The medina of Tripoli (Libya) is not just another replica of the Arab-Islamic city and its peculiar collective institutions. Being developed on a pre-existing Roman city by different populations such as Arab-Berber, European and Jewish it has turned into an urban system which exhibits composite characters. It is possible therefore to speak of Tripoli, as a Mediterranean medina. This definition suggests a legacy of values of urban life and space, common to the cities that face the Mediterranean Sea, where cultural relations and exchanges take place despite ethnic and religious differences. The comparison between the Medina of Tripoli, as represented in the old plans, and its recent plan evidences enormous transformations. The most spectacular of which is the progressive formation of great voids in the western part of the city, that compromises the extraordinary image of the compact fabric of the Medina in 1911. One of the principal reasons of this transformation is certainly the abandonment of the city by the Hebrew population, progressively, after the Second World War, and definitely, on June 1967 in the occasion of the Arab-Israelite war. The ghettos, hara es-saghira and hara el-kebira (small ghetto and great ghetto), already in poor conditions during the Colonial period, are evacuated, together with the synagogues. The houses no more inhabited, decade and fall down producing great voids and a progressive process of decay in the compact fabric. In fact in this type of urban fabric each building is linked to the adjacent one through a physical, structural and functional continuity that is impossible to cut without compromising the survival of the system. The presence of a void in the continuous fabric produces, with a domino effect, other voids around it and thus propagates and amplifies the pathology. Presumably the newly created conditions release the house from the compulsory open space in its core, substituting the openings towards the court, to attain air and light, with other ones towards the surrounding spaces. Thus the traditional court, is often transformed into the central hall of the house, covered and protected. This transformation does not regard this or that house, but is a general phenomenon that affects and modifies the original and genetic characters of the residential fabric, producing, in time, a deep mutation of the relation between the housing type and the urban morphology. The study of these transformations, that deeply involve the residential system, becomes thus significant in twofold ways. On one hand, it evidences the more or less profound consume of an original model that has produced extraordinary urban clusters; on the other hand it reveals, together with a non implemented demand for a new quality of dwelling, certain trends, changes of direction that could be a prelude for new advanced models. The medina is no more … and is not still….
The Medina of Tripoli, Libya. The Future of an Urban Living Heritage and Cultural Landscape
MICARA, Ludovico
2012-01-01
Abstract
The medina of Tripoli (Libya) is not just another replica of the Arab-Islamic city and its peculiar collective institutions. Being developed on a pre-existing Roman city by different populations such as Arab-Berber, European and Jewish it has turned into an urban system which exhibits composite characters. It is possible therefore to speak of Tripoli, as a Mediterranean medina. This definition suggests a legacy of values of urban life and space, common to the cities that face the Mediterranean Sea, where cultural relations and exchanges take place despite ethnic and religious differences. The comparison between the Medina of Tripoli, as represented in the old plans, and its recent plan evidences enormous transformations. The most spectacular of which is the progressive formation of great voids in the western part of the city, that compromises the extraordinary image of the compact fabric of the Medina in 1911. One of the principal reasons of this transformation is certainly the abandonment of the city by the Hebrew population, progressively, after the Second World War, and definitely, on June 1967 in the occasion of the Arab-Israelite war. The ghettos, hara es-saghira and hara el-kebira (small ghetto and great ghetto), already in poor conditions during the Colonial period, are evacuated, together with the synagogues. The houses no more inhabited, decade and fall down producing great voids and a progressive process of decay in the compact fabric. In fact in this type of urban fabric each building is linked to the adjacent one through a physical, structural and functional continuity that is impossible to cut without compromising the survival of the system. The presence of a void in the continuous fabric produces, with a domino effect, other voids around it and thus propagates and amplifies the pathology. Presumably the newly created conditions release the house from the compulsory open space in its core, substituting the openings towards the court, to attain air and light, with other ones towards the surrounding spaces. Thus the traditional court, is often transformed into the central hall of the house, covered and protected. This transformation does not regard this or that house, but is a general phenomenon that affects and modifies the original and genetic characters of the residential fabric, producing, in time, a deep mutation of the relation between the housing type and the urban morphology. The study of these transformations, that deeply involve the residential system, becomes thus significant in twofold ways. On one hand, it evidences the more or less profound consume of an original model that has produced extraordinary urban clusters; on the other hand it reveals, together with a non implemented demand for a new quality of dwelling, certain trends, changes of direction that could be a prelude for new advanced models. The medina is no more … and is not still….I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
