Strategie di sopravvivenza: riciclare – rigenerare – includere nella città medi

Abstract

The transformations that affect the contemporary Mediterranean city make the way of living more and more complex and contaminated. Precariousness is a recurring condition that generates unforeseeable and variable landscapes. It becomes necessary to reassess the city through its layers not only the material ones: you live by recycling spaces, changing relationships, using unusual market strategies. The city loses its apparent organicity but, transforming itself, keeps its basic elements, surviving in self-constructions and appropriation forms, in social relations and in the economic arrangements. The condition of survival becomes strategy and new border of living. The thesis finds its arguments in contexts where environmental and socio-economic conditions produce landscapes at the limits of survival. This is the case of Cairo where entire districts have been transformed by the huge demand of survival. In particular, the paper wants to deepen the study case of the City of the Dead. Initially occupied by temporary structures of adoring relatives, Al-Qarāfa is today inhabited by about a million of Egyptians. The population density is high and the services aren't always enough, so the local authorities decided in the 2010 to demolish entire sections of the cemetery through the implementation of the development plan Cairo 2050, changing the original structure of the area. What is the role of the project? What are the political, economic and social models capable of regenerating the contemporary mediterranean city? Can we still speak of 'Mediterranean model'?