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This book studies the change in Mediterranean port cities, from the nineteenth century when they flourished as a result of international economic relations and advances in transportation technology, through the twentieth century when the nation-states were at their prime time. This trajectory with two distinct parts belongs as a whole to what we call the modern times. Whereas in the first phase, Mediterranean port cities became hubs of spontaneous urban complexity and social diversity thanks to reciprocal relations that made them the places of cultural exchange, where people from different parts of the Mediterranean met one another, during the second, because of the interruption of such connectivities and major demographic changes the same cities experienced by way of massive migration, they became less and less unlike other cities with which they shared the same geography in general and the nation-state territory, in particular. Over the last few decades, with a new roundof globalization, port cities increasingly find themselves facing new opportunities and connectivities, the realization of which would make them once again different, albeit in variegated ways and to degrees. Our narrative foregrounds contexts and connectivities with specific attention paid to mobility, fragility, and precarity. The purpose of this book is to highlight commonalities of and differences among the select Mediterranean port cities, with a focus on the role of social actors, changing economic relations and spatial characteristics and practices.
List of contents
Introduction: The Mediterranean, and the Port Cities in Modern Times.- Overture.- Urban Planning in a Mediterranean Port City: The contested nature of urban redevelopment in the el Raval neighborhood in Barcelona.- PART I A Mediterranean Tour d'horizon with the Port City Articles as the Ports of Call.- Alexandria: A Glorious Past, Troubled Present and a Promising Future .- Beirut--Forever on a Tightrope: The Search for a Fragile Modernity in Travelogues, Memoirs, and Archives.- The Character of Mersin as an Eastern Mediterranean Port City.- Izmir, the Port City That Will Follow You No Matter Where You Go .- Intermezzo: A View from the Bridge of Volos Collapsing into Infinity .- Volos in the Network of Mediterranean Cities: Comparative Mapping of the City's Spatial Evolution through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.- PART II Fragments of Connectivity.- Transnational Trajectories: From Chios to London through Alexandria, A Family Story.- City, Fathers, and Sons: Life Trajectories of Salonican Sabbatians in the Nineteenth Century .- Ex-Changing Houses in Rethymno after the Treaty of Lausanne.
