Decoding the Mediterranean town

Steve Hawley, Jan 07, 09.

Recent information reveals that old Mediterranean towns were built in an emergent fashion, rather than as the result of large-scale planning, according to this piece in Emergent Urbanism. The sheer beauty of Mediterranean towns has turned many into popular tourist destinations, and other cities have tried unsuccessfully to replicate their designs. The problem is that Mediterranean cities simply evolved over time as clusters of buildings that relied on proscriptive or prohibitive rules, rather than today’s inefficient prescriptive mandates that delve into minute detail, according to the study. The author argues that the form of a building is not nearly as important as the process that created it. According to him, planners should base modern prescriptive rules on the much older proscriptive rules in order to create “a sustainable city and living urban tissue out of the vast urban fabric of suburban sprawl.”