Mediterranean Cities and Gardens. Structures and Sustainability

In recent years researches on new ‘sustainable urban forms’ were influenced by theories based on polycentric growth, integration between town and country, enhancement of ecological corridors, and urban agriculture. This displays the necessity to bring back to an inter-scalar vision of the ratio between ‘elements’, ‘structures’ and ‘systems’, which make a territory ‘sustainable’ - focusing on the design of gardens and orchards, intended as ‘linking structures’ between architectural, urban, water and territorial systems – as well as to develop design theories for urban agriculture, intended as one of the inter-scalar components of the landscape, new centralities for peripheral areas. In a time when agriculture and gardens are having a new significant role in defining urban and territorial sustainability, a clear Mediterranean individuality hasn’t been found yet. This entails the consequence that urban and territorial plans for Mediterranean cities are poorly integrated with the real environmental vocation of sites and, consequently, improper to their specific historical, cultural, and hence territorial individuality. This paper aims to demonstrate, through the reading of sustainable Mediterranean urban landscape structures, the possibility of re-propose high degree self-sustainability ‘urban systems’, appropriate, in their architectural form, to regional characteristics. Case studies will be taken into account, in order to highlight their inter-scalar consistency with territorial organism and architectural elements.