primarily a linear model of progression, in which cultural borders were assigned perpendicular to seafaring movement.
(2) The lateral crossing, born of advanced navigational technologies, readied the region for the creation of port networks and the various sea empires whose fluid borders were demarcated by shipping routes and island forts. This was predominantly a temporal model which allowed the coexistence of contesting entities to simultaneously inhabit a single territory.
Gradually both strategies of association have been exhausted. First, the archaic cabotage has lost all of its functional motivations with the advent of steam ships in the 19th century. Later, lateral crossing ports also lost their viability with the opening of the Suez Canal (which did succeed in brining a short lived renaissance to certain port networks) and the concentration of trade around the mega-ports of the North Sea – that ‘other’ Mediterranean. The introduction of aviation, which completely replaced maritime crossings, further marginalized the coast as international airports stretched inland, widening the historical rift between interior capitals and port cities. Post-war realities have further robbed the sea of any formal role in trade or diplomacy. Crossings nowadays consist mainly of vacation cruises, local trade and the occasional clandestine movement of peoples and goods.

2. The Floating Symposium

The Mediterranean Sea has no tidal movement, which means its waters’ edge is constant. However, its outer boundary ¬– the outer extent of its influence ¬– is ever-more fluid. What lies without was always clearer – a homogeneity of landscapes and peoples; it is what’s inside that remains elusive. Rather than detecting collective identities in the process of reframing the region, we believe the most common trait of the Mediterranean has always been its profusion of localities – an extended archipelago – the world’s oldest and most enduring model of a world within a world. An extended archipelago approach to a super-urban Mediterranean can reactivate its inherent ability to amalgamate diversity, that is, to extend the logic of the sea inland and approach local entities as semi-autonomous Odysseian worlds. The ‘abnormal’ mixture of societies within its modern nation states (ethnical, national, religious etc.) can be reinterpreted as the region’s ability to promote the coexistence of cultures.

Our argument is that the organizational logic of the region can only be deciphered from the starboard side of a vessel, approaching cities from the sea. We believe that an academic conference, aimed at an exchange of ideas and the dissemination of knowledge, needs to reflect the physical transfer of culture and goods. Odysseys will be a “floating symposium” on Mediterranean super-urbanism. This sailing seminar, predated by CIAM’s seafaring journey from Marseilles to Athens as well as the Doxiadis initiative of the 1963 Greek-Islands cruise, will consist of a short hauling between port-cities, where invited guests will board and disembark at the various stops, serving as a modern-day, intellectual cabotage.

The Mediterranean Society is a student organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for promoting a Mediterranean discourse, which transcends national and cultural barriers through inter-disciplinary research into coastal geographies and port-cities. The society was founded by Yonatan Cohen, Iddo Ginat and Andrea Pavia.