Behind the Waterfront: Enduring Inequities and Illusive Renewals in the Making of Mediterranean Port Cities

Abstract

This dissertation uncovers the problematic legacies of large-scale urban design gestures in Mediterranean port cities. It evaluates lasting tropes, measures socioeconomic effects, and reveals neglected histories. This research challenges waterfront-centric narratives by demonstrating how port cities often reinvent their coastal front while turning their back on adjoining neighborhoods, relegating them to languish in the shadow of new development.

This study carries out a computationally rigorous yet culturally sensitive investigation to expose overlooked legacies behind urban waterfronts. It bridges urban design scholarship with port city literature, critical heritage discourse, and inequality studies to understand what frameworks and analytical methodologies can illuminate hidden-in-plain-sight, yet structurally ingrained, injustices stemming from the physical remaking of port-adjacent neighborhoods.

From a methodological perspective, it employs historical GIS techniques on primary sources collected in more than thirty archives in Barcelona, Marseille, Rome, Naples, and Beirut. It models socioeconomic data and urban morphology features extracted from archival materials spanning a period of 150 years. Finally, it creates new data through participatory mapping initiatives and contextualizes analytical findings with interviews and field observations.

The dissertation adopts a tripartite structure, with the first paper acting as the theoretical frame for two in-depth empirical case studies on Naples (Italy) and Beirut (Lebanon). BEHIND THE WATERFRONT introduces the “behind the waterfront” framework for the study of Mediterranean port cities and proposes a longue durée analysis of governance schemes (power), technical mechanisms (progress), and socioeconomic effects (poverty) shaping water-facing development patterns. THE MASKING OF INEQUITIES IN NAPLES evaluates the intentions and policies behind the late-nineteenth-century urban incision of Naples's historic center and examines its long-term effects and lingering tropes. EXCLUSIONARY TALES IN BEIRUT’S SPACES OF CRAFTSMANSHIP unearths the spatial history of crafts workshops in Beirut's port-facing neighborhoods and situates their recurring displacements in the city's design politics.

Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how spatial injustices have persisted through physical forms, political processes, and socio-cultural milieux in the illusive renewals of Mediterranean coastal neighborhoods. Its findings and interdisciplinary methods reveal the spatial inheritance of contemporary inequities, fostering the adoption of inclusive urban narratives, acknowledging plural pasts, and envisioning reparative futures.