Living the border. Territories and cities between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between Land, Territory and City through a long-term historical-philosophical perspective, from ancient cosmogonies to the contemporary Metropolis. Starting from the notion of "world soul" – from Platonic and Plotinian geo-sophy to the imaginal geography of Henry Corbin – the paper examines how civilizations have constructed the sense of place and the urban boundary: from the Greek polis, born out of a federative agreement among rural communities, to the Roman civitas, founded on the inclusive principle of citizenship, through to the medieval city, the urban boundary is never a mere physical barrier, but a “threshold” bringing sensible and supersensible worlds into relation. Medicean Florence offers an exemplary case: the columns of Cosimo I redraw the urban perimeter as ceremonial thresholds, while the Vasarian Corridor embodies Alberti's idea of a city within the city. In the nineteenth-century Metropolis the threshold becomes a situated utopia – in the Parisian grands travaux read by Foucault as heterotopies – while in the contemporary megalopolis it dissolves, producing existential disorientation. The essay closes with an open perspective on the cosmopolitan Earth-City, calling for a new theoretical foundation for urban design capable of embodying a neo-humanism for the man of the future.