Mediterranean Landscapes: Between Cultural Development and Sustainable Design

Cities and landscapes are places of collective memory, local identity and inherited architectural characteristics. Today, in the almost completely globalized landscapes along the Mediterranean basin, a rapid urbanization is undermining environmental resources as well as urban and landscape heritage, which is a diverse and non-renewable asset for the cultural layout of our territories. Moreover, even if today agriculture and gardens are having a new significant role in defining urban and territorial sustainability, landscape design for Mediterranean cities is poorly integrated with the real environmental vocation of sites and with the specific historic, cultural, and territorial characteristics. In this framework landscape design should play a linking role between architectural, urban and territorial system. It is therefore needed to provide actions to recovery the identity of places bringing back to an inter-scalar vision of the ratio between ‘elements’ (buildings and gardens), ‘structures’ (streets and open areas) and ‘systems’ (neighbourhoods), which make an urban territory ‘sustainable’. It is also necessary to focus the design of Mediterranean urban landscapes on gardens and orchards, on their specific ‘forms’, which should be suitable to the local environmental context. Therefore, to shift our design toward a ‘cultural landscape model’ means to begin with a ‘sustainable urban design approach’. This paper deals with the role of landscape design in defining a consistent urban sustainability for the Mediterranean landscape. It aims at demonstrating the possibility of re-proposing high degree self-sustainable ‘urban systems’ functioning thanks to wise techniques of local resources control, and appropriate, in their architectural forms, to the regional cultural characteristics. Case studies will be taken into account, in order to highlight their inter-scalar consistency with both urban organism and architectural elements.