Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism
Abstract
To be a tourist in Libya during the period of Italian colonization was to experience a complex negotiation of cultures. Against a sturdy backdrop of indigenous culture and architecture, modern metropolitan culture brought its systems of transportation and accommodation, as well as new hierarchies of political and social control. Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya shows how Italian authorities used the contradictory forces of tradition and modernity to both legitimize their colonial enterprise and construct a vital tourist industry. Although most tourists sought to escape the trappings of the metropole in favor of experiencing "difference," that difference was almost always framed, contained, and even defined by Western culture.
This research argues that the "modern" and the "traditional" were entirely constructed by colonial authorities, who balanced their need to project an image of a modern and efficient network of travel and accommodation with the necessity of preserving the characteristic qualities of the indigenous culture. What made the tourist experience in Libya distinct from that of other tourist destinations was the constant oscillation between modernizing and preservation tendencies. The movement between these forces is reflected in the structure of the book, which proceeds from the broadest level of inquiry into the Fascist colonial project in Libya to the tourist organization itself, and finally into the architecture of the tourist environment, offering a way of viewing state-driven modernization projects and notions of modernity from a historical and geographic perspective.
This is an important book for architectural historians and for those interested in colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Italian studies, African history, literature, and cultural studies more generally.
... Light and shadow, simplicity of feeling, structural suitability, natural forms and practical design of structures around shared courtyards, bright colours and harmonious effects emerged from organic development, all loosely defined Mediterranean architecture. As a distinct style, Mediterranean architecture was developed mainly in north Africa's (post)colonial cities, where architecture was commissioned to "conquer the hearts of the natives" (Wright 1991, 1) and legitimize the colonial power (Fuller 2006;McLaren 2006;Crane 2011). Mediterranean architecture was believed capable of grounding a sense of community and belonging by creating a sense of "home" to counter the threat of vulnerability and temporality (Goldhagen and Legault 2000; Avermaete 2010; Van der Heuvel 2015). ...
... Mediterraneanism (Herzfeld 2005) became a favourite way for architects to integrate European modernity with native traditionalism and claim timelessness and universality through the resulting hybrid aesthetic forms. Architects such Bernard Rudofsky, ATBAT-Afrique and Team 10 found in vernacular architecture ontological definitions of place, of being at home in the world, to the point of reclaiming it as "already Italian" (Fuller 2006;McLaren 2006) or "already French" (Crane 2011). ...
... Architectonic forms vary in their relation to the peculiar conditions of the historical moment and the spiritual conditions of each population, but nothing takes away from the influence of the climate and the action that the sacred and fatal basin of the Mediterranean exercises, everywhere-cradle and crucible of the highest human civilization. Working on the coast or on the Mediterranean islands, I felt these traditions revive in me and passed on the necessity of respecting them to my buildings ( [9], p. 183). ...
... Di Fausto's Uaddan Hotel in Tripoli represents the most significant example of his architecture in the North Africa [9]. In this building, Di Fausto incorporated important elements from the brand images of Tripoli. ...
There is currently a major debate in architectural thinking between two groups. One group completely rejects the past architecture of their culture while the other builds a new architecture based on the past. This paper explores the potential of brand design strategy as a mechanism for creating a sense of attachment in end-users’ minds to an existing local brand of architecture. In particular, it examines whether the approach of Florestano Di Fausto (1890–1965), as expressed in his major Libyan designs of the 1930s, successfully achieved the goals of brand design strategy. The findings of this study contribute to the field of meaning in architecture by introducing brand design as mechanism for architects’ creative thinking in the design process of a new building/product. The outcomes of this intellectual argument suggest that this architectural paradigm is a worthwhile model for learning and practicing architectural design (This paper includes quotations from the author’s original doctoral thesis entitled: Assessing perceptions of Di Fausto’s neo-traditional architecture based on personal construct theory. A digital copy has been conserved at the UNSW Library since April 2016.).
... Tripoli. Die modernisierte Wüste» 11 -un'immagine comunque coerente con l'intenzione del governatore e del regime di far incontrare una stereotipata tradizione nord-africana con il modello italiano di modernità [McLaren 2018]. L'idea di fondo, in ogni caso, è sempre quella: non solo il colonialismo può essere benefico ma quello italiano si è particolarmente rivelato tale, cancellando qualunque ricordo degli abusi contro la popolazione autoctona. ...
The experience of Italo Balbo in governing Libya is the most well-known and significant among the Italian colonial governors. While much has been studied about the impact of the fascist leader on the territory, little has been written about the influence this role had on him. Thanks to Italo Balbo’s private archive acquisition by the Istituto di storia contemporanea di Ferrara, this article aims to analyze the collected material – especially bibliographic and photographic – to identify the persistence of colonial memory in the material gathered by the quadrumvir.
... The essay, slightly edited for this volume, was first published in "Rassismus in der Architektur / Racism in Architecture, " ed. by Regine Hess, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Monika Platzer, kritische berichte 2021, vol. 49, no. 3, 16-38. 1 On "turns" in the humanities and social sciences since the 1960s, see Guldi 2011and "AHR Forum" 2012. 2 See, for example, Littmann 2021Loo 2017 Giorghis and Gérard 2007, Talamona 1985, Fuller 2007, Denison et al. 2003, Rifkind 2011, Anderson 2015, and McLaren 2006. 6 Herscher et al. [2019. ...
... Its main institution, Teatro Miramare, was one of the first and probably the most active Italian colonial theatre in Africa. Built in 1921, it went through multiple processes of renovation in 1928 and 1938 following the advancement of the colonial agenda as well as of the evolution of architectural aesthetics (McLaren 2006). During the years of its activity, it hosted Opera, operetta, theatrical performances, and movies. ...
This article analyzes the perception and representation of alterity in Neapolitan song, with a specific focus on Raffaele Viviani’s “O’ tripulino napulitano” (1925). My interest in this lesser-known work is twofold: first, it attests to the perception of Libyans during fascist colonialism and to the ways in which Italians negotiate their identity through an intimate relationship with North African people; second, it anticipates some elements found in later Neapolitan song production, namely Renato Carosone’s “Tu vuò fa’ l’americano”, “Caravan petrol”, “‘O Pellirossa”, and “Torero”. However, unlike Carosone, Viviani does not limit his macchietta-style portrayal to a list of stereotypes. The lyrics proclaim a shared condition of subalternity with the North Africans unveiling a transcultural approach that emerges in later Neapolitan works starting from the mid-1970s.
... A key intention of the colony's approach to its museums was to promote their accessibility to all, with tourists (Labanca 2000) and Italian colonists, but not really scholars, especially in mind: archaeological fragments, even if valuable or scientifically important, were therefore not publicly exhibited and were kept in separate workshops for experts in the field. The next governor, Italo Balbo, was particularly responsible for a boom period of tourism in Libya, and left his personal and distinctive mark on the museum; he always had one eye on the tastes and needs of the tourist, whether a wealthy foreigner interested in archaeology or an Italian making a sea trip to Libya, perhaps on the favourable terms offered by the Opera Nazionale del Dopolavoro (OND: Fascism's federation for leisure pursuits) (McLaren 2006;Capresi 2007). When Balbo arrived in Libya in January 1934, he immediately wanted to move the governor's offices back to the Red Castle, a symbol of power from which 'directives for government of the region had been issued for 20 centuries' (Guidi 1935, 22). ...
The Fascist model of exhibiting power and placing it in museum settings had its origins in the Liberal exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, and in the first exhibitions devoted to the Risorgimento. However, the regime's museum initiatives were numerous, innovative and varied, and many of them have not yet been adequately investigated; those launched in Italy's colonies, in particular, remain largely unexplored. This article highlights the surprisingly extensive network of museums and temporary exhibitions that Fascism initiated in Italian possessions abroad, involving prominent figures from the regime and contemporary culture, and shows how science, culture and nation-building (in both the colonies and the mother country, and between them) were interwoven in the Fascist museological project for the colonies.
... 13). Referring to Luiggi's master plan, Mclaren (2006) stated that, "In the surrounding oasis, the land to the southwest was reserved for industrial development while the remainder was given over to agriculture" (p. 21). ...
... 13). Referring to Luiggi's master plan, Mclaren (2006) stated that, "In the surrounding oasis, the land to the southwest was reserved for industrial development while the remainder was given over to agriculture" (p. 21). ...
In Tripoli, Libya, urbanization remains characterized by dominant planning standards, even after authoritarian withdrawal. The lack of democratic deliberation limits citizens from resisting the change often suppresses longstanding cultural legacies. Recent efforts to regenerate large urban areas are reviving these tensions. Drawing on International Planning Development (IPD), Historic Preservation (HP), and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper examines the tension through the case of the historic center of Tripoli, where historic preservation and redevelopment strategies have intersected. The findings suggest that the vulnerability of local areas relates to a disconnect between macro preservation policies and local practices, emphasizing the importance of calibrating global preservation policies to cities that remain under siege.
Keywords: Political Domination; Urbanization; Historic Preservation; Tripoli; STS; UNESCO
... 13). Referring to Luiggi's master plan, Mclaren (2006) stated that, "In the surrounding oasis, the land to the southwest was reserved for industrial development while the remainder was given over to agriculture" (p. 21). ...
... The 1882 km coastal road -completed in 1937 -represented a turning point in the evolution of the Libyan coastal region, opening it to Modernity -not only because it represents the first modern infrastructure of the country, but especially for the transformation processes it accelerated -an act of a territorial re-foundation, which supported agricultural developments and cultural tourism. Although its role in the modernization of the country has been recognized [1,2,3], until today its tangible effects on the territory and also in the invention process of an Italian modern landscape appear not to have been investigated [4]. A systematic survey of the rural materials related to this phase is also missing, depositing so many different artefacts waiting to be re-discovered and understood. ...
The construction of the Strada Litoranea , the first modern infrastructure of Libya, coincided with an impressive territorial refoundation process. Although the role of this infrastructure in the tourist and rural development had been recognized, the scope and its transformative qualities in the process of modernization of the territory and of invention of a modern landscape has still not been investigated. The present paper illustrates ongoing research, interweaving geography, landscape architecture and architectural planning. Its first aim is to overcome the design-related disciplines previous research, through a less thematic and more 'relational' approach. A process that, starting from the coastal road, can tell the colonial fragments and their relations and reassemble them into a new interpretation of the Libyan peculiar rural landscape. Particularly, the modern strategy for rural development will emerge, also from a topographic point of view. A further element of originality consisted in the mapping process based on multi-scale territorial readings and architectural drawings, both as an instrument of knowledge and of restitution of relations between colonial fragments and strada litoranea . These maps intend to describe the complexity of an ambiguous landscape that oscillates between heterotopia and rooting, designed to be Italian and Libyan together.
... Le travail de Cardeira de Silva et Oliveira (2013) sur les pratiques touristiques coloniales portugaises, les oeuvres de McLaren (2004et 2006) et Hom (2012 sur le tourisme colonial en Libye et en Albanie sous domination italienne, ou encore les recherches de Pirie (2009), Anderson (2012, Sacareau (2013), Steward (2004), Gregory (1999Gregory ( et 2001, entre autres, sur le tourisme dans l'empire colonial britannique, pourraient par la suite nourrir une réflexion comparative sur la praxis coloniale des principaux empires européens. ...
Throughout this text I will try to contribute to a brief reflection on the status of Mauritania in the context of the colonies of French West Africa, along which I will focus on how the country was recurrently placed in the periphery of the French colonial empire in Africa. Based on the analysis of the presence of Mauritania in the Colonial Exhibitions of the first half of the XX century, as well as in tourism promotion during the colonial period, I will outline, through the constructions and representations conveyed by this corpus, some considerations on the peripheral status of Mauritania within the territories of French West Africa under colonial administration.
... Said (1979) often wrote about the 'imagined geographies' that Europeans, especially during the colonial era, had about the Islamic world in terms of a binary between the Occident and the Orient. In their colonial regions, France, Italy, and Britain designed urban spaces, promoted cultural practices, and structured tourist gazes to identify the local with 'tradition' in contrast to the 'modern' forms they implanted (see, for example, McLaren, 2006). Postcolonial states across the Third World have since struggled under the legacy of this divide. ...
The global spread of mass tourism is often understood in terms of the diffusion of practices first developed by English tourists and driven by the seemingly universal processes of urbanization and industrialization. This article offers a postcolonial critique of this approach, arguing it fails to appreciate the political and cultural dynamics of local adoption and remains blind to the role of alternative, indigenous practices. Moreover, as mass tourism practices are often viewed as expressions of modernity, societies are understood as modern only to the degree that they adopt northern European styles of leisure. Using Spain and Tunisia as examples, the article shows how the spread of beach tourism to the Mediterranean was shaped by geopolitical factors and imposed cultural and architectural expressions of modernity ill-suited to local contexts. Suggesting the value of alternative approaches, the article discusses forms of domestic coastal tourism in Morocco that express a modern hybrid Moroccan identity, in which a popular Islamic traditional ritual is performed and reinvented within the space of leisure beach tourism.
British and French colonial administrations exploited various aspects of the histories of Cyprus and Tunisia to justify their occupation of those countries during the late 19th and 20th centuries. There, archaeologists unearthed Greek, Roman, Christian, and medieval artifacts that testified to the Mediterranean’s rich, complex history and the various cultural networks that have bound it together. As the same time, designers created complementary historicist architectures that facilitated self- aggrandizing presentations suggesting that the European colonial presence was both historically precedented and superior. Architecturally, such claims can be seen in many of the government buildings, Christian churches, and antiquities museums built by colonizers in each context. This article presents an account of these colonial-era built environments constructed in Cyprus and Tunisia by Britain and France (1878–1960 and 1881–1956, respectively) through several conceptions of the Mediterranean cultivated by colonizers, including Ancient Greek and Roman, early Christian, and medieval Crusader lenses. It does this through an underutilized comparative thematic method that crosses the boundaries of European empires and is thus an approach with potential for application to other colonial situations. Ultimately, the article invites the development of additional comparative projects that span empires, geographies, and themes, in order to facilitate an understanding of salient colonial-era built environments and global architectural histories that transcend national borders and colonialist rhetoric.
This article takes the figure of Bousaadiya, once performed in varying iterations throughout central North Africa, as an entry point to approach the problematics of mobility and memory in Libya. Bousaadiya performance, a multidimensional set of practices that I read critically as dance, produces an embodied social ground upon which Libyans have enacted and contested racialized practices of belonging and a mobile gravesite where it is possible to interrogate regional histories of enslavement and their material and symbolic legacies. While reading Bousaadiya performance enables an excavation of the trans-Saharan slave trade and its ghostly e/affects, performing Bousaadiya enabled the incomplete burial of these through surrogation, easing particular losses. In this article, I explore both of these aspects of the performativity of Bousaadiya’s dance, which is underscored by the forms of remembering it that continue to proliferate. To follow Bousaadiya is to grapple with the ongoing unresolvedness in Libyan cultural politics of the country’s histories of slave economies and the hierarchies left in their wake and to gesture toward the prospect of repair.
This essay will consider some key aspects of the imagery of the ventennio regarding the Italian overseas territories through the analysis of the covers of the illustrated magazine Libia , launched in 1937 in the context of the so-called ‘Fourth Shore’ of Italy, ruled between 1934 and 1940 by governor Italo Balbo. Firstly, this essay will address the existing bibliography on the relations between the press and Italian colonialism. Then, it will examine the figure of Balbo over two sections – one relating to his activities for the development of Libya, the other dedicated to his relationship with the arts – unpacking the close links between the work of the governor in the colony and the periodical. The final part of the article will focus on Libia , examining the themes and subjects chosen to illustrate its covers and the several artists who collaborated with the magazine as illustrators.
In this special issue of Modern Italy , four early-career scholars examine how the study of objects and images rooted in Fascist imperialist history enables a sustained interrogation of Italy's colonial imaginary. Their articles explore the diverse possibilities offered by the study of visual and material culture for scholars of imperialism, as it is precisely this realm of visual and material culture that emerges as a site of negotiation in which different individuals and constituencies contended with the regime's ideology.
This paper is a brief of masters degree thesis which examines the housing patterns in Tripoli and their sustainability to determine how they penetrate urban open spaces. Within this framework, selected housing areas and public space relations will be analysed in terms of sustainability that has become commonly discussed recently. As far as Tripoli is the city that exists for thousands of years and it has different impressions and culture mixture and ethnics through its historical background and its geographical importance in the world, these researches deeply encourage and interest the author to emphasis the relationship between this urban open space and housing settlement patterns in scope of sustainable urbanization in Tripoli. This relationship and design patterns shape our life and response harmoniously and accordingly in returns. This thesis obviously analyses the main Tripoli square with its close street surroundings. It is aimed to develop the housing patterns with their urban open spaces in Tripoli to encourage interaction for humans and create diverse and welcoming environment for all locals and foreigners. Furthermore, it is concentrated on the main urban open space in Tripoli center 'Martyrs square' which is the core of the city and set as launching point of the thesis and case study with its housing settlement relation nearby. It is thus inevitably focused on investigating the district to maximize the quality of life standards initiating a masterpiece of sustainable architecture design development.
This book charts the city of Tripoli’s rapid economic, environmental, and physical transformation, investigating how these new developments have failed to incorporate the cultural and historic values of the urban fabric. As a result, the city is juxtaposed between traditional and modern urban forms. Urban Form and Life in Tripoli, Libya: Maintaining Cultural Heritage seeks to address this imbalance and argues for greater understanding of local culture and heritage and how this can be enhanced and preserved in future city developments. It explores the challenges of enabling growth and development to accommodate an increasing population and their changing requirements, whilst sustaining the unique cultural and individual characteristics of place. It traces the evolution of urban form and evaluates street quality and life within the city centre of Tripoli, which represents one of the most central, valued and iconic environments in Libya. It interprets the early urban structure, covering the traditional old town and the colonial urban developments, which includes the Italian Quarter and the Garden City. Through the case study city, the book presents a wider approach for understanding how design can be informed by a deeper knowledge of the structural mechanisms of evolution and change in built form. It will appeal to academics, researchers and students interested in urban history, Islamic architecture, and cultural studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I: URBAN MORPHOLOGY, URBAN FORM AND URBAN LIFE
Chapter 1. Theories and Schools of Urban Morphology
Chapter 2: Urban Form and urban Life
Part II: TRIPOLI’S HISTORY AND ISLAMIC PRINCIPLES
Chapter 3. Historical evolution of the city of Tripoli
Chapter 4. Islamic Principles of Built Environment
Part III: INVESTIGATING THE ESSENCE OF TRIPOLI’S CITY CENTRE
Chapter 5. Measuring Urban Components at the Neighbourhood Scale: Street Network and Block Structure
Chapter 6. Analysing the Street Front: Quality and Social Life
Chapter 7. Analysing the Street Edge: Constitutedness and Social Life
Conclusion
References
Index
Author(s)
Biography
Adel M. Remali is an architect, urban designer, academic, and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is a former academic and researcher at the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde. He is a member of the Cluster for Research in Architecture and Urbanism of Cities in the Global South (CRAUCGS) and a member of the Urban Design Studies Unit (UDSU). His teaching and research work focus on urban morphology, housing typology, and traditional cities. His recent research explores the relationship between the cultural and behavioural factors and architecture and urbanism.
Huyam H. Abudib is an architect and a research associate at the University of Strathclyde. She started her university study at Temple University–Japan, and graduated with M.Sc. in architecture and urban planning from the University of Tripoli–Libya. She received an MRes and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Strathclyde and is currently a member of Architecture and Urbanism of Cities in the Global South (CRAUCGS). Her research focuses on traditional cities and the transformation process that is taking place on urban and architectural scales.
Throughout the bloody and protracted Colonial War/War of Liberation in Mozambique (1964–1974), the European built environments of Lourenço Marques (presently Maputo) and Beira (the colony’s second city) came to embody what current scholarship on twentieth-century architecture in Africa misleadingly tends to identify as “Modern Diaspora”, failing to articulate the historiographical challenges of specific material translations with a complex interplay of actors and the colonial agenda. On the one hand, this text examines the strong urban developments and the “policy for built heritage” followed by the colonial administration between the decades of 1950–1970 in Lourenço Marques, which were challenged in the aftermath of Independence (June 25, 1975) with the implementation of socialist development policies; on the other hand, it reflects on the loss of architectural heritage of Portuguese influence in Maputo, sanctioned by recent urbanization plans and urban developments. Therefore, the text contributes to a realization of the fragile condition of modern heritage inherited by post-colonial societies, especially in cities where strong real estate speculation, limited state capacity, fast urbanization and the lack of acknowledgement, by tenants, of the values attached to the built environment are dominant aspects of the urban setting. The article benefits from fieldwork and archival research carried out in recent years, arguing that Maputo’s locally dubbed cidade de cimento (city of cement, built for settlers following European standards) presents neglected potential for negotiating and building (trans)national identity and memory, as well as sustainable economic alternatives (in areas like tourism and heritage conservation).
This article examines Israeli development in the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai from 1972 to 1982 from the perspective of architectural history. We argue that the prime objective of the Israeli occupation in this decade was economic development, not elimination; its guiding logic saw humanitarian aid as the preferred way to “resolve” the Palestinian refugee crisis. We follow how the pro-development, humanist “know how” of the architects and urban planners wrote themselves onto Gaza’s politics of space. Their scientific approach embodied in Mediterranean architecture was the solution of choice to hit two birds with one stone: end the refugee crisis by assimilating them into the Gaza strip cities, and ensure dependence on Israel by a new development plan with Yamit city at its epicentre. Mediterranean architecture expressed the gradations of vernacularity in the Israeli policy, and helped fashion a unique ideology of development based on exclusion and ethnic separation.
This article reconsiders the development of Fascist architecture throughout the late interwar period. It pays especial attention to the structures erected for the most significant international expositions held, or planned to be held, between 1933 and 1942, in order to identify significant trends in Party-sponsored design. It argues that the ‘dynamism’ of Fascist design was a consequence of the regime's preference for an increasingly imperial tone which developed in direct proportion to its increasingly imperial identity. It points to Piacentini and Pagano's Italian Pavilion built for the 1937 Paris Exposition, the first national pavilion constructed following the May 1936 proclamation of empire, as a significant flashpoint in the tension between Fascist interpretations of modern and classical design. This article concludes that the often-overlooked world's fair buildings can be viewed as crystalline distillations of the stylistic experimentation which defined the broader Fascist building programme both in Italy and abroad.
In a historical context, the term Libya has a really long tradition. Herodotus, for example, used it to describe an area that covers the Northern part of Africa between the Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Red Sea in the east. At that time, Libya was known to be a separate continent, the third one besides Europe and Asia.
The map “Important Caravan Tracks and Oases” offers an overview of the progression of the most significant caravan and pilgrim routes and local trading routes. It reveals the location of the most important oases in present-day Libya.
This paper is concerned with the relationship between the Wehrmacht soldier in North Africa, during the campaign of 1941–43, and the places—particularly Italian colonial Libya—in which fighting took place, and what this can tell us about the soldier and about these places at that time. My contention is that he (and very occasionally she) was very like a tourist, and that his or her experience of, and relationship to these places was like that of a tourist. The principal evidence for this is photographic.
In conveying his different individual interests and experience to us via his photographs, the soldier tourist comes over in a range of quite different ways, providing us with a counterweight to current views of the Wehrmacht and its campaigns in North Africa. Additionally, the photographs he took have the potential significantly to improve our knowledge of the material culture and operations of the Wehrmacht in the theatre, while providing us with an unparalleled record of the final gasp of Italian colonial Libya.
This thesis looks at the relationship between Roman Africa in the Italian cultural imaginary, and Italy's project of nation-building and modernisation. I focus on non-academic sources, since these, I argue, represent ideas of Roman Africa in the Italian imperial imaginary at their most pervasive and widespread, and are most suited to transforming discourses of Roman Africa into imperial realities. Films, monuments, popular publications, and public ceremonies propagated the 'invented tradition' of romanità, forging a modern, national, and imperial identity by appealing to antiquity. Focussing on the years of Italian colonialism in Libya, 1911-1943, I proceed chronologically to investigate multifarious discursive formations of Roman Africa under Italy's liberal government becoming increasingly reified and monolithic under the Fascist regime. In this period, Italian imperialism was most explicitly able to exploit links to Roman imperialism, through excavating the region's Roman history. However, for this to be the case, Italian imperial discourse was forced to suppress Roman ambivalences surrounding empire, centred on the ruins of Carthage which foreshadowed the fate of the Roman Empire. The first half of my thesis explores these dynamics of excavation and suppression during the period of liberal imperialism, while the second turns to the ventennio fascista. In this current moment of the nation being thrust to the forefront of political discourse in Italy and beyond, I examine the role of an African empire in Italian nation-building, and the centrality of Roman imperialism to this project whose legacy haunts recent Mediterranean history. The thesis thus unravels the ties that bind Italy to Africa, through the waters of ancient Rome's mare nostrum.
Nearly twenty years after its initial release, Kaijima, Kuroda and Tsukamoto’s architectural guidebook Made in Tokyo remains a unique cultural and visual contribution to our global architectural textual archive. The authors offer readers accessible and sharply unique observations into Tokyo’s vast urban megascape through generating and implementing a creative and caring reviewing practice. As a result, Made in Tokyo encapsulates the art of guiding; it directs and encourages us to embed enthusiasm and sheer love into the multiple ways in which we write and represent the built environment.
In a moment of global urban change, migration, and political transformation, the politics and practices of cultural heritage might seem to have little import. However, this paper argues that focusing on cultural heritage in the Middle East provides two key insights with much broader relevance. First, examining how heritage is made (and unmade) shows one way that regions are constructed through the articulation of material and symbolic connections. Second, these regions might be better understood not as containers but as complexes in and in relation to which people articulate and communicate shared meanings. These insights build upon and extend recent theorizations of cultural geopolitics. In surveying an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf, this article seeks to expand the linkages between geography and Middle East area studies scholarship. It begins by connecting current debates about planetary urbanization in relation to a historiography of the “Middle Eastern city” and suggests that thinking in terms of heritage provides a novel approach for understanding both new and old regional imaginaries. It then highlights three dynamics that make the politics of heritage distinct in this region. It closes with a discussion of the dual role that heritage can play in both contesting and facilitating top‐down projects of dispossession and urban transformation.
This open access book provides a multi-perspective approach to the caravan trade in the Sahara during the 19th century. Based on travelogues from European travelers, recently found Arab sources, historical maps and results from several expeditions, the book gives an overview of the historical periods of the caravan trade as well as detailed information about the infrastructure which was necessary to establish those trade networks.
Included are a variety of unique historical and recent maps as well as remote sensing images of the important trade routes and the corresponding historic oases. To give a deeper understanding of how those trading networks work, aspects such as culturally influenced concepts of spatial orientation are discussed.
The book aims to be a useful reference for the caravan trade in the Sahara, that can be recommended both to students and to specialists and researchers in the field of Geography, History and African Studies.
Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-00145-2
Tunisia received little attention in the copious historical scholarship on tourism with regard to its beginnings
back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most often Tunisia is mentioned as an adjunct to Algeria, which used to be the French colonial prime winter resort. The scant and scattered evidence available on early Tunisian tourism, its roots and maturation tells but a little part of the narrative of early Tunisian tourism. This
article chronicles the first tentative steps of Tunisian tourism by reaching back to the emergence of Tunisia as a popular winter resort for Europeans and others. It looks at the major factors, which gradually contributed to the incorporation of Tunisia in French colonial tourist circuits and later in European and international tourist networks.
The Anglophone cookbook writers Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert situate Mediterranean cookery at the intersection of science, history, literature, and art. In conversation with one another they build a discourse of Mediterranean food that binds up cooking and eating with cultural identity. To establish their authority as experts over the wide and varied Mediterranean zone, David, Roden, and Wolfert reach for an elusive unity across the sea, presupposing not only a shared history but an imagined past in which the Mediterranean presented a single cuisine and, by extension, a single culture. In suggesting the possibility of eating one's way into knowledge of a culture, each author stresses her own deep ties to the Mediterranean, sidestepping the fundamental ambiguity of these links. The Mediterranean their writing creates echoes this ambiguity, its lacunae bringing into relief the constructed nature of the “Mediterranean diet” and the unified Mediterranean it imagines. This construction is rendered available for readers via the doubled consumption of Mediterranean food and Mediterranean culture.
Introductory article of the issue 28 (2016-1) of the journal L’Espace politique entitled " Political Geographies of Tourism"
Retaining the conceptual framework of the first edition through emphasis on the dual themes of continuity and change, the second edition of Libya is revised and updated to include discussion of key developments since 2010, including: The February 17 Revolution and the death of Muammar al-Qaddafi. The political process which evolved in the course of the February 17 Revolution and led to General National Congress elections in July 2012, Constitutional Assembly elections in February 2014, and House of Representative elections in June 2014. Post-Qaddafi economic policy from the National Transitional Council through successive interim transitional governments. Post-Qaddafi foreign policy. The on-going process of drafting a new constitution which will be followed by the election of a Parliament and a President. Providing a comprehensive overview of the Libyan uprising, seen to be the exception to the Arab Spring, and highlighting the issues facing contemporary Libya, this book is an important text for students and scholars of History, North Africa and the Middle East as well as the non-specialist with an interest in current affairs.
At the end of '800, Italy became a new nation and timidly trying to build its own national identity. It will confront immediately with the need for expansion of the cities, just gone beyond the bounds of its city walls. Thus opens the way for that fervent period, rich in architectural and urban experimentation that, starting from the end of the '20s will infect the Italy and many Mediterranean countries.
The main Italian coastal cities which until then had experienced the relationship with the sea in terms of defense and protection, almost to the point to deny it, by this time become places of a strong expressive research based on the ability to build a new relationship with the water. The image of a large new urban unit, visible by those who come and watch the city from the sea, becomes a new, specific, cultural and expressive choice.
It was born in these terms the urban theme of the "lungomare", the picture frame in which the Italian cities built their monumental and scenographic image toward the sea. The "lungomare" thus becomes for the Italian architectural experimentation, especially during the Fascist period, a manifesto of national identity; a new vehicle of communication, necessary to symbolize the power (especially in the cities of southern Italy), and steer the Italian colonial policy towards other Mediterranean regions. In this perspective, we can interpret the experiences of lungomare of cities such as Bari and Taranto in Apulia Region, but also the contemporaneous and very often similar experiences of Tripoli and Benghazi, in the Libyan colony.
During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.
From the early 1920s through the 1930s, an important yet forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon developed in the Zionist community of British Mandate Palestine. In cities and resort regions across the country, several dozen modernist hotels were built for a new type of visitor: the Zionist tourist. Often the most architecturally significant structures in their locales and designed by leading local architects educated in some of Europe's most progressive schools, these hotels were conceived along ideological lines and represented a synthesis of social requirements, cutting-edge aesthetics, and utopian national ideals. They responded to a complex mixture of sentiments, including European standards of modern comfort and the longing to remake Palestine, the historical homeland of the Jewish people, for a newly liberated, progressive nation. This article focuses on Jerusalem's most ambitious modernist hotel, the Eden Hotel, to evaluate how the architecture of tourism became a political and aesthetic tool in the promotion of Zionist Palestine. Modernism in hotel design – at least on a large and popular scale – has been credited as the postwar accomplishment of Conrad Hilton (1887 –1979), father of the eponymous hotel chain, whose mass-produced formula evolved in the 1950s and 1960s. For the practical-minded Hilton, modern architecture was "oriented to the human scale [without any] attempt to impress with grandiose effects or to awe with ostentatious display; there is luxury without pretentiousness." 1 However, the late 1920s through the 1930s, decades before Hilton's surge of activity, witnessed an important but forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon: several dozen modernist hotels sprouted in the cities and resort regions of British Mandate Palestine (1917 – 48). Designed by leading progressive local architects trained in Europe, these structures – often the most ambitious architecture of the region's modern built fabric – embodied social ideals and ideological principles that synthesized a real need for modern infrastructure, futurist aesthetics, and utopian national aspirations. Their interiors, too, were important for their interpretation of a modernism adapted from the typical Jewish bourgeois home of Central Europe to the new homeland in Palestine. A close relationship between hotel design and political and national aspirations has marked many cultures. 2 This was certainly true for Zionist Palestine. There, hotel culture and modern design emerged particularly in the late 1920s but assumed greater visibility with the so-called Fifth Aliyah, the wave of immigration to Palestine of the 1930s.
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