Il Fronte Mare

This book is the result of research promoted by the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, which has made the UN objectives on Sustainable Development for 2030 its “Mission and Vision”; the reference to these objectives, to issues of inequalities, conditions of inclusiveness and security of the city, to the fact that its space can be the physical site of the unrelenting opposition between different cultures, to which the impoverishment and loss of identity of the urban environment can be ascribed, has contributed to the choice of Acre as case study. Acre, also known as St. John of Acre, was a crusader capital and then an important Ottoman city and is inhabited today mainly by an Arab Palestinian, but politically Israeli, population. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2001 and has become the “paradigm city” for addressing themes of architectural and urban design and its methods. The present paper, "il Fronte Mare" is therefore an attempt to formulate a historical excursus of the current state of the city, looking at its possible future; the reflections made on the basis of the description of the structural transformations of ancient Acre show that there is an indissoluble physical relationship between the various components of the city, and that cannot be ignored in the attempt to revive the internal process of life and orient its future. Antique Acre presents itself as a complex that can only be defined through its “urban unity”, which the morphological state of the urban fabric allows us to identify by means of a subdivision into contexts, within the limits of the invariability of its configuration.