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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Mediterranean Neighbourhoods: Is There an Alternative Governance Model for Local Identities?

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Back in 2002, Le Galès acknowledged that European cities are composed of increasingly diverse social and cultural groups. As Beck and many others state, most world cities are experiencing a deep change, due to cosmopolitanism and globalization. However, there is one scale of analysis that might at first appear entirely unrelated to the new emerging spatialities (conurbations, city regions, post-metropolises). This scale is the neighbourhood, which looks like a relic of a now lost time. The authors believe that neighbourhoods host the majority of urban social (sometimes ‘insurgent’) movements, along with interesting negotiations of governance processes: therefore, they cannot be rejected as useless and outdated realities, even within contemporary European cities. The main topic the authors discuss concerns the applicability of the traditional Anglo-American notion of neighbourhood to Mediterranean cities. Is globalization determining the diffusion of just one model of neighbourhood (i.e. the Anglo-American) all over the world? Or is there a distinctive Mediterranean model of local identities for our cities? Starting from the analysis of case studies from Italy and Spain, the paper suggests the need of describing Mediterranean neighbourhoods in a new way, while strengthening their role as the ‘connecting ground between private and public spaces’ (de Certeau).