1 - Spontaneous urban development: in search of a theory for the Mediterranean city

Summary

But how these developments unfolded, what was the causal nexus among them, we shall only learn when we make out the interplay among them by focusing upon a city specifically in all its uniqueness.

Oscar Handlin (1963: 22)

Uneven development in urban space has been reproduced all over the world. Space has always been stratified in the history of capitalism and the working class confined to residual land, lacking in basic urban services. However, this is the only universal statement that can be made about capitalist cities. The question is, why space was stratified in different ways in history and among various geographical regions. A study of urban development as the result of class-specific patterns of collective consumption and appropriation of urban space thus differs from one of distributions as approached in traditional and positivist geography. This book focuses on the social forces which have reproduced a spontaneous urban development pattern throughout the Mediterranean, and on its recent transformation through planning and class struggle.

Rather than ‘structures’ or ‘patterns’, transition, change, restructuring and development are explored, as produced by human agency rather than by personified State agencies or the impersonal forces of the market. Spontaneous urban movements and informal activities, which have usually been neutralized in social studies, are focused upon. ‘Misery’ has been stressed by sociologists, while planners and political scientists tend to moralize: ‘Unlike the cities of northern and northwestern Europe, Rome cannot build upon historical habits of civic pride, discipline and enterprise’ (Fried 1973: 40).