Emerging landscapes in Mediterranean port cities. An approach to recode maritime identity.

For a long time main places of urban public life, strongly representative of Mediterranean urban identity, in XX century ports became mostly inaccessible and specialized spaces. Given the capital role it plays on the economic and geopolitical level, the modern global shipping has been free to erode the distinctive urban topography that included ports and the sea, transfiguring the maritime identity of these cities. Is it possible today to recompose the unity of these particular urban landscapes, even during port full activity, making them the expression of a renewed common identity? The issue has long been debated but it is still unsolved since related planning strategies failed in this endeavour. We need to rethink the relationship between port and city on new bases. Fostering “relationships projects”, the landscape approach shifts the reflection from space to the communities that inhabit it. Introducing the definition of emerging landscapes as an interpretative category, the article shows ports through the changing lens of each user’s community in order to recap their contemporary history and recompose the scattered mosaic of port’s imaginary in the city. This reading, experimented in Mediterranean cities, traces alternative sequences of interpretation according to the prominence of the perception, determined by the European Landscape Convention (ELC), laying the foundations for a design approach capable of rediscovering and enhancing the lost identity of these places.