Ambiance as a key issue in the contemporary Mediterranean public space

The revolution, a revealer…

« Now, on the contrary, we are at home. But home does not preexist…»¹

The fall of Ben Ali’s dictatorship lifted the veil on a divided and fragmented Tunisia where identities collide, social models crash into each other and socioeconomic disparities are more than ever exposed. The Tunisians, sharing a territory of 163 610 km2 (Tunisia is the smallest North African country), a common history and a same geographical climate, are a heteroclite population with opposite and sometimes contradictory aspirations, and confronted to demonstrating their perception of a common reality given the extremely politicized situation (because future rules are in effect now) they confirm Tunisia’s extreme plurality.

This intense and abrupt arrival of Inhabitants (all inhabitants) led us to wonder about the plural habitability of the Tunisian public space, i.e. how can it be shared? Can the Tunisian public space, in its current forms (sensitive conformation and forms), be shared?  Does it still hold any remnants of the dictatorship demands that were taken over by architects who in turn were not sensitive enough to public spaces concerns?

Tunisia, a miniature of the Mediterranean…

Starting from Tunisia’s both miniature and dense situation, we intend to explore the Mediterranean ambiences.

In fact, the Tunisian situation reveals the obsolescence of classical notion of the neighborhood. We are sharing the same territory but there is not/no more that “mimetic contagion through which a modus vivendi, a way to draw and to ensure that the vital space spreads among a population”² and which, according to P. Sloterdijk, characterizes neighbors. But the question concerning neighborhood is raised in each Mediterranean country and at the Mediterranean level as a supposed neighborhood place.

The Tunisian situation demonstrates that the collective perception of reality is not / no more structured by the only one place (same history, geography and climate) but also by a virtual world of different networks.  But this situation is not proper to Tunisia’s case, it is a worldwide feature.

Considering this endogenous hyper-plurality (which no more affects a foreigner who does not expect to feel at ease in the country he/she visits, but also affects whom we may call endogenous), which shapes should be given to the public space, necessarily unique and local?  What should be done so that it contains all the necessary markings, that same thing again and again mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari: “Now, on the contrary, we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that fragile and uncertain center, to organize a limited space. Many and very diverse components intervene, landmarks and marks of all kinds. (…) The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the calendar forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extraction, in order to prevent the earth interior forces from being submerged, to enable them to resist or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the drawn space.”³

If the hyper-plurality’s “endogeneity” characterizes more the countries located on the southern of the Mediterranean, it does also affect the countries on the north shore attracting for a good number of years multiple immigrant populations. In a less or more long term, these countries may have to deal with the impact of public space forms on the feeling of sharing and the possibility of living in a harmonious side by side of obviously mixed race populations.

Tunisia, a miniature… or a tessera?

Each Mediterranean country has also its own history including its own architectural and urban planning history along with its own geographical and political climate. Each country has also its own “neighborhood units” what we can call these national groups who hold common perceptions and similar strategies derived from both places and networks.

The questions raised by our country concern mainly the public space and are accentuated in reality by the current political situation as overexposed. The contemporary Mediterranean public space — a political and scenic space — raises the issue of the notion of sharing, in consequence leading to the notion of neighborhood, alienation, familiarity, porosity and accessibility. The studies on Libya and Egypt’s, close to their present political situations, and different from the historical point of view, or of Morocco and Algeria’s situations, countries that didn’t witness Arab revolutions, and which adopted different patrimonial policies, will serve into drafting the responses’ major outlines. The studies and thoughts on the countries north of the Mediterranean will allow us to identify the differences and similarities existing between both shores and to consider the possibility of building common strategies towards harmonious hyper-plural societies.

Rethink the public space

This reflection led us to various interrogations:

1. What structures perception of the perceiving person and more precisely the perception of his/her country public spaces or his/her place of living? Is this structured perception linked to a geographical and political climate or socio-economic needs? Do we perceive according to our well-being or ill-being? Do we perceive a space according to what we expect? How much does the place weigh in this process within the ubiquity of the virtual networks to the Inhabitant?
2. Being shared places, are contemporary public spaces in the Mediterranean necessarily sites for sharing? Can we classify them according to their degree of “sharibility”? What stimulates this “sharibility”? Do we measure it according to familiarity vs alienation? Or rather according to accessibility or hospitality if we may describe one’s ability at welcoming the Other, his/her body and entities in their co-presence and interactions? Isn’t this ability at welcoming all markings, at including them or avoiding them that defines this “sharability”? Isn’t that what Jacques Ferrier wrote about in A Town’s Possibility: “A town’s porosity depending on one’s time, on day and night, through seasons, on climates, on usage…”⁴?
3. To what extend does the architecture of public spaces and the urban forms condition the sensitive sharing of these spaces? Which architectural and urban forms can today incite to share ambiences? Do they relate to the urban layout, the architectural style, the size of buildings, rearrangements (factors of quarrels), etc.?
4. If architecture, to the extent that it contributes into shaping the urban, is a factor of sharing in public spaces, which architecture should we conceive? Does the solution lie on the side of a new international style more focused on, for example, the issue of durability (with all the necessary local adjustments) or on the contrary, on the side of an environment shaped by local specificities? Is the consensual public space to be considered neutral, “cleared” of all affiliations or a space that carries contemporary bits and fragments chosen from a common architectural and urban history? Does the public space have to be a space for a sensorial object in motion – a sensual town as described by Jacques Ferrier – or a space for a sensitive object?  Do identities in public space have to dissolve, juxtapose or be created?
5. Which lessons could we learn from the past experiences? It is to that extent that ambient studies about architectural and urban experiences (alternative or hybrid), become interesting (in Tunisia, we can list, for example, the Palaces that where transformed before and through the Protectorate, reconstructions and other post-modernist attempts), but we can also mention the ones due to more modernist operations (The Olympic City, Sidi El Béchir, Sfax etc.). To what extent, can the architectural experiences — more numerous than the urban ones — hybridizing heritage and modernity, nourish a reflection on public spaces conception?

NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (11 – 1837, De la ritournelle), Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, 1980, 648p.
2. P. Sloterdijk, Sphères III. Écumes. Sphérologie plurielle, traduit de l’allemand par Olivier Mannoni, Paris, M. Sell, 2005. p.229-230.
3. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, op. cit.
4. Jacques Ferrier, La Possibilité d’une ville. Les cinq sens et l’architecture, Paris, arléa, 2012, 130 p.

Lundi 24 février | Monday February 24th

• • • UTOPIA, hic et nunc – L’ambiance, pour penser la cité méditerranéenne aujourd’hui. Olfa Meziou, ERA/ENAU, Tunis

4 – 4:30 pmPause | Break4:30 – 6:10 pmSession #1 — Concepts et théorie | Concepts and Theory
Président de session | Chair: Jean-Paul Thibaud

• Reflection on the Notion of Site Specific Ambiances. Carsten Friberg, Aalborg University, Denmark

• Le partage d’expériences au service du vivre ensemble. Esquisse d’une typologie d’ambiances urbaines. Noémie Lago, Université d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme de Mons, Belgique

• • • An examination of the affordances of street spaces in Mediterranean cities. Susana Alves, Okan university Istanbul, Turkey

• • • L’espace public au Maroc : hypothèse de la partageabilité « contrôlée ». Siham El Rharbi, Maroc

7 – 8 pmDiner | Dinner8:30 – 10:30 pmSoirée projection et débat cinématographique | Cinematographic projection and discussion
Présentée et animée par | Presented and facilitated by Nicolas Tixier

Avec Mahmoud Ismaïl (Egypte) et Hichem Ben Ammar (Tunisie) | With Mahmoud Ismaïl (Egypt) and Hichem Ben Ammar (Tunisia)

• Art contemporain en Tunisie et reconstruction du « sens du lieu ». Giuseppe Scandura, Maria Antonie Trasforini, Université de Ferrara, Italie

 

• Suivre un fil de ville en ville, ou une expérience filmée de l’espace public méditerranéen. Alissone Perdrix, EAD, Saint-Etienne, France

• L’ambiance comme dynamique d’un patrimoine architectural et urbain méditerranéen, cas de la Casbah d’Alger. Lilia Makhloufi, EPAU, Alger, Algérie

• Marseille dans l’air du temps : la culture comme nouvelle ambiance ? Anissa Bouyaed

4 – 4:30 pmPause | Break4:30 – 6:10 pmSession #4  —  Moments révolutionnaires | Revolutionary Moments
Président de session | Chair: Daniel Siret

• Tahrir Agora. Mohamed Alaa Mandour, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt

 

• Les émeutes du 2011 et leur environnement matériel : vers une transformation du statut de l’héritage architectural et urbain récent ? Romeo Carabelli, CITERES EMAM UMR 7324 CNRS et Université François Rabelais, Tours, France

• Le partage du sensible dans l’espace public tunisien. Processus révolutionnaire et mutations ambiantales. Mouna Zairi, ENAU-ERA, Tunis, Tunisie et ENSAG-CRESSON, Grenoble, France

• La place S. Al-Jabri à Alep en Syrie : d’un espace public central à un espace de conflit et de pouvoir. Abboud Hajjar, Youssef Diab, Université Paris Est, LEESU et Ecole d’Ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris, France

From 7:30 pmDiner de gala | Social dinner