So where are we when we are in a small interior? In which way can a world, its opening to boundlessness notwithstanding, be an intimately divided global sphere? Where are the worlds-to-come, if they are in bipolar Intimssphaeren or bubbles? 1
— Peter Sloterdijk
“What is the Mediterranean?” The Oxford English Dictionary responds to the question by defining “Mediterranean,” from the Latin mediterraneus, meaning “in the middle of the land,” as an adjective that characterizes an almost landlocked space. But it also suggests distinct characteristics and stereotypes that indicate the boundedness––characteristics and degree of boundaries seen from many different perspectives––of a territory, without actually determining how bound or unbound the territorial and cultural limits are. Cultural historian Iain Chambers defines this territory in-between Europe, Asia, and Africa as “Medi-terranean,” arguing it is “an interleaved and multi-stratified constellation, a point of dispersion and dissemination, rather than a single, concentrated unity.” (Chambers 2013)
Mediterranean scholars––historians such as Fernand Braudel, Nicolas Purcell and Peregrine Horden, David Abulafia, or social scientists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michael Herzfeld whose sometimes overlapping and contradictory perspectives we continue to use––answer questions about the Mediterranean in their own way and employ different epistemic frameworks within which they believe the region unfolds. (Petrov 2013) The study of the Mediterranean is so rich that the methodological conjectures over investigations invite differences between disciplinary perspectives, as does the Mediterranean itself by emphasizing “the narcissism of small differences,” (Sarkis, Herzfeld, Ben-Yehoyada 2013) keeping the omnipresence of distinctions within the territory in constant tension.
With characteristics so elusive, and a geographic coherence so ambiguous, this chapter examines how utopian projects like Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa and Rem Koolhaas’ Eneropa do greater justice to a coherent perception of a Mediterranean territorial integrity by proposing new conceptions of the region’s synthesis. (Fig 1) I argue that by doing so, these projects not only serve as alternatives to scholarly readings of what the Mediterranean is, but also, one could say they do so by radically eliminating “the Mediterranean.” Both schemes replace territorial structures that make the fabric of the Mediterranean and insert modern frameworks that overwrite existing borders, boundaries, and frontiers. Sörgel and Koolhaas promise new territories that not only are sites of new (modern) world orders, but also function as a pivot between geographical and utopian imaginations.
By examining history, geography, and identity as epistemic frameworks—all elements of transformation—I aim to recover how an imaginary of what the Mediterranean (potentially, or actually) is has imposed itself between reality and its symbolic image, upsetting the balance between the two. In a region in which an ambiguous geographic identity has been tenaciously preserved over millennia, in part through its architectural tropes and stereotypes, historical, geographic, and cultural definitions of a Mediterraneanity––causes and effects in relation to a larger Mediterranean identity–– evoke imperceptible bonds beyond stereotypical manifestations that not only determine new regional formations, boundaries, and frontiers, but also distort any cultural a priori.
Are there ways to conceptualize the Mediterranean without “the Mediterranean?” And can the dichotomy between the consistent crisis of spatial and identity politics on one hand, and a Mediterraneanity driven by stereotypes on the other, produce new morphologies that consider complex geographic and cultural parameters of a present-day Mediterranean, if not the world?
History
In The Corrupting Sea, Nicolas Purcell and Peregrine Horden take this fundamental but provocative question—“What is the Mediterranean?”—to new ends. The way they engage with the problem and how they answer it “is as radical as the method they use to arrive at it.” (Lahoud 2013) However, it is impossible to approach their text without looking at the canonical propositions that French historian and leader of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, makes in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Both books question the historic scale of the Mediterranean in new ways, but they depart radically from each other by taking fundamentally different methodological approaches. Rather than organizing history into separate layers as Braudel does, Horden and Purcell begin to define their problem by asking a question, suspending Braudel’s initial propositions. Braudel stressed the analysis of structures and the endless stretching and layering of boundaries and common rhythms in the Mediterranean. (Braudel 1995) In contrast, Horden and Purcell highlight how “kaleidoscopic fragmentations,” in which the tectonics of the region define “microregions,” are based on topographical conditions and delineate how mutual characteristics are points of contention rather than common grounds. (Horden & Purcell 2000)
For Greek philosopher Plato, the Mediterranean is a set of common territories. In a famous passage of Phaedo, Plato envisions a Mediterranean world by describing a common territory in which Greeks gather around a pond like frogs. He describes the experience of a geographically captured space as part of a larger world with other regions, and how it evolves beyond its limitations as a place in which “the earth is very large and . . . we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phasis live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and . . . many other people live in many other such regions.” (Plato & Rowe 1993) He continues:
For I believe there are in all directions on the earth many hollows of very
various forms and sizes, into which the water and mist and air have run
together; but the earth itself is pure and is situated in the pure heaven in
which the stars are, the heaven which those who discourse about such
matters call the ether; the water, mist and air are the sediment of this and
flow together into the hollows of the earth.
Plato is not the only one for whom ambiguity creates utopian potential. In his perception Plato does not identify anything particular to the region, he argues, it is formed just like others elsewhere in the world, equally vaporous. His conception of this world-within-the-world and the combination of critical relationships between history, geography, and identity allow new readings of historic frontiers in the Mediterranean. The true meaning of the contemporary Mediterranean, through the lens of historic readings, however, remains (especially) ambiguous. The Mediterranean in terms of its own history, I would argue, is an epistemological provocation in itself. It seems as if what holds it together also produces the divide; it is the place where the European Union is being tested to its breaking point, capitalism is being questioned, and where issues of migration, immigration, cultural and social inequality become most evident. It is also the region of (global) conflicts: the Israel-Palestine dispute, the wars in the Balkans, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, and the current civil war in Syria. Perhaps the reality of its own boundedness and the resulting crisis is what keeps the Mediterranean as a transitory space in constant tension. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses the analogy of an ill patient going to the doctor to describe the space:
“Crisis” in ancient medicine meant a judgment, when the doctor noted
at the decisive moment whether the sick person would survive or die.
The present understanding of crisis, on the other hand, refers to an
enduring state. So this uncertainty is extended into the future, indefinitely.
It is exactly the same with the theological sense; the Last Judgment was
inseparable from the end of time. Today, however, judgment is divorced
from the idea of resolution and repeatedly postponed. So the prospect of
a decision is ever less, and an endless process of decision never concludes.
(Agamben 2013)
The notion of crisis, and the decisive moment to determine whether the patient is sick, chronically ill, or going to die, is instrumental in the construction of the Mediterranean. Yet the way this illness, or as a matter of fact death, has been used to serve and legitimize political actions deprives the Mediterranean of a fixed identity, leaving citizens across the region without a clear understanding of who they actually are. Ironically, it seems as if what constituted the Roman Mare Nostrum still represents the axis around which the Mediterranean world revolves. But this time it is not ancient, and it distributes strife and controversy instead of a common rhythm. (Vanstiphout 2013) Reforms, continuous conflicts, and destabilizing demonstrations have shaken up the territory and, along with these, the emergence of new democracies with the support of new communication tools and social media endow the region with a continuous restructuring and transformation. These perpetual crises require continual deferment of judgment and of the resolution of identities it would allow.
Fernand Braudel has captured this nature of conflict best in his longue durée2; but conflict was also what he identified as keeping the region together. He employed the term “complementary enemies” to refer to powers condemned to living together and sharing the Mediterranean Sea, with wars and battles as the courte durée incidents in centuries-long periods of cohabitation. (Braudel 1995) In the foreword to the English edition of 1972, Braudel vehemently repeated his claim against the analysis à la Pirenne in which the rise of Islam fatally broke the Mediterranean: “I retain the firm conviction that the Turkish Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian, that the whole sea shared a common destiny, a heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if not identical consequences.” (Braudel 1995) Political activist Predrag Matvejevic captures Braudel’s claims and points out that boundaries in the Mediterranean, and therefore alternative conceptions, are drawn neither in space nor in time. He even goes so far as to assert, “There is in fact no way of drawing them: they are neither ethnic nor historical, state nor national; they are like a chalk circle that is constantly traced and erased, that the winds and waves, that obligations or inspirations, expand or reduce.” (Matvejevic & Heim 1999)
While the Mediterranean’s true definition as a system of interrelating systems is hard to decipher, the speeds at which new shifts and resulting spatial consequences occur have postulated a new level of significance for the readability of the region. Awareness lags behind the emergence of indefinable, shapeless regions devoid of identity, which underscores how current region-making processes in the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, are becoming increasingly transitory. (Thierstein & Agnes 2008) Recent political conflicts have not only spawned new urban and regional morphologies; they also underline how the Mediterranean as a space is contributing to new readings of what is at stake in regionalism and urbanism on a much larger scale. The question is, is the Mediterranean of the twenty-first century being radically transformed by the very means that make it?
Whether through the lens of Horden and Purcell’s kaleidoscopic liquidity or Braudel’s stretching and layering of boundaries, the unfolding of history, geography, and identity is an interface of many systems and networks. The structural differences between these two methodological frameworks allow us to recover new proximities and qualities of a Mediterranean that is separated by politics and crisis. Problems or opportunities that existed within territorial and political boundaries of cities, regions, or even nation-states are radically shifting beyond borders. Some even argue that the limitations of borders in the Mediterranean are exaggerated. I propose that a possible perspective for looking at a new unfolding Mediterranean is by understanding the future of borders there as a locus of innovation, especially in the context of environmental problems, energy, demographics, and infrastructural problems.
The complex history and the multifarious understandings and differentiations of its limitations make it difficult not to look at the region as a space with a “hundred frontiers” (Braudel 1995). The spatio-temporal coordinates of points and lines that separate one place from the other are not simply geographically determined; nor are they understood as cultural constructions that belong to a “semantic field of similar formations across Africa, Asia, and Europe” (Chambers 1995). It is not the hegemonic generalization, or the power over land and water that determines this large field of connected, interconnected, and unconnected urban, regional, and interregional structures. Rather, it is the conflict of “complementary enemies,” (in Braudel’s terms) that are condemned to live together and share the critical space. Cultural conflicts and economic competition have always been fundamental parts of coexistence in the Mediterranean. But historically, conflicts caused by invading powers always resulted in assimilation. Interestingly, this consisted not of assimilation to the dominant party, but assimilation within a deeper geographic logic that kept borders mobile and uncertain, and more “a horizon than a cartographic projection.” (Braudel 1995)
The distinctiveness and the meaning of the region, whether considered globally or regionally, is no longer defined by its natural frontiers (coast, islands, mountain ranges, the hinterland) that function as interpreters of signs and symptoms of historic and cultural values. Nor, if we refer to it as a lifestyle or an ecology, is it a moral geography or a physical one; neither north nor south, Europe, Africa, nor Asia determine what the Mediterranean is. The liquidity of the frontiers in this uncentered historical Kulturraum are what offer new understandings of active limitations and a new sense of scalar dimensions within different territories all over the world. The complexity of the issues and conflicts, climate and the environment, and other new parameters makes it difficult to clearly differentiate the scalar frames that are based on cultural and economic constructs operating in a globalized world. Within these epistemological frames the study of cities, regions, and worlds (within the world) provides us with morphologies of what a newly unfolding Mediterranean can be today.
Urban and regional theories suggest that the constantly emerging, transnational urban and regional networks are the new control points in the geographically transforming, international “global city” in which the economy determines the locations and the aesthetics of power. The Mediterranean proves them wrong. The representation of the Mediterranean as de-territorialized does not reflect the region’s unbounded complexity and diverse cultural ecology; nor can it indicate the endless debates about how to define it, or how its liquid geographies are bound together by the problems that constitute it. Whether we use frameworks such as ecology, migration, economy, or energy, the Mediterranean as such challenges every bounded conception of space. We also have to understand that notions of a limited set of relations––boundaries, cultures, etc.––are a paradox. How can a space or its definition be boundless, but yet be defined by all these limits?
Geography
In the early 1930s, an exhibition in Germany and Switzerland showcased one of the boldest architectural visions ever seen. Herman Sörgel, an architect and engineer from Munich, presented a totalizing vision on such a grand scale that it even outshined the fantasies of a novelist like Jules Verne. “Atlantropa,” which was first known as “Panropa,” was a project that re-imagined the entire Mediterranean region, from the Western Mediterranean and the Straits of Gibraltar to Israel in the East, and from Northern Italy to the Sahara desert in Africa.
A 35-kilometer-long dam in the Straits of Gibraltar was the key element in Sörgel’s architectural utopia. The dams of Atlantropa disconnected the water supply from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and created a new super-geography of what was once known as the Mediterranean. (Fig 2) His gigantic dam gradually dried up the Mediterranean Sea and reduced the water level by 200 or more meters. The cultural landscape affected by this shrinkage was the largest geographical transformation ever imagined. Sörgel’s vision created up to 600,000 square kilometers of new arable land where the sea had been. At the core of his design were several trans-Mediterranean arteries that supported the flow of people, cars, trains, and natural resources between civilizations inhabiting the Eurasian peninsula west of the Ural Mountains and Persia, including the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, beyond any historically predetermined infrastructural arteries.
Sörgel reimagined the Mediterranean by eliminating it. His project effaced the region’s complex historic and cultural values; he re-designed every corner of the new region as a huge power plant with gigantic dam projects to provide an unlimited supply of energy. However, his Gesamtkunstwerk did not design the citizens for Atlantropa. Who would be the citizens populating these new territories?
The arts stimulated his work, but he was also a student of geography, which he believed was integral to architecture and his worldview. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel and the philosopher Oswald Spengler were elemental to Sörgel’s self-assessment as Weltbauer [global architect]. Both shaped this understanding in very different ways. Ratzel was fundamental to Sörgel’s concept of an architect as possessing a chiliastic spirit that liberated him to aim for cosmic depth, and a pacifist spirit that aspired to create new borders. Ratzel’s theory was that of der Staat als Organismus (the state as organism), in which he equated dams, autobahns, railways, and bridges to the digestive and circulatory systems in natural organisms. Ratzel argued that the more extensively and qualitatively these systems were built, the more the organism, the Lebensraum (living space) of a nation-state, would thrive.
Spengler, on the other hand, had a much deeper and more personal influence on Sörgel. Both were friends from the time they lived in Schwabing. In 1918, Spengler published his book, Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West], in which his pessimistic prophecies about the extinction of western culture through “civilization” and “overpopulation” captured Sörgel’s attention. (Spengler 1980) Sörgel, however, had a more positive view and believed in the technical advancements of modern societies. He shared Spengler’s critique of the nineteenth century and that the uncontrollably growing urban environment was a sign of the weakness of western civilizations. But in contrast, he believed in technical and artistic urban planning solutions for the future. (Fig 3) While Spengler looked at technology as a demonic force that destroyed culture, Sörgel saw in technology the key to its salvation. Along with Bruno Taut and Le Corbusier, Sörgel actively promoted Weltbauen in large-scale dimensions, striving for global solutions that questioned geography, including human activity, existing distribution patters, population, and resources, and replaced it with utopian imaginations. The use of technology to address the challenges of future developments and achieve unprecedented improvements through the alteration of global geographies characterized their ideas as Weltbaumeister. All of these activities looked at planning as a totality that extended to every corner of the planet. In one of his countless publications and movies, Atlantropa: Der neue Erdteil, Das Land der Zukunft (Atlantropa: The New Continent, Land of the Future), Sörgel responded to the Spenglerian despair of civilization with his engineer’s megalomania.
Atlantropa’s objective was not only to become a new supercontinent centered in the Mediterranean, created from Europe and African, but also to solve all major problems of a continent battered by crisis after crisis. With the Great Depression, World War I, and a looming World War II, Europe was in need of a vision for the future. However, Sörgel’s angle on the problem was purely a technocratic perspective. He was convinced that in order to remain globally competitive with technologically and economically advanced America and an emerging Pan-Asia, Europe needed to be self-sufficient, which required possession of territories in all climate zones. To position Europe as a sustainable global player among the United States of America, Great Britain—which he believed could not maintain its empire in the long run—and Asia––a mystery to Europeans––his plan was to lower the Mediterranean basin and produce infinite amounts of electric power through his dam. As a result, vast tracts of land would have been generated for new urban settlements and agriculture, including the Sahara desert, which was to be irrigated with the help of three sea-sized, man-made lakes throughout Africa. “The massive public works, envisioned to go on for more than a hundred years, would have relieved the unemployment crisis on the continent and the acquisition of new land would ease the pressure of overpopulation, which Sörgel thought was the fundamental cause of political unrest in Europe.” (Group Edit Suisse 2003) The polemic of his project was not only to change the geography of the entire Mediterranean, but also of the African continent. The racist thinking of Sörgel’s time, which saw Africa as an empty continent devoid of history and culture, was integrated in his belief in technology’s political power. (Voigt 2007) His vision was an alternative to anything ever imagined, and with the larger geopolitical goal of venturing deep into the Congo Basin he also wanted to secure the vast natural resources of Africa with European technological and engineering know-how and turn Africa into a “territory actually useful to Europe.” (Voigt 2003, p. 29)
At a time in which apocalyptic visions determined the Zeitgeist and the politics of imperialism were dominant, he placed his project within a larger geopolitical order. He followed a Social Darwinist and colonialist school of thought, declaring, “The fight for survival is a fight for territory.” (Voigt 2007, p.29) His plans for Atlantropa aimed to revolutionize the north-south connection between Europe and Africa, and convert the global west-east imbalance into a “harmonious coexistence” of the three A’s: America, Asia, and Atlantropa, which he considered Kontinentale Grossräume (continental megaspaces) that would coexist in a new world order of supercontinents. As a result, Atlantropa not only completely obliterated what was known as the Mediterranean, but it completely sacrificed cultural complexity for the promise of a continental European economic security and energy independence by regulating the flow between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and its cultures. Inadvertently, Atlantropa advocated itself as a site of a new world order of geographic, geopolitical, and architectural visions.
In its early stages, Atlantropa was created in the political context of the Pan-European Union, founded in 1923. The assembly brought together by the Austrian (geo)-politician Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi sought political unification of the European continent after the devastating First World War. When in 1929, Sörgel’s vision took on the name Panropa, he wanted to emphasize its close connection to the Pan-European Union. However, in 1932 Sörgel replaced Panropa with the official project name, Atlantropa, to avoid confusion with the Pan-European Union. He changed the name primarily because he did not believe in the ideological principles of the Pan-European Union, and disagreed with Coudenhove-Kalergi politically and morally. Sörgel believed that only an economic union could bring Europe together, and advertised the guaranteed profit of Atlantropa and its economic benefits and energy independence. The change of name was also an expression of the ways in which Sörgel’s geopolitical ambitions went far beyond Coudenhove-Kalergi’s organization. Atlantropa, the term invented by Sörgel, meant new territory at the Atlantic Ocean [Festland am Atlantik], and stood for the idea of politically and geographically uniting Europe with Africa into a supercontinent of tomorrow.
Identity
Many decades after Atlantropa, the Dutch avant-garde architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)—alongside AMO, the firm’s research-based think tank within OMA—proposed another “megalomaniac“ vision for Europa. Koolhaas and Reinier De Graaf, his partner in charge of the project, envisioned “Roadmap 2050,” a redesign of the entire European continent, including North Africa, along new energy-saving frontiers. The project promises a prosperous “United Nations of Energy” (Hartman 2010) in a new energy-independent and decarbonized European continent. Typically for OMA/AMO, “Megalomania” says de Graaf, is a standard part of the repertoire of the firm.
The core of their proposal, however, is “Eneropa,” a new map for the European continent that completely redraws national boundaries and replaces nation-states with regions based on energy sources supplying the larger Eneropa grid. (Fig 4) The OMA/AMO study develops a new energy-based identity for Europe: Eneropa, unlike the European Union (EU), is not defined by economic or cultural identities. Rather, similar to Sörgel’s Atlantropa, the proposal overlooks the complex cultural identities of Western and Eastern Europe, and instead develops an alternative scenario for the entire continent. Eneropa reorganizes Europe into regions defined by their available energy sources, which, ideally, will contribute to a larger energy grid. Mediterranean nations such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece are combined into the energy territory Solaria; Central European states such as Germany are Geothermalia, and others such as Switzerland, parts of France, and Austria are Enhanced Geothermalia; parts of Great Britain and Ireland are Tidal States; the Scandinavian nations are Isles of Wind in the North Sea; the project even reunites Former Yugoslavia into Biomassburg.
The idea is simple: Eneropa is a redesign of the entire European territory based on the creation of a power network linking abundant, regional, renewable energy sources that contribute to and compensate for each other within a large renewable energy network. For example, wind is abundant in Northern Europe, sun in the Mediterranean, waterpower in the Alps, and in different seasons and different quantities. However, if it were windless in the North but sunny in the Mediterranean, the Eneropa power network would compensate and balance deficiencies in areas where energy was needed. The 2050 report also discusses the possibility of expanding Eneropa into North Africa in an energy exchange utilizing the region’s solar potential in return for wind energy from Eneropa’s Isles of Wind.
The big idea of Eneropa, however, is a graphic narrative. The firm conceptualized and visualized geographic, political, and cultural implications of the integrated and decarbonized European power network into a proposal that operates in areas far beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture. Koolhaas and OMA/AMO are known for pushing these boundaries. His global engagement in research, development, preservation, and politics manifests his broad inquiry across disciplines. For a few years, Rem Koolhaas worked as a member of the EU’s Reflection Group on similar schemes. Eneropa is just a continuation of his larger interests, and two projects AMO has been working on for several years stand out as foundational.
In 2004, the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt invited AMO to develop proposals to best meet the needs, functions, and identity problems of a European capital. AMO’s proposal addressed the presence of the EU through the architecture of its institutions, but also saw an opportunity to address the representation of Europe at large. Other than the European flag, there was no visual narrative that connected the continent.
In their proposal, they pointed out Europe’s iconographic deficit. The visual form of the EU’s flag was a result of what they interpreted as “a widespread ignorance about the activities and the origins of the EU among the general public.” (OMA 2001) In a series of experiments, the AMO think-tank came up with illustrations and “image bites” in which all the flags of the EU member states were merged into a single pattern. The result resembled a colorful barcode of European nations that only represent a sliver of each individual cultural identity while suggesting the functional advantages of acting together. The critique of the old flag was that the number of stars representing member states was fixed. OMA’s barcode had the advantage of being expandable infinitely as new members join the economic union. However, the barcode also signifies an optically- readable machine representation of data in relation to an object, and not a cultural entity, which in the proposed context seems ironic.
Another pre-Eneropa project was a 2008 masterplan for offshore wind farms in the North Sea. The main concept here was based on the urgency of calls for sustainable and secure energy requiring a collective mobilization of intelligence and ambition that would exceed standard piecemeal solutions to climate change. The project mapped out a large-scale renewable energy infrastructure in the sea for supply, distribution, and strategic growth, engaging with all its surrounding countries, and potentially those beyond, in “a supra-national effort that will be both immediately exploitable and conducive to decades of coordinated development” (OMA 2008). The masterplan also included infrastructure to support manufacturing and research, as well as existing marine life. Koolhaas argued that all North Sea countries were uniquely positioned to benefit from large-scale wind farms not only in regard to the economic benefits of renewable energy production, but also from research and development in the advancement of wind, wave, tidal, and biomass energy production.
Ultimately, Koolhaas’ ambitions come together in his interest in policy-making. His proposal not only addresses new cultural geographies of the European continent, and potentially Africa, but it also is a policy roadmap to reduce CO2 emissions by 80-95% by 2050. Together with his partners McKinsey, Imperial College London, the energy consultancy KEMA, and analyst Oxford Economics, AMO mapped out scenarios for meeting this target. The technical and economic analyses outline why a zero-carbon power sector is required to meet the commitment of reduced CO2 emissions and, given current standards of technology, illustrates its feasibility by 2050. The goal can be achieved through the complete integration and synchronization of the EU’s energy infrastructure, and the plan shows how Europe can take maximum advantage of its geographical diversity to ensure energy security for future generations.
Additionally, in this typically provocative, OMA’esque sense, the report raises the question of what to do with the old European energy infrastructure. Over the past twenty years, European nations have invested billions of dollars to revive relics from the industrial age and bring them into the twenty-first century. The report suggests that the old infrastructure could be preserved as Unesco sites of a pre-decarbonized Eneropa, and function as a cultural memorial for the larger world. Thus, the old European identity would be transformed into a new, post-carbon identity.
There is also the question of how much this would cost. The study has produced figures that show that the scheme would not cost much per capita, especially when compared with road building, war in Iraq, or bailing out bankers. It also points out the benefits of reducing reliance on nuclear power, Middle Eastern oil, and Russian gas. The overall conclusion is that the economic benefits would outweigh the cost, which could be reduced by 80%, especially if North Africa and its abundance of sun could be integrated into the Eneropa grid.
Alternative Conceptions
Herman Sörgel’s and Rem Koolhaas’ super-geographies envisioned territories so alternative to the cultural landscape of the Mediterranean, and so divergent from scholars’ perceptions, that they fundamentally transformed what ultimately determined it. Their large-scale frameworks and the imposing of new territorial structures radically eliminated “the Mediterranean” and replaced its regional, cultural, and geographic fabric with the promise of new world orders.
Undoubtedly, in understanding how the region is constructed Braudel, Horden and Purcell provided insight into the history and geography of the Mediterranean, and how both conflict and the emergence of limits materialize from concrete networks of causes and effects in relation to a larger Mediterranean identity. Furthermore, their scholarship identifies the presence of frontiers as much by what crosses them as by what holds them apart. But Sörgel’s and Koolhaas’ proposals suspended these traditional perceptions, understandings and conceptions of Mediterranean borders and frontiers that are based on geography and culture. Instead, they proposed totalizing visions in which the solution for larger geopolitical questions, as well as ones of culture and identity, was sought in questioning geography and replacing it with utopian imaginations.
In the last twenty years, new developments from reforms from the Arab Spring’s destabilizing demonstrations to the deliberative discussions about a Mediterranean Union have further altered the territory, and along with the emergence of new democracies, endowed the region with unremitting reorganization, transition, and transformation. From Egypt’s Tahrir Square to Athens’ Syntagma Square, and from Madrid’s Puerta del Sol to Algiers’ Habib Bourguiba Avenue, mainly urban revolutions have recast the image of the Mediterranean and presented it with a new significance and a new sense for urban, regional, and transnational identities. The revolts against regimes, global economics, and capitalism not only turned the dissolving European-dominated identity of the Mediterranean into a volatile and multifarious “Medi-terranean,” but they also reaffirmed that the territory and its frontiers are highly contested.
Points and lines––bound, unbound, connected, or interconnected and, as Giorgio Agamben argues, with every culture’s identity sitting on both sides of its frontiers––separating one place from another are not simply geographically determined; neither are they dependent on utopian imaginations or interventions privileging one Mediterranean identity over another. Current events actually show how tedious transformative processes are. Political unrest and the shifting of social, cultural, political, economical, and ultimately environmental borders are a reflection of the fluidity of the Mediterranean territory today. These events are a testament to real transformations, rather than Sörgel’s and Koolhaas’ metanarratives. However, there is something to be said about the radical nature of their proposals. Both never question the larger territorial coherence of the Mediterranean (understanding that there is no such thing in the Mediterranean). Quite on the contrary, they understand the region as a geography that is neither determined as Mediterranean nor Medi-terranean, maintaining certain regimes of demographic control along political and cultural frontiers.
The true Mediterranean unfolds somewhere between the modern frameworks set by Sörgel and Koolhaas and the continuous political unrest. Drawings and sketches by, for example, Peter Fend4 or Philippe Rekacewicz, or Max Ernst’ painting Europe after the Rain I, or photography by Bas Princen5 and Iwan Baan present the territorial, and I argue, cultural fluidity of the Mediterranean in ways that render borders and boundaries less as objects than as specific contextual geographies with hybrid meanings. (Fig 5) The works of these artists amorphously reveal (altered) territories that utilize ambiguity as a potential means of negotiating place not only between notions of centrality and peripherality, but also social and cultural identities on one or the other side of the frontier. The metaphorical power of points, lines, pixels, and rain (in Ernst’s painting6) offer enough Spielraum (space/leverage) to construct a new synthesis of an unbounded Kulturraum in which understandings of active limitations and a new sense of scalar dimensions emerge within the larger Mediterranean territory. In this sense, Predrag Matvejević’s idea of borders in which the chalk circles are constantly traced and erased gaining a new importance, and Ernst’s metaphoric rain becomes the mediator that assimilates the entire territory, not just its buildings.
The argument for a conceptual ambiguity, as seen not only through the eyes of the artists or planners but also Mediterraneans, and the real pertinence of the Mediterranean is not that of a geopolitical zone, or of a grouping of nation-states with clear borders and a sea around which everything is organized. The artworks and their conceptual ambiguity argue for an unbounded Mediterraneanity, seen through the eyes of projected desires and hybrid interpretations, with Mediterranean frontiers that are not just sites of new “world” orders, but also pivot points between geographical and utopian imaginations. The geographic limits of the Mediterranean, whether determined by history, historians, or political unrest, will always be “Mediterranean,” whether they are eliminated or not. The Mediterranean will always continue to be an expression of both the “geographic” and the distinct individuals that are instrumental in its own construction.
— Antonio Petrov
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1 From the German: “Wo also sind wir, wenn wir in einem kleinen Innen sind? In Welcher Weise kann eine Welt, ihrer Öffnung aufs Unermessliche hin ungeachtet, eine intim geteilte Rundwelt sein? Wo sind die Zur-Welt-Kommenden, wenn sie in bipolaren Intimssphaeren oder Blasen sind?” Peter Sloterdijk, Sphaeren II, Globen, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1999.
2 Braudel identifies three levels of time: the “longue durée,” the “time” of geography; the “moyenne durée,” the time of social, economic patterns and movements; and the “courte durée,” the time of individuals and events.
3 “That’s what I love, to desire the impossible.” Voigt, Wolfgang. Atlantropa: Weltbauten Am Meer. Ein Architekturtraum Der Moderne. Hamburg: Dölling and Gallitz. M.A.T. Music Theme and Licencing, 2007. P.29.
4 Maps in: Petrov, Antonio. The Mediterranean. New Geographies Vol. 5, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. P. 126-128.
5 Princen, Bas. “A Mediterranean Photodossier.” In New Geographies 5 “the Mediterranean”, edited by Antonio Petrov, 179-94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
6 The title dates back to an earlier painting sculpted from plaster and oil (and painted on plywood from the set of L’Âge d’or) to create an imaginary relief map of a remodeled Europe completed in 1933, the year Hitler took power. In Europe after the Rain I, Max Ernst’s depicts an emotional desolation, physical exhaustion, and the fears of the destructive power of total warfare combined—after the rain of fire, the biblical deluge, and the reign of terror.