Connections, Mobilities, Urban Prospects and Environmental Threats : The Mediterranean in Transition [1 ed.] 9781443882224, 9781443872461

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Connections, Mobilities, Urban Prospects and Environmental Threats

Connections, Mobilities, Urban Prospects and Environmental Threats The Mediterranean in Transition Edited by

Theano S. Terkenli, Annick Douguédroit and Louis F. Cassar

Connections, Mobilities, Urban Prospects and Environmental Threats: The Mediterranean in Transition Edited by Theano S. Terkenli, Annick Douguédroit and Louis F. Cassar This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Theano S. Terkenli, Annick Douguédroit, Louis F. Cassar and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7246-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7246-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii List of Tables .............................................................................................. xi Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii Theano S. Terkenli and Annick Douguédroit Geography, History, and Heritage: A Mediterranean Overview ................. 1 David Lowenthal Part I: Urbanization and Tourism: Aspects of Development Chapter One ............................................................................................... 51 Anticipating the Future of the Mediterranean Coastal Regions through Geoprospective Approaches: The Latin Arc’s Coastal Areas and the Region of Nice Christine Voiron-Canicio and Sophie Liziard Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 77 Intermediate Size Cities and the New Urbanization Pattern in Greece Pavlos Delladetsimas Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 97 Globalised Tourism and Local Development: An Apparent Contradiction? A Test in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, Italy Igor Jelen, Norbert Weixlbaumer and Maurizio Stanic Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 123 Networks of Dependency and Partnership, in Times of Crisis: Tourism Sustainability in the Aegean, Greece Theano S. Terkenli

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Part II: Environmental Threats: Present Trends and Future Prospects Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 153 Temperature and Precipitation in the Mediterranean Region: Present Trends and Future Scenarios Annick Douguédroit and Piero Lionello Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 187 Place Differences in Human Exposure to Environmental Factors in Eastern Mediterranean Cities: The Case of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa Izhak Schnell, Oded Potchter and Yaron Yaakov Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 213 Threats to Mediterranean Forest Landscapes by the End of the 21st Century Annick Douguédroit and Michel Vennetier Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 239 Mediterranean Extreme Floods and Flood Risk: The Hydrogeomorphological Method Jean-Louis Ballais Part III: Geospatial Tools and Info-communication Technologies Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 265 Changing Perceptions in Mediterranean Geography: The Role of Geospatial Tools Ioannis Vogiatzakis and Maria Teresa Melis Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 287 Perspectives on International Communications in the Mediterranean Basin Aharon Kellerman Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 305 Mediterranean Communication Societies: Perspectives on Policies from Italy Maria Paradiso Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 335 The Mediterranean Internet Barney Warf Contributors ............................................................................................. 359

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1-1. Framework showing the factors used to estimate the probable land-use change, from agriculture to urbanization Figure 1-2. The various classes of littoralisation suitability in the Latin Arc Figure 1-3. The physical 3-D model of the Var Valley, as a medium of survey (1: 50,000 scale; 50 cm x 26 cm size) Figure 1-4. Comparison between areas perceived as agricultural by Mayors and the actual agricultural land in the lower valley of Var River Figure 1-5. The highest probabilities of irreversible change from agricultural to urban land in the Var Valley Figure 2-1. The urban network in Greece and the cities considered in the context of this study Figure 2-2. The Egnatia North Axis and its catchment area influence Source: The Egnatia ObservatoryFigure 3-1. Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and its location in the Upper Adriatic Figure 3-2. View of Lignano peninsula Figure 4-1. Model of partnership typologies Figure 4-2. The Island of Lesvos, Greece, and its location in the Aegean Sea Figure 4-3. Yearly charter flight passenger arrivals in Lesvos (1983-2009) Figure 4-4. The survey interview questionnaire: questions related to the company Figure 4-5. The survey interview questionnaire: questions relative to Lesvos Figure 4-6. The domes of St Therapon church, landmark of Mytiline, the capital port city of Lesvos Figure 4-7. Activities in women’s cooperative of Petra Figure 5-1. Mean seasonal temperature (°C) in the Mediterranean region Figure 5-2. Mean seasonal accumulated precipitation (mm) in the Mediterranean region Figure 5-3. Schematic of the NAO signature on the Sea level pressure field and of its consequences on the precipitation in the Mediterranean and Western European regions depending on its High/low phase Figure 5-4. The 3 main teleconnection patterns originating cold season rainfall in the Mediterranean basin

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Figure 5-5. Schematic representation of cyclone tracks in 3 rainfall winter daily regimes identified by the analysis of the 500 hPa mean pressure Figure 5-6. A1B scenario temperature differences between the 2071-2100 and 1961-1990 periods Figure 5-7. Normalized distribution of summer temperature anomalies over southern Europe Figure 5-8. A1B scenario percentage change of precipitation between the 2071-2100 and 1961-1990 periods Figure 5-9. Normalized distribution of summer precipitation anomalies over southern Europe Figure 6-1. The study route in Tel Aviv Metropolis Figure 6-2. Distribution of sense of discomfort Figure 6-3. Error bar of sense of discomfort Figure 6-4. An error bar of social stress by type of place Figure 6-5. Error bar of noise by type of place (dB) Figure 6-6. Levels of CO by type of place (ppm) Figure 6-7. The multiple regression between the environmental factors and sense of discomfort in types of places Figure 7-1. Monthly precipitation for Mediterranean levels along a transect from eastern Tunisia to Mediterranean France at sea level Figure 7-2. Daily evolution of carbon uptake by a branch of holm oak at Le Rouquet, France Figure 7-3. Pinus sylvestris die-back at the southern edge of its distribution area after 2003 heat wave and drought (after Norman, 2005 and Douguédroit, 1976) Figure 7-4. Relative variation (average per plot) between 1996-98 and 2008 of the sums of occurrences and Braun-Blanquet abundancedominance coefficients, according to plant tolerance to heat and drought Figure 7-5. Annual number of fires and burnt surfaces in Mediterranean France (1973-2013) Figure 7-6. Forest fires in Peloponnese, Greece (24-27 August 2007) according to MODIS satellite Figure 7-7. Map of Western Provence with the bioclimatic index of Vennetier et al. (2008): end of the 20th century Figure 7-8. Map of Western Provence with the bioclimatic index of Vennetier et al. (2008): +2°C mean annual temperature, -30% of summer rainfall and -20% of spring rainfall Figure 8-1. Topographic relations between the different beds Figure 8-2. Section of the Orbieu River alluvial plain at « La Mourède », Ferrals-les-Corbières, France

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Figure 8-3. Superimposition of limits of river floodplain and flooded areas Figure 8-4. Hydrogeomorphological map of the Orbieu valley (Ferrals-lesCorbières, France) Figure 8-5. Building up of the Argent-Double River high water bed at La Redorte (France) during the XXth century Figure 9-1. MODIS image, acquired in July 2004, showing dust plumes blowing off the coast of Algeria and Tunisia and over the Mediterranean Sea Figure 9-2. The Total Population in the Mediterranean. The size of each territory shows the relative proportion of the world's population living there Figure 9-3. SPOT image, acquired in September 2009, in an area of western Sardinia, Italy Figure 9-4. Landscape types in Sicily, excerpt from the Italian national landscape map Figure 9-5. Mapping Pressure in the Mediterranean. Based on the 1st Principal Component for pressure indicators of the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index —ESI Figure 9-6. Projected amphibian species losses (with no dispersal) and gains (with unlimited dispersal) by 2050 in 10DZ grid-cell resolution across Europe Figure 9-7. Land use in Europe in 2080 according to GRAS scenario Figure 10-1. Potential geographical patterns for international telecommunications within the Mediterranean basin Figure 12-1. Fiber Optics Lines of the Mediterranean Figure 12-2. Internet Users (000s), June 2012 Figure 12-3. Internet Penetration Rates, June 2012 Figure 12-4. Broadband Penetration, 2012 Figure 12-5. Growth in Internet Users, 2000-2012 Figure 12-6. Total New Internet Users (000s), 2000-2012

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1-1. Indicators values and the corresponding future perspectives of littoralisation Table 3-1. Companies’ dimensions per number of employees in FVG 2007-2008 Table 3-2. Arrivals and overnight stays on Upper Adriatic coastal destinations (2010) Table 3-3. Arrivals and overnight stays in Lignano Sabbiadoro (19502010) Table 3-4. Seasonality for Lignano tourist facilities—hotels Table 5-1. Temperature increase for A1B scenarios by the end of the 21st century in the SEM region from AR4-WG1 and RCP 4.5 scenarios for 2081-2100 in the MED sub-region from AR5-WG1 Table 5-2. Precipitation simulations for the RCP 4.5 for 2081-2100 with respect to 1986-2005 and A1B scenario by the end of the 21st century Table 6-1. Number of visits by type of place Table 6-2. Distribution of sense of discomfort by time of the day Table 6-3. The distribution of PET values by Seasons Table 6-4. Mean values of the distribution of the studied environmental factors by main seasons Table 6-5. Sense of discomfort by PET level and season Table 6-6. Thermal load by type of place and season (PET) Table 6-7. The multiple regression between the average levels of the environmental factors in types of places and the variability in the average sense of discomfort among the types of place Table 7-1. Typical climate stations of the vegetation levels in Tunisia and southern France at sea level Table 9-1. Examples of mapping in the Mediterranean as discussed in the chapter Table 10-1. Geographical classes and patterns of International telecommunications Table 10-2. Most frequently called countries for selected Mediterranean countries 1994-1996 Table 10-3. Most frequently called countries for selected Mediterranean countries 2005-2006

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Table 11-1. Basic indicators for Mediterranean Information geographies 2007-2008 Table 11-2. Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions 2006-2012 Table 11-3. Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants 2006-2012 Table 12-1. The Economist E-Readiness Rankings and Scores for Selected Mediterranean Countries in 2010

PREFACE

ȉhe Mediterranean, the “middle of the earth” in ancient Greek and Latin, a contested, revered and multiply revisited and re-articulated region, where the “West” and the “Orient” part paths: a region of condensed history and geography. This is where the construction of the West, as we know it, starts, our cultural hearth, shared with the Arabic world, and in close correspondence and symbiosis with neighboring African and Asian cultural realms. Aristotle’s “inner sea”, however, does not belong only to the West; it is universal and omnipresent. Furthermore, it is multiple and dynamically ever-transforming, and it is such ‘Mediterraneities’ that this book explores, from a geographer’s viewpoint—or, should we say, viewpoints. This world region has always been surrounded by and summoned powerful symbolisms and long-lasting appeal. In the last century or so, the Mediterranean Europe has been attempting to catch up with the rest of Europe socially and economically. In a globalizing world, this upward struggle is dramatically culminating in the current credit/ economic and climate/ environmental crisis, with—as of yet—-uncertain results. Yet, this new crisis notwithstanding, ‘mare nostrum’ is still largely unknown, in its multitudinous and ever-transforming hypostasis. It is the multiple geographies of this fascinating geographical imaginary that this book turns to explore. The main objective of this undertaking, then, is to grasp the pulse of the dynamism of such contemporary Mediterranean geographies. Specifically, it addresses trends, challenges, threats and prospects of various sorts to the Mediterranean region (especially Southern Europe and the Middle East), in light of current trends such as climate change, economic crises, accelerated human mobility and info-communication, as these affect an already burdened and fragile part of the world. This is considered to be both, a timely and a pressing task, despite the fact that much has already been written and debated about the Mediterranean. Thus, the book addresses Mediterranean geographical particularities, but does not attempt to cover every aspect of the human and physical geographies of the Mediterranean region. It rather rests on emergent and increasingly significant issues of Mediterranean bearing, and aims at

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providing new perspectives, insights and interpretations to issues exerting various pressures on the region, at various geographical scales. The emphasis is on new and pressing issues, often particular to the Mediterranean; impacts of trends of globalization and crisis on the Mediterranean; discussion of these issues and trends in the context of contemporary world processes. This collective volume provides a more specialized scope on selected Mediterranean geographies, with a focus on emerging and frequently overlooked issues concerning the Mediterranean region, in a world-integrated perspective. Such issues include the increased summer drought and the northward shift of climatic types, littoralisation processes, urbanization trends, human exposure to environmental stresses, the significance of partnerships in tourism and the booming of info-communication technologies. The present volume comprises an overview on the Geography, History and Heritage of the Mediterranean, and is divided in three parts. The overview sets the stage historically for the specific topics subsequently developed. The first part focuses on issues of urbanization and mobility; it centers on drivers of regional and local dynamism and development and the potentials and challenges posed by and through them. The second part revolves, to a large degree, around climate change in the Mediterranean region and its consequences on the natural and human environment. Finally, the third part of the book features an area of growing significance and interest in and for Mediterranean people and researchers, namely geospatial tools and info-communication technologies, as applicable and applied on contemporary Mediterranean geographies. Issues of globalization thread throughout the book, spanning its historical dimension and its spectrum of geographical differentiation, in the Mediterranean context. Furthermore, this goal is maintained, with an eye to placing the Mediterranean in the context of contemporary world processes, also through the transfer of experiences, ideas, and tools to this region from elsewhere around the world. Where and when this undertaking fails to deliver its goals, as set above, the failing rests with its editors. Such failings refer to its inability to cover all significant aspects and issues of contemporary Mediterranean geographies or to afford them their due ontological and epistemological breadth and depth. In some cases, the weight of the book’s contributions falls more on theoretical underpinnings rather than applied research or vice versa. Consequently, such a task may only assume significance in the context of ongoing work on the geographies of the Mediterranean.

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The core of contributions to this volume originates from an initiative of the Mediterranean Renaissance Program of the International Geographical Union (now the COMB Committee of the IGU—International Geographical Union). Most chapters have been authored by members of the latter Committee and additional chapters have been included, in order to cover more aspects of contemporary Mediterranean Geographies. We would also like to thank our English editor, Mrs. Lena Kontakou (translator/editor, PhD c. Applied Linguistics Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid) for her thorough editing of the whole manuscript, and all of the book‘s contributors for their unfailing cooperation and support, throughout this project. Finally, this task would have never been realized without the generous help of Patricia Cicille (CNRS Research Engineer in Social Science, ESPACE UMR 7300, CNRS, Aix Marseille Université), who assumed its formatting and general preparation for publication.

GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND HERITAGE: A MEDITERRANEAN OVERVIEW DAVID LOWENTHAL

Foreword This chapter enlarges on and updates its “Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel, modern millstone”, Nations and Nationalism, 14(2) 2008: 369-92. Its concerns embrace history, heritage and social identity in locales ranging from the Caribbean and Tasmania to the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Greece. Along with the sociology of the islands and their diaspora and conflicted claims to relics and reminders of the classical tradition, it studies Mediterranean environmental and ecological issues past and present.

Abstract The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the cultural heritage of the region the most widely acclaimed in the world. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean people with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of the transalpine and transatlantic nation-states. The consequences for the care and control of the Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both, the region’s selfdefining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.

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Peerless patrimony, global heritage Mediterranean cultural heritage is customarily cited as the richest and most widely acclaimed in the world, as well as one of its most ancient. Urban civilisation may have begun earlier in China and Mesopotamia, but it is the Mediterranean, more durably and densely urbanised, that in common Western parlance has long signified civilised antiquity. The megalithic marvels of Malta, the perdurable Pyramids of Egypt, the classical temples of Greece, the multitude of Italian and Spanish UNESCO World Heritage locales, “the sheer quantity of ancient sites and buildings bind past and present more closely in the Mediterranean than anywhere else”. A quarter of the one thousand World Heritage sites are in the Mediterranean. With five million catalogued works, Italy alone is said to house half or more of the world’s art treasures—a patrimony likened in economic terms to the oil of the Arabian Peninsula. Yet not Italy alone but every Mediterranean country boasts “a wealth of archaeological and architectural heritage” that helps to “make it one of the most pleasant places on earth to live in” and to visit (European Community 2002: 11; Benoit and Comeau 2005: 272; Chechi 2009: 187; Lenzerini 2009: 108). Of that patrimony a high proportion are loci of revelatory sacred import, the focus of millennia of veneration and pilgrimage, along with crusading conflict and contemporary contestation, birthed by and host to the world’s three great monotheistic faiths. From Jerusalem west to Compostela and east to Mecca, these “geographical points of tangency between God and man, between the eternal and history”, in Pope John Paul II’s words, infuse the greater Mediterranean with a supremely transcendent living heritage (Ferrari 2014: 4-13). Along with the Mediterranean’s extant relics, its long-lost legacies—the cities of Troy and Carthage, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Romer and Romer 1995; Scarre 1999: 19-47), the fabled library of Alexandria—continue to infuse collective memory and public art. The lifeblood of the region’s vital tourist industry, that heritage is also a global inspiration, “a monument and symbol of universal civilization”, as phrased in the 1994 Declaration of the Aegean.1 Mediterranean civic example suffuses the world’s statuary and street names, theatres and plazas, governmental systems and commercial forums, cenotaphs and memorials, colleges and stadiums. The wish to be “Mediterranean” in far-flung New World peripheries enriched colonial elites in Amazonian Brazil with Greek and Roman decor (Marshall 2005: 312). Les Nouvelles Athènes (Retzler 2004) details how classical exemplars from Athens and Florence enhanced eighteenth- and nineteenth-

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century Dresden, Weimar, Munich, Edinburgh (by the architect James “Athenian” Stuart), and St. Petersburg. Overseas, a 1936 full-scale Parthenon replica made Nashville, Tennessee, the proud “Athens of the South”. Edmonton, Alberta, became the “Athens of the Tundra” when a flood of cultivated Eastern European refugees gave this provincial Canadian capital two symphony orchestras (Lowenthal 1988: 727). “Follow me!” urged mayor W. G. Brookman of Perth, capital of Western Australia, in 1900, “and I will make this city a fairer Athens and a freer Rome” (Richards 1982: 69).2 Backing Greek independence in the United States Senate in 1824, Daniel Webster noted that reminders of ancient Greece so enveloped America that “even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors” (in Lowenthal 1988: 727). Reminiscent of Palladian fame in Georgian Britain (Carré 1996) is the renewed allure of classical architecture in the United States, from Ionic columns and classical proportions, friezes, cornices and statues to a new translation of Vitruvius (Colman 2005). A mere token royalty on every classical ornament erected the world over would enrich Greece beyond compare.

The interlinked Mediterranean: fabled unity and homogeneity Integral to Mediterranean antiquity were social connections that overrode geographical fragmentation and cultural difference. By the second millennium BC, seaborne accessibility brought trade and industry to every island, to every coast, and deep into the hinterlands of navigable rivers from the Levant to Spain. However distant, what was reachable by sea seemed close, and most of the Mare Internum was safely within landfall. Waterborne mobility linked harbour towns all around and all-year round; oft-trumpeted dangers seldom seriously deterred sea travel (Martín Montero 2002; Horden and Purcell 2005: 367; Malkin 2011; Broodbank 2013). From the first millennium BC, Mediterranean connectivity created concentrations of wealth and culture “completely unknown anywhere else on the globe” (Bresson 2005: 113-14). By the second century AD, the Roman Empire had transformed the earlier Greek world into a global village and expanded the Tyrrhenian Mare Nostrum from the Gates of Hercules to the Strait of Gibraltar (Rathbone 2007). The Greco-Roman civilisation during the half millennium from the fifth through the first century BC spread the same architectural styles and ways of life

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throughout Greece, Italy, France, Asia Minor, and North Africa. “Put down in the marketplace of one of these Mediterranean cities of the first century AD you would find it difficult to recognize where you were”, a homogeneity likened to today’s ubiquitous skyscraper architecture and global-brand stores (Schäfer 2007: 339). Here, almost uniquely before modern times, myriad peoples of diverse roots and creeds, customs and tongues, shared habitats and economies. Strife was never absent, but coexistence fostered alertness and flexible adjustment to alien ways, even to the competing monotheistic fealties— Hebraic, Christian, and eventually Islamic—birthed in the region. Proclaiming pan-Mediterranean ties, Greeks inserted themselves into others’ histories and traditions, appropriating their patriarchs and legendary heroes, finding fictive founders all around its shores: Cadmus in Thebes, Danaus in Argos, Pelops in the Peloponnese, Perseus in Persia. Romans took pride in Trojan ancestry and Arcadian antecedents. Rivalrous peoples nonetheless, prized interconnection and fabricated kinship; Greeks and Egyptians tied Athens to Egyptian Sais, linking Osiris with Herakles; Hellenistic Jews mingled Egyptian, Babylonian, biblical and Hellenic lore, making citizens of manumitted slaves throughout their mongrel empire. Romans embraced connections with Pythagoras, remoulded Greek and Etruscan rites and rituals, and deferred to the oracle at Delphi (Gruen 2011: 224-227, 355-356). Although promulgated by Rome, the calamitous Crusades were more often waged as transalpine vendettas. By contrast, Mediterranean folk tended to be urbane cosmopolites’ “living proof”, in one scholar’s view, that “different cultures [of] diverse traditions and beliefs … may co-exist” (C. Schmitt 1954 [1997]). Henri Pirenne’s (1935 [1983]) portrait of a Mediterranean hopelessly split by warring faiths is belied by the Cairo Geniza archive’s massive evidence of functioning commercial and social networks (Goitein 1999). The facing ports of two small Aegean islands, Herakleia and Schinoussa in the Cyclades, are each protected from gales, one from the Northeast, the other from the Southwest. Espying a threatening wind, fishermen and yachtsmen rush to move boats from one port to the other. The sea is their shared space. The Herakleia–Schinoussa symbiosis is a “fractal” microcosm of the whole Mediterranean’s dynamic connectivity (Malkin et al. 2009: 1-2). Connectivity enabled ancient Rome to extract imperial tribute from the entire basin. Outlasting that empire, Mediterranean unity was long celebrated—longer, in many respects, than it survived. “The peoples around the Mediterranean”, in the nineteenth-century historian Jakob

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Burckhardt’s wistful metaphor (1958: 23), “are really one animate being”. Twenty-three years after the first (1949) edition of his own magnum opus on the Mediterranean world, Fernand Braudel (1972 [1995]: vol. 1, 14) held “the unity and coherence of the Mediterranean” a still unchallenged truth. “The whole sea shared a common destiny”. Following Pirenne, Peter Brown (1982: 168-169) saw “the basic homogeneity of Mediterranean civilisation [lasting] deep into the early Middle Age”. Divergence within, was “always dwarfed by the immensity of the gulf which separated the Mediterranean itself from the alien societies” outside, walled off by steep mountains to the North and East and harsh deserts to the South (Horden and Purcell 2000: 7, 34-38, 134-135; Boissevain 1979: 83).3 The basin’s homogeneity endured, to some degree, well past early modern times. Even if the so-called “Mediterraneanism”—the distinctive features Mediterranean cultures have or have had in common—often seems a wishful reflex in the face of glaring North-South economic disparities (Harris 2005: 38; Calleya 2009: 51), “the consistency with which the stereotypes appear within the area itself” vouch for their durable salience. “From Morocco to Turkey, from Thessaloniki to Toulouse, we hear more or less the same list of traits” held to be characteristic of everyday life (Herzfeld 2005: 53). The agricultural and social practices, vernacular buildings, cuisine, and folk dances of the Arab Mediterranean are more like those of the non-Arab Mediterranean than of the Arabs of Arabia (Lenzerini 2009: 109n27). As new unities are generated and epitomised by the airplane and the bikini, in reinvented traditions and in local reactions to tourism (Abulafia 2003: 283-312; Horden and Purcell 2005: 363), old unities are revivified by an array of new agencies—the Union for the Mediterranean (now the Barcelona Process), the Euromed University (Calleya 2009; Lesser 2009). Trade and the spoils of war made the Mediterranean globally crucial until the end of the Second World War, as attested by the strategic importance of Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Crete and Sicily. Control over shipping, however, had already devolved away from Mediterranean empires, centered in Venice and Constantinople, to northern naval powers. Seaborne interaction, once the sine-qua-non of Mediterranean prosperity, increasingly subjugated and impoverished its peoples.

Dwindling influence and prestige After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean by and large became ever more disadvantaged. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion, and colonial

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subjugation have left its inhabitants with fewer resources and weaker infrastructure than those of most transalpine and transatlantic nationStates. The trading, financial, and commercial power of the Venetian and Genoese empires and other City-States proved a mixed blessing, bringing great wealth through the spice trade and plantation crops at the cost of latifundia slave labour and environmental degradation. After 1550, Venetian, Genoese, and Catalan trade was displaced by Ottoman and Habsburg power and then by French, Dutch, and English commerce, dissolving long-time trans-Mediterranean symbiotic relationships—the Genoese with Castile, Venice with the Sublime Porte, Florence with the French throne. As Portuguese galleons penetrated the Indian Ocean, sugar moved across the Atlantic, and the world’s economic hub shifted to the North Sea. Meanwhile the Mediterranean, its shores and lowlands increasingly abandoned for upland occupance, “was turning into a millpond” (Tabak 2008: 2, 14-25). As marine trade dwindled, traditional coastal hostelries “accepting all comers” gave way to segregation, rigid disjunctions, expulsions, most notoriously the Spanish expulsion of first Arabs and then Jews (Constable 2003: 11, 356-361). The perceived trend towards divisive fragmentation is epitomised in Nicholas Purcell’s (2003) “The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness?” Mediterranean sovereignties today are mostly poor or small or both; with a few notable exceptions, the Mediterranean parts of larger states (Spain, Italy) are generally least well off, sometimes woefully destitute. “Almost every region of the Mediterranean”, notes an anthropologist, “has at some point in the past—generally more than 300 years ago—been much more important than it is now”, whether importance be measured in terms of commerce, capital, or creative confidence (Thomas Crump in Boissevain 1979: 86; see Abulafia 2011: 545-639). A common history of decline suggests homogeneity of a dismaying sort. Since “the people of the Mediterranean have been engaged in conquest, commerce, colonialism, connubium, and conversation for about five millenniums”, writes another anthropologist, “it is impossible to imagine that … they have not created common institutions” (Davis 1987: 22-23). But some see these commonalities as deficiencies that make a mockery, even self-mockery, of Mediterranean distinctiveness (Sant Cassia 1991b). “We write”, notes Herzfeld (2001: 675), “not so much about the Mediterranean, as about “ȉhe Mediterranean””. The old “Mediterranean” was the famed seedbed of European civilisation. “All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages has come from the shores of the Mediterranean”, Samuel Johnson summed up Enlightenment views (Fox

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1978: 5). As in ǹrt and Law, so in Architecture and Literature and Theatre, Philosophy and Politics, “when we reflect on supreme human achievement”, wrote Georges Duby in 1988, “our gaze is drawn to the Mediterranean” (Carmignani 1996: 9, 15-17). From ancient cosmopolitan pre-eminence, however, the basin was stereotypically held by transalpine aficionados to have relapsed into quasiprimitive Arcadianism. Against the advanced and dynamic industrial North, the Mediterranean got typecast as southern and backward, rural and artisanal, its “traditional urban centres more antique curiosity than defining features of the present” (Herzfeld 2001: 674-675). Seen by Grand (and lesser) Tourists as innocent and childlike, yet conniving and mercenary, at once seductive and effeminate, primitive and violent, Mediterranean youths also fell prey to the homoerotic quests (sanctioned by classical Greek practice and greased by latter-day disparity of wealth) of northerners from Winckelmann, Pater, Symonds and Wilde through E. M. Forster and Thomas Mann (Aldrich 1993: 162-172, 217-229). As resorts of rich rogues, the Riviera and the Costa del Sol became, as Somerset Maugham said of Monaco, “a sunny place for shady people” (Chippindale 2007: 742). Meanwhile the golden hordes of holidaying hoi polloi, lured by the banal hedonism of sun, sea, sand, sex, and spirits, penetrate and pullulate in honey pots from Morocco and Mallorca to Corfu and Kefalonia (Crang, Obrador, and Travlou 2012). Economic need forced locals to promote “the stereotype of their “hospitality” as presented to foreign tourists” (Herzfeld 1987: 76-77, 86). But “in conforming to a model of Mediterranean peoples as unreliable, imprecise, and spontaneous—all virtues highly regarded in Greek cultural intimacy”, they provided “both an excuse for their own failures in the larger spheres of competition and an excuse for others to despise them” (Herzfeld 2005: 57). Given such ambivalence, the only reliable serviceable local defences would seem to be deception and irony—themselves being stereotypically Mediterranean (Zarkia 1996). “The colonial trauma that envelops the modern Mediterranean, both for its colonized and its colonizers”, concludes one transalpine scholar, “induces ubiquitous pessimism” (Chambers 2008: 86, 149).

Legacies of environmental degradation Over the course of seventy centuries the Mediterranean has not only borne witness to a unique efflorescence of human creativity, it has also endured an unexampled history of human pressure on the natural habitat that periodically left much of it degraded, infertile, desolated. Imperial

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depredation typically wasted Mediterranean island and coastal resources. Ancient Rome milked its provinces dry. Venetian, Genoese, and Ottoman commerce transformed the “Isles of Paradise” (Cyprus and Crete), along with much of the former Roman breadbasket in the Levant and North Africa, into soil-depleting and forest-destroying sugar and cotton plantations (Tabak 2008: 303). Aragonese and Savoyard monarchs stripped Sardinia of its forests for timber and fuel; Genoa impoverished Corsica by imposing intensive agriculture. The classic tale of environmental desolation may oversimplify, but its residues are everywhere apparent in landscape and vegetation, soils and sands and watercourses. It is worth recalling George Perkins Marsh’s (1864 [2003]: 7-12) famed indictment, penned while he was American Minister to Italy: The Roman Empire, at the period of its greatest expansion, comprised the regions of the Earth most distinguished by a happy combination of physical advantages. The provinces … of the Mediterranean enjoyed a healthfulness and an equability of climate, a fertility of soil, a variety of vegetable and mineral products, and natural facilities for the transportation and distribution of exchangeable commodities [unequalled] by any territory of like extent in the Old World or the New. … [But today] more than one half of their whole extent … is either deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or … greatly reduced in both productiveness and population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges; [soils] are washed away; meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproductive, because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets … ; the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sandbars, and harbors … are shoaled by the deposits of the rivers … ; the elevation of the beds of the estuaries … have converted thousands of leagues of shallow sea and fertile lowland into unproductive and miasmatic morasses. … The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due … to geological causes … but it is, in a far greater proportion, either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature, or an incidental consequence of war, … tyranny and misrule … acts and neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepitude the noblest half of the empire of the Caesars.

Above all else it was “the exhaustion of Roman soil and the devastation of Roman provinces”, said a later historian echoing Marsh, that doomed civilised antiquity (V. G. Simkhovitch [1921] in Horden and Purcell 2000: 317). In fact, the deforestation, erosion, flooding, estuarine silting, and lowland abandonment noted by Marsh had been much augmented by logging for timber and fuel since the fourteenth century and

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by upland clearing for livestock and New World food crops (maize, potatoes) from the mid-sixteenth century on (Tabak 2008). The saga of anthropogenic degradation sketched above is dismissed as hyperbole by Grove and Rackham (2001: 8-10, 262-263), who date the general aridity of the Mediterranean rather to the fourth millennium BC. But its main thrust is substantially accepted by many scholars (Sallares 1991; Hughes 1994). Horden and Purcell (2000: 316-340) would recast the history of ecological damage as episodic and locally variable rather than basin-wide and imperial Roman. But they do not suggest that Mediterranean peoples lived in general harmony with their environment, and they stress the grim effects of entrepreneurial greed over the whole of history (Horden and Purcell 2005: 369). In particular, imperial Rome’s centralising power and huge demands for food, fuel, and timber indubitably led to deforestation and degraded soils, neglected and abandoned lands, and impoverished peasants and slaves, as tellingly chronicled by Lucretius, Varro, Columella, and Tertullian, first for central Italy and then for North Africa (Williams 2003: 79, 95-100; Walsh 2004: 241; Montgomery 2007: 62-65). To laud any part of the Mediterranean as a “monument of nature which has remained practically unaltered throughout time”, as does the 1994 Declaration of the Aegean, is a myth. Every locale has witnessed continual change, every aspect of nature altered by human usages since the earliest antiquity. Ongoing flooding and alluviation, silting of shorelines and harbours, layering of urban habitation, and manifold enterprises of irrigation and channelling culminating in Suez show man and nature together ceaselessly transforming Mediterranean lands and waters. Environmental pressures exacerbated by tourism continue to degrade much Mediterranean land, with fragile coastal areas and islands especially vulnerable (Allen 2003: 260, 270-272; Benoit and Comeau 2005: 261-271, 282-289, 305354; Hillali 2008). One of the world’s richest and most endangered ecosystems, the Mediterranean, is in dire need of decontamination from industrial emission, municipal waste, and urban waste water (Lesser 2009: 33-34; Holst-Warhalf and Stenhuis 2010).

The crippled and crippling heritage These retrogressions are parlous for the care of Mediterranean artistic and architectural heritage, whose glories have long seemed virtually synonymous with social decay and political degeneration. Although the self-defining pride and an economic mainstay of many Mediterranean natives, that heritage is at the same time a crippling burden to protect and

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maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and armed guards are all but impotent to stem. At Pompeii, trampled by 2.6 million visitors a year, cracking walls, falling stones, abandoned work sites and flaking frescoes led to a year-long closure in 2008; half the houses, their interiors carpeted in weeds, remain shut. Escalating cultural loss has increased sharply in recent decades owing to voracious and insatiable international markets, armed conflict, civil unrest, and economic hardship (Vrdoljak and Francioni 2009: 3; Popham, 2010; A. Wallace 2013). Competing national, regional, local, and family claims to “ancestral” legacies bedevil heritage stewardship throughout the Mediterranean. Such conflicts are especially rife in Italy, owing to the weakness and felt alienation of Rome from the Provinces, and of provincial authorities from the villages and the countryside (Odermatt 1996). Italy’s combined police force and army cannot secure its relic-laden soil against tombaroli, its thousands of museums and a hundred thousand churches against theft, nor its borders against illicit export. Rome has been impotent to staunch the outflow of antiquities that defies the blanket prohibition against the sale abroad of its beni culturali. Illicit traffic is most widespread in Tuscany and Sicily, whose inhabitants confront reminders of their ancestors daily, living atop them, building on their graves, stumbling across relics in fields and foundations. Tomb robbing, a practice as ancient as the burial of the grave goods, is an economic mainstay and a source of local pride among enduring family networks. “Illegal digging is an institutionalised part of community life”; it is a rule that “any money made has to be spent immediately” for the benefit of all. Tombaroli are widely viewed as Robin Hoods stealing from the rich to give to the poor. They feel entitled to the rewards of digging by consanguinity with those buried there. “Many inhabitants of modern Tuscany see themselves as direct descendants of the Etruscans. They claim to have Etruscan physical features and … to maintain intimate links with the Etruscan ancestors”, whose spirits direct the digger to the chosen site (Thoden van Velzen 1996: 111-113, 118). Tombaroli and their neighbours regard outsiders—the State, the Police, and, especially, archaeologists from Rome—as extortionate interlopers. As locals see it, “excavations should not be the prerogative of landowners and archaeologists alone” (Thoden van Velzen 1996: 117). That view is reinforced by the central Government’s predisposition to favour the

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Greco-Roman heritage and, until lately, to relegate even the notably ancient Etruscan to second rank. Given the profusion of forged Etruscan antiquities and documents, of which Annius of Viterbo and Curzio Inghirami of Volterra were only the most famed perpetrators, the antiEtruscan bias is not wholly unjustified (Rowland 2004). Tomb robbing has grown since the 1950s owing to increased public interest in Etruscan culture, intensified agriculture, the lucrative global market for antiquities, and, until the late 1990s, casual official disregard of illicit export. Although post-war laissez-faire resignation has given way to a new cultural militancy that scored recent spectacular recoveries of illegally exported antiquities and, it was said, reduced illegal digging, permanent protection remains chimerical (Chechi 2009: 157-158; Lobay 2014). All apart from long-term conservation, daily care of the architectural and urban legacy exacts costs beyond Italian means or will (Benedikter 2004). With a mere fifth of one percent of the national budget devoted to cultural heritage, even Rome’s greatest antiquities—the Colosseum, the Domus Aurea, the Palatine—are crumbling (Kimmelman 2010a; Squires 2010; Rocca 2011), and much of Italy’s heritage is increasingly privatised. During the summer of 2004 a lone iconoclast armed with no more than a wrench and a screwdriver wreaked havoc in Venice with total impunity; to safeguard the massive heritage of that city it would require putting the whole of it behind glass or replacing every original piece of marble, stone and plaster with a copy (Povoledo 2004). Hence the sardonic Italian joke (www.euronews.com 2013): “You know that 60% of the world’s cultural heritage is in Italy? And the rest? The rest is safe!” Herein lies the conundrum of the Mediterranean heritage. This wondrous legacy is crucial to the identity and, for many, to sheer livelihood. “Our Government can do nothing for us, and this thing that was built thousands of years ago is still helping me feed my family”, said a postcard vendor outside Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. But that is all it means to him. “We feel the weight of this History when we get paid”, added a peasant farmer hauling debris from a newly discovered third millennium BC Pyramid near Cairo. “But if we don’t get paid, we feel nothing” (Slackman 2008). Wholesale rifling of Egyptian museums, historic sites, and archaeological excavations during the turbulent years since attests the prime value of the past as a disposable resource for survival in the ravaged present. Mediterranean heritage is on the one hand so voluminous and cumbersome, on the other so fragile, envied and exportable, that it is unsustainable. This fearsome imbalance, along with the continual attrition of theft and sale, copying and faking, has given rise among many

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Mediterranean folk to a bitter or resigned sense that the heritage in which they are steeped does not really belong to them, but is an incubus to be overcome or eradicated.

The present in thrall to the past: Italy and Greece The most agonising burden of a voluminous glorious past is to feel not just swamped by but inferior to it.4 Ancestral marvels demean modern heirs who, in the prevailing stereotype, cannot create but can only admire, husband, display, and copy. The sheer weight of Rome’s monumental ruins, alike sublime spectacles of ancient glory and gloomy images of death, seemed to Petrarch (Liber sine nomine 1347-1354 in Coogan 1983: 3)—“dwellings are propstrate, walls are toppling, churches are falling, sacred things are perishing”—to freeze its populace, immured among the Eternal City’s ashes and petrified memories, into defeatist inaction (Mazzotta 1993: 120). Eighteenth-century Grand Tour gentry dismissed Italians as hapless custodians of the treasures that northern worshippers of antiquity came to admire. Italian painters and draughtsmen—Panini, Piranesi—so immortalized the Roman decay and dissolution that tourists closed their eyes to everything modern as a sad defilement of the city’s aura of antiquity (Cooper 1999: 107-108; Siegel 2005). The Romantic poets who flocked to Italy after 1815 were besotted by its past and dismissive of its present; they learned Italian to read Renaissance sources, not to converse with Risorgimento patriots. “Rome is a city of the dead, or rather of those … puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot … made sacred to eternity”, wrote Shelley (1912: 2:653) in 1818 of Europe’s third most populous city; “you see nothing of the Italians”. In “transition from Europe’s “museum” to Europe’s “mausoleum”, Italy without the Italians” was a land of sepulchres, tombs, and cemeteries (Luzzi 2002: 49-52; 2008). The overwhelming sense of decay from imperial greatness was epitomized in the painter Thomas Cole’s scenes of destruction and desolation in his 1833-1836 Course of Empire series, derived in large part from ruins at Baia and Pozzuoli in the Roman Campania. Lapped in sentimental adoration of Dante and Petrarch, the Brownings and their expatriate successors to the present day, cared for in their Arcadian villas by obsequious servants, treated Italy as a museum of its own “ancient and weary civilization” (Cavaliero 2005: 207-223).5 Deadly malarial Rome, whose every haunting dream of beauty was tainted with “the fever of fear”, epitomized, for Ruskin, the “strange horror” of this “mass of accumulated human corruption” (Pettitt 2014).

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Casting off this demeaning heritage was the cri de coeur of Italian Futurists. By the late nineteenth century, thwarted national aspirations left Italy’s youth completely subjugated to the past. Faced with risorgimento failures, as earlier with foreign oppression, Italians had long taken refuge in classicism and neoclassicism, their dreams of a new life harking back to Imperial Rome. The Futurists scorned this worship of the past as an insuperable obstacle to progress. Their manifestoes termed Italy as “the country of the dead”, its people dozing over the glory of their ancestors, Rome and Venice mired in mouldy relics, Florence a cemetery kept up for tourists besotted with the antiquarian rubbish celebrated by transalpine visitors like Goethe and Ruskin. Italians had been reduced to slavish lackeys purveying fake antiques, thus denying and demeaning themselves. The real Italy lays in modern machine-age Milan and Turin, not in the Baedekered, dolce far niente, fetid necropolises (Marinetti 1909; Rainey et al., 2009: 52, 63-4, 75, 105, 218, 260, 274).6 Many Futurists soon morphed into fascists, and Mussolini initially echoed their iconoclastic rhetoric. Italians must, “quit living off the glories of the past”, he declared in the early 1920s, “cease being degenerate and parasitic grandchildren” and make sure “past glories are surpassed by those of the future” (in Nelis 2007: 403, 409). But whereas the Futurists condemned the entire past, fascism simply got rid of the dolorous epochs, the smothering “centuries of decadence” following Imperial Rome. And fascists celebrated, purified, and modernized selected idealised pasts for urban regeneration, to foster Italian pride in identity, and to promote tourism. Futurists rejected fascism’s cult of past glories (Gentile 2000: 11; 2007). In Rome Mussolini identified the heart and soul with the features of the imperial past, “wise and strong, disciplined and imperial”, virtues “valid yesterday, tomorrow and always”. He fancied himself as a new Caesar, Augustus or Trajan. Adopting ancient Roman paraphernalia—fasces, wolf, eagle—along with Roman salute and military step, festivals and spectacles, he destroyed medieval and Renaissance structures, “liberat[ing] all of ancient Rome from the mediocre pasts” to create celebratory spaces and the triumphal Via dei Fori Imperiale (Nelis 2007: 400, 403, 412). And Mussolini’s architects rebuilt Rome in neo-Roman style. The unadorned simplicity of the streamlined Roman Plain Style harked back to GrecoRoman while stressing vernacular Italic influences, exemplified in the columns, arches, and stairways of the modernist Esposizione Roma in the late 1930s (Kostof 1973; Lasansky 2004: 16). In Tuscan cities lacking relics of classical antiquity, the myth of romanità gave way to a myth of italianità, autochthonous Etruscan and

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Italic traditions signifying independent self-reliance and reinforcing popular faith in Italian superiority. Stripped of later additions, purified medieval and Renaissance buildings and antiquated festivals and pageantry made Tuscany’s heavily restored towns and traditions “appear more medieval and Renaissance than they ever really were” (Lasansky 2004: xlii-xliii). Greece became the next, and remains the most conspicuous, victim of its fabled history. From the failed revolt against Ottoman suzerainty in 1770 to the War of Independence half a century later, Greek patriots learned that in order to enlist essential Western support they had to accept Philhellenes’ nostalgised Eurocentric constructions of their identity and their cause. As the reformer Richard Monckton Milnes (Picturesque Sketches, 1834) found a decade after Greek freedom, modern Greeks became “the pensioners of the culture which the rest of Europe has learnt by labour and by the fruition of the ages; they have to think with others’ thoughts, almost to feel with others’ feelings” (in Roessel 2002: 15, 116). Omnipresent reminders of the unmatchable virtues of the past, the monumental remains of Classical Antiquity are sacred to Greek national ideology. And they wield potent moral authority. Since the past stands for purity, the present is ipso facto polluted; at least since the seventeenth century ancient glory has been felt to imply modern decadence (SaƯd 2005: 277-289; Hamilakis 2007). In Kostas Mitropoulos’s cartoons the ancient Greek past becomes a “prison” for modern Greeks (Hamilakis 2000). “I woke with this marble head in my hands”, wrote the poet Seferis (1935 [1969]: 7, 53); “...it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down”. The poet’s antique “brothers in stone … united hardness and weakness”. The curated hordes of armless and mutilated classical statues bespeak the support exacted from the living to prop up the dead. “For modern Greek artists”, concludes an interviewer, “the ancient forebears are a tough act to follow” (Carr 2005b). Many feel conscious, in museum director Niko Stavroulakis’s words, of inhabiting “a nation aware of a past too grand to live up to” (in Lowenthal 1988: 734). Long before the 2011 financial crisis, a cartoonist was asked whether he thought Greece had a future. “Well, he said, we have a past. You can’t have everything” (Storace 1997: 159). Since the War of Independence Greeks have vehemently repudiated the notorious ethnic slurs (not true Hellenes, just Slavs and Albanians, or worse yet, “wretched Orientals”, Turks in disguise) of Jakob Fallmerayer and his ilk (Just 1995; SaƯd 2005: 277). Yet they shared philhellene dismay at the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between “what it was that the Greeks had been, and what it was that they are no longer”, in Virginia

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Woolf’s (1906) rumination at Mount Pentelikon. She sardonically noted that “dirty peasant boys” no longer spoke their own language “as Plato would have spoken it had Plato learned Greek at Harrow”. Woolf was echoing Ludwig von Maurer’s 1834 gibe that “all the Greeks have to do in order to be what they used to be is to mimic the Germans” (Gourgouris 1996: 255). As a Greek anthropologist puts it, “to be considered European they first had to prove that they were as “Greek” as the rest of the Europeans” (Panourgia 1995: 28). Why is it, asked a visiting classicist, that Greeks “stayed glued to this obsession with antiquity, instead of accepting who they are today”? The response, “Who are the Greeks today?” betrays the “perpetual uneasiness” felt by modern Greek intellectuals (Panourgia 1995: 129). And not by intellectuals alone. A national survey (ekathimerini.com 2005) reconfirms the widespread feeling that “Greeks aren’t what they used to be”; youth tends to be “gloomy and insecure” because their sense of national identity relies mainly on the achievements of predecessors two millennia ago. Museum upon antiquity-crammed museum bears out the oft-repeated plaint that “the most powerful individuals in this country are the archaeologists” (Fani Palli-Petralia, in Carr 2005a), who hence become “objects of hostility … accused of obstructing progress” (Loukaki 2008: 137, 142). It is not the Greek past in toto that throttles the present; a particular past is promoted to disown the rest. History is twisted for an iconic heritage. “Classical, Byzantine and modern Greece is about as different in style and mentality as one can get. But only the first has proved to be a consistent money-spinner”. The world’s reluctance to realise “that Greek culture is not all about what happened 2,500 years ago” (Carr 2005b) is abetted by Greeks themselves. Just as the Pharaonic past in Egypt overwhelms as to virtually expunge the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Coptic, and Islamic (Hawass 2005: 15; Parker 2009: 58), so in Greece the Classical pre-empts the entire past. (Damaskos and Plantzos 2008). Every monument, every emblem, every advertisement must evoke the Parthenon, every structure must recall Sophocles or Phidias (Hamilakis 2007). Young Greek artists educated abroad could not shake off the mantle of tradition; “if you didn’t make a piece of art that had columns and ancient gods”, says Athens Art Foundation’s George Georgakopoulos, “you couldn’t sell your work outside of Greece” (Kakissis 2011).

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Local dispossession and alienation: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Cyprus, Crete Heritage alienation is a common Mediterranean plaint. Thus in Sicily, “always a colony, never a country… the deep, corrosive sense of futility: … a feeling that none of these riches—the Greek temples, the Byzantine mosaics, the Catalan-Gothic churches—are really yours” (Eberstadt 1991: 72). People who feel their past doesn’t belong to them are prone either to sell it or to wreck it, like the Sicilian peasant, weary of archaeologists and tourists trampling his onions to view the third-century statues of Cybele carved in a rock face near Palazzolo Acréide, who took his hoe and hacked them to pieces. Twelve faceless, limbless stumps, today locked behind bars for safety, bespeak the fate of a heritage admired only by alien usurpers (Eberstadt 1991). A celebrated statue of Persephone, bought by the Getty in 1988 for $18 million and repatriated to Italy in 2011 after it was shown to have been looted from Morgantina, Sicily, now occupies a museum in Aidone, an hour and a half by rough road from Catania; Aidone had 31,000 viewers in 2013, compared with 400,000 at the Getty in 2010 (Donadio 2014). Conversely in Sardinia, tourism variously usurps much appreciated local heritage. A neolithic tower, the nuraghi Losa near Abbasanta, was a traditional haunt of shepherds sheltering their flocks. Archaeologists cleared the site of “rubble” (including its Roman stratum), and fenced it off as protected heritage in the 1970s. Excluded villagers tried to halt the work and were banned from the site. No longer frequented by locals and virtually neglected by the Government over the next two decades (Odermatt 1996), nuraghi Losa was still virtually deserted (unlike its crowded visitors’ centre) when I saw it in 2009. Thus “the “colonial” pretensions of the heritage industry alienate[d] the local residents from their monumental past and, as a consequence, … indifference led into oblivion” (Annis 1996: 123). Millennia of subjugation and despoliation by successive conquerors have ingrained Sardinians’ sense of dispossession. Punic, Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Pisan, Genoese, Aragonese, Savoyard, and Italian invaders each reshaped local inhabitants and resources to their own needs and desires. Savoyard and Piedmontese risorgimento-driven impositions, ruinous land reforms, and misguided linguistic and schooling diktats made outlaws and brigands of Sardinian pastoralists, destroyed collective management of grazing commons, criminalised sheep-herding traditions, and condemned generations of children to sub-literate impoverishment (Pungetti 1995; Pruneri 2006).

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Despite devolution with quasi-autonomous status, Sardinia remains economically dependent on, and overwhelmingly resentful of, control from Rome. Memories of authoritarian outrages merge in Sardinian minds with current outsider usurpations in many realms. High on the list of grievances are tourist takeover and second-home building along the Costa Esmeralda, where gated compounds of the Aga Khan, Silvio Berlusconi, and other super-rich foment crime and curtail local access to the sea (Kington 2007). In the upland interior, nativist resentment surfaces in animus against the impurity of neighbouring villages. Thus, Orgósolans claim unmixed Sardo ancestry against degenerate Mamoiadan descent from Roman soldiers, Genoese and Italian woodcutters, and Piedmontese railway workers in the “whorehouse of the Roman Empire” (Sorge 2008: 818). Another Sardinian grievance is the outsider stereotype of Sardinia as pristine wilderness, nature uncontaminated by human presence. At Gennargentu National Park, Italian naturalists and managers ignore three thousand years of pastoral usage that have shaped the vegetation and left a cultural impress valued by locals and increasingly by ecotourism. In ageold bonds between land and people, shepherds made the wilderness a garden by pruning juniper branches for enclosures and shelters. Their descendants’ custodianship has given the locale its famed healing salubrity (Heatherington 2010). Indeed, so deeply humanized is the whole Mediterranean that environmental and cultural conservation are always intertwined. Thus the survival of the lesser kestrel, elsewhere extinct, depends on the retention of traditional roofs for nesting and of old-style farming practices in Greek Thessaly and Lemnos (Catsadorakis 2007). Sardinian religious festivals are wrenched out of traditional context and remade for outsider consumption, which is economically lucrative but socially distressing. Geared to national and international tourism, traditional sports, music, and dance have become increasingly Italianized. With ballo sardo and traditional circle dancing in decline at patronal festivals, Italian pop-music bands and “costumed dance performances are purchased from Italian entertainment brokers” (Magliocco 2001: 180; 2005). Cultural ambiguity features the Cavalcata Sarda at Sassari, a 3000strong horse parade invented de novo as a folkloric spectacle for King Umberto’s visit in 1899. It was initially put on to legitimate imperial civilizing rule taming a wild rough barbarian savage people. Disdained locally as an image of backwardness, the Cavalcata was sensationally revived for the 1951 Italian Rotary Club congress. It has since become an annual event promising tourists “insight into the deep past of a mysterious

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and fascinating island”. Meanwhile Sassarians, their invented tradition hijacked by neighbouring villagers, converted into a pan-Sardinian fête, and taken over by Italian and foreign tourists, abandon their town during the Cavalcata to holiday at the beach (Magliocco 2001; Azara and Crouch 2006). Heaping European Union on Italian agricultural rules rouses talk of secession or even, when fuelled by enough strong Sardinian red wine, adoption by Switzerland. (Kamdar 2014). Corsica offers almost a mirror image of Sardinia. Successively invaded by Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Saracens, Lombards, and the Papacy, Corsica fell under Genoese suzerainty and resource-gutting from the 14th century until 1729, when it achieved independence until being sold by the Genoese to, and conquered by, France in 1769. Although more autonomous than any other part of European France, Corsica continues to seethe with separatist resentment against French imperial rule (Bernabéu-Casanova 1997; Arnaud 2006; Bohlen 2014). The Corsican dialect, far closer to Italian than to French, is still forbidden in official matters; a Corsican electric company official cannot respond in Corsican to a client who calls and speaks to him in Corsican. Jean-Marc Olivesi, chief curator at the Museum of Corsica, recalled a teacher saying that Corsica had no real architecture because it lacked Gothic churches. “We had wonderful Baroque churches, [but] Baroque architecture wasn’t considered French, so it didn’t count” (Kimmelman 2010b; see Jaffe 1999). Especially dismaying is the long saga of the gutting of Cypriot heritage, in an impoverished island with 13 World Heritage sites. Spurred by philhellenism and the growing market for antiquities, 19th-century foreign Consuls in Cyprus avidly acquired ruins, inscriptions, buried treasure. They saw nothing wrong in “seeking out the material evidence of the past and then disposing of it … at a profit”. Many claimed to ship it out for its own safety, some for the sake of the islanders themselves. To relieve starving Cypriotes, British Consul T. B. Sandwith hired peasants to excavate pots and explore ancient graves and tumuli (Goring 1988: 3-4, 14). The sale of Luigi Palma di Cesnola’s huge Cyprus’ antiquities collection to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art paved the way to his becoming its first director (Herscher 1997; Lowenthal 2000: 326). Emulating earlier foreign despoilers, Greek Cypriot collectors and traffickers continue to smuggle antiquities out of the Turkish-occupied North, where “villagers had [notoriously] raised illicit excavation into an art” (Ahmet Kdir Dinç [Sakalli Ahmet] quoted in Hofstadter 20 July 1992: 61; Jansen 2005: 20-21; Hardy 2014). The island’s political, religious, and linguistic division inflames heritage identities on both sides and corrodes

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long-standing collective traditions (Peristianis 2006; Christofides 2012; Papadakis and Bryant 2012). To these sagas of insular deprivation Crete provides a partial contrast. After five centuries of Venetian and then Ottoman dominion, Crete in the late nineteenth century gained a tenuous freedom and then union with Greece under the benevolent protection of the British Imperialism. In return for liberation from the Turks, Crete surrendered the stewardship of its buried Bronze Age heritage, eagerly promoting Arthur Evans’s excavation and imaginative configuration of what local archaeologist Stephan Xanthoudides (in Hamilakis 2006: 149) in 1904 termed “the most ancient social regime of Law and Order in Europe”. Evans’s Minoans, a romantic medley of sophisticated aristocrats, peace-loving devotees of art and nature, and proto-feminists, were echtEuropeans blessedly free of Levantine origins and Mycenaean savagery, an offspring of the German love-affair with ancient Greece fostered by Schliemann and Nietzche. Viewing restored Knossos in 1924, Nikos Kazantzakis pronounced Crete “the first place in a totally dark Europe to become enlightened” (Beaton 2006: 186). The Minoan heritage bolstered Cretans’ pride vis-à-vis Athens’ and the later Hellenic heritage, lending them “superiority, as the direct descendants and thus rightful owners of the past” (Hamilakis 2006: 158-159). Reproduced all over the island, Knossos’s trademark Art-Deco red columns and recreated wall paintings become visual signifiers of a mythic utopia embraced alike by tourists, locals, Cretans abroad, and myriads of learned devotees.7 A century after the writer Saki’s (1910 [1980]: 135) famed remark that “the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally” (a phrase so apposite that Cypriotes today claim it too), the tourist board happily asserts that Cretans now “loyally preserve and present” the Minoan heritage invented for them by British archaeology (Papadopoulos 2005). Indeed, ancient Knossos has “the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island” (Gere 2009: 1). The Minoan success story is not unalloyed, however. Local heritage is intermittently beleaguered by Athens. Without consulting Crete, the Greek Government in 1994 was on the verge of sending the Herakleion Museum’s most valued artefacts on extended loan to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Incensed by ministerial hypocrisy that lauded Crete’s “uniquely superior’ heritage while filching it, and fearful of loss in transit and replacement abroad by faked copies, thousands of Cretans barricaded the museum against Athenian ‘usurpers” (Hamilakis 2006; Hamilakis and Yalouri 1996: 126-127). And in locales lacking

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showy “Minoan” sites resentment breeds indifference and neglect towards antiquities. Indeed, the very fame of a heritage whose anachronistic inauthenticity must be publicly denied not only lends seeming credence to Epimenides’ adage that all Cretans are liars, but tarnishes the whole of Minoan Crete with the tourist honey-pot aura at Psychro cave (Wallace 2005). In architecturally diversified Crete, obsessive Athenian devotion to the classical heritage pre-empted local cosmopolitanism. Michael Herzfeld’s (1991: 191-259) study of planning conflicts in the Byzantine-OttomanVenetian city of Rethemnon highlights the crippling effects of canonical classicism. Shopkeepers and householders cursed “the archaeologists”— planning officers, engineers, and architects from Athens—who ordered the removal or concealment of non-“classical” features. At the same time, regulations imposed from Athens stifle development initiatives aimed at reshaping historic structures to cater for local and tourist needs. “Archaeology has destroyed people’s houses”, say Rethemniots forbidden to “put one stone on top of another” (Herzfeld 1991: 199, 201).

Tourism, “tradition”, and Mediterranean diasporas Tourism, if not so baneful as in the Caribbean and other tropical “paradises” (Kempadoo 1999; Strachan 2002; DeLoughrey 2004), is an omnipresent threat to the Mediterranean comity. Its environmental impact, especially in coastal areas, is severe. The build-up of tourism along thousands of kilometres of fragile beaches is especially damaging (Hillali 2008); only Corsica’s reputation for criminal violence is said to have kept its stunning beaches from overdevelopment (Bohlen 2014). Visitors to the world’s most popular destinations not only degrade landscapes and deplete scarce water supplies, they increasingly crowd out local people.8 And those who remain become stage-set props in Split, “a City Where the Time Stands Still”—indeed, in all Croatia, incessantly touted as “the Mediterranean as It Once Was”, whose denizens “are supposed to live in that place as it used to be” (Dinko Peraþiü, in Habsburg et al. 2007: 77-78). “Once regarded as our salvation and still our main means of sustenance”, grumbled a Maltese in 1994, tourism “has become purely a necessary evil”. Asked why he had shot at birds when he saw policemen coming, a hunter on Gozo told a judge, “Your Honour, I thought they were tourists!” (Boissevain 2001: 689, 694). Global fame makes it hard to avoid swamping the genre de vie in Florence or Venice, at the Acropolis or Knossos. More damaging is the influx in, say, Siena, where four million overnight visitors in 2013 inundated a local population

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of fewer than 55,000 (Goulding, Horan, and Tozzi 2014:555). The median age of two thousand remaining residents of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Pienza is said to be sixty; the “local” handicrafts on offer there, seen by this visitor in October 2005, came from as far afield as India and Thailand. Inauthentic kitsch strains the sense of native worth. Arguably, so do new “Myconian”-style arched and vaulted houses that cater for tourist taste in Skyros (Zarkia 1996: 160), and myriad heritage events contrived for tourist consumption—the Extremadura cherry festival, the parade of the Grand Knights of Malta into Valletta (Boissevain 2001: 690), the Cavalcata Sarda. “Foreigners shouldn’t idealise our past”, argued a Mallorquin in Deià, the village made world-famous by Robert Graves. But the very qualities beloved by foreigners have thereby enriched local Deianenes and enabled them to reclaim as “heritage” what their impoverished peasant forebears had sought to put aside (Waldren 1996: 205, 228-236). Thus the heritage in renewed guise remains a fount of local well-being even when marketed abroad (clandestinely as in Tuscany or openly as in Israel). Being consumed does not exhaust the supply but fosters its reanimation and emulation both within and beyond the Mediterranean. The global admiration that has cost the Mediterranean so many sites and stones, statues and paintings, leaves a storehouse still so overflowing that only a fraction of it is yet unearthed, and of that, a smaller fraction properly assessed, curated, or displayed. Exporting people as well as artefacts helps to sustain Mediterranean life. Emigrants and descendants return to visit, to retire, to renew memories, bringing not only a nostalgic gaze but capital and skills that revitalize childhood or ancestral locales (Kenna 1993; Boissevain 2001: 690; McCabe et al. 2005; Sifneos 2006). In mass emigration following Turkish massacre in 1822, the Greek island of Chios spawned close-knit ship-building and maritime trading communities in London, Manchester, and Liverpool, whose entrepreneurial leaders employ Chiot crews, periodically return home, and send their children back to the island to absorb local tradition or find spouses (Wann 1987; Chatziioannou 2009: 47-48, 54-55). For Chiots, the Thames’ waterfront is practically a Mediterranean tributary. Thousands of emigrants have returned from Australia to join in Malta’s burgeoning progress. Gibraltar-born retirees, back home from Britain, play a major role in the social and intellectual life of the Rock. Overseas workers such as Cypriot restaurateurs in England shore up Mediterranean tradition and economies on frequent trips back. Many post-war Sardinian emigrants to other European countries have

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returned to the island with valuable catering experience, establishing their own tourist premises and spearheading Sardinia’s new stress on its food and wine heritage (Gentileschi and Pisano 2006). Often, to be sure, “nostalgia has created a non-existent country”, in Seferis’s (1938 [1969]: 219) lament. Ithacan folkways long discarded and forgotten were revived or contrived to give visiting American kinsfolk a “taste of home” (Lowenthal and Comitas 1962: 204-205). But tradition is, after all, always being reinvented everywhere.

Renewing the Heritage: Continuity, Palimpsest, Cosmopolitanism, Multivocality Recent developments in conservation practice and aesthetic theory expand the remit and enhance the viability of Mediterranean heritage. A living compage of nature and culture, embracing intangible as well as material relics, traditions and life-styles along with artefacts, increasingly replaces the isolated jewel or treasure locked away from the rest of the landscape. Conservators now desist from trying to restore structures and artefacts to supposedly original states, preferring instead “to leave unairbrushed the vagaries of time, age, loss” (Eberstadt 1991: 74). Current restoration philosophy, stemming from Cesare Brandi’s dictum “to create a visible dialogue between past and present” (in Hoeniger 2001), respects the entirety of the past, a palimpsest whose residues reflect all periods of continuity and change. Absorption with a single epoch or stylistic mode—Ptolemaic, classical, Christian, Celtic, or whatever—to the exclusion and detriment of the rest gives way to more catholic inclusiveness. The new Metro displays in Athens fuse the past of all periods with the overtly modern (Fouseki and Sandes 2009). Rose Macaulay’s (1953: 113-127) delight in seeing Crete’s “Achaean culture imposed on the last Minoan, the Dorian on the Achaean, the Roman on the Hellenic, the Byzantine on the Roman, then the Saracen, the Venetian, the Turkish, and the Cretan of today” now echoes in the local classroom, where verses from Vitzéntzos Kornáros’s seventeenth-century ByzantineVenetian chivalric epic Erotókritos are set to local tunes (Rowland 2005: 242).9 Schools in Crete assiduously promote a temporal palimpsest embracing Classical Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Venetian, and Ottoman remains along with Minoan as an integrated historical saga (Simandiraki 2006: 267-268). Likewise at museums and monuments in Cyprus, “troops of uniformed children traipse from Chalcolithic mud huts … to vast Greek tombs and Roman villas, [from] the cave monastery of Neophytos who in 1196 AD

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attacked Richard the Lionheart as a “wicked wretch” [to] the wooden boat of General Grivas, the EOKA leader whose 1955 attacks were directed against King Richard’s successors” (Stothard 2005). Young Greek Cypriots become aware that these are all part of the extended island story, and some, despite fears of Turkish nationalism, include Turkish elements to stress a united Cypriotness against all-enveloping Hellenism (Papadakis 1998: 152-156). Concerted stewardship of material cultural heritage originated in the Mediterranean, mentor to the world since the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites of 1964. A generation later, Mediterranean enterprise similarly initiated UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage program. Long resident in Marrakech, the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo in the 1990s pioneered the protection of its Jemaa-el-Fna marketplace square as a traditional site of storytelling, culminating in UNESCO’s 2001 Proclamation of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, whose international jury he chaired in 2001-2002 (T. M. Schmitt 2008; http//www.unesco.org/bpi/intangible_heritage/jury.htm). Celebrating temporal continuity may help Mediterranean peoples to reclaim convivencia, the age-old facility of living cheek by jowl among many ethnicities, several faiths, diverse modes of livelihood. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of the Levant, merchant-ghettoed cities were famed for such tolerance well into the twentieth century. The cornerstone of civil ethos was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, interreligious heterogeneity built by traders in every port along the inland sea (Constable 2003; Dobbs et al. 2008; Schwartz 2008). Although often dependent on forced labour and slavery and heavily infused with racism and elitism (Fahmy 2004a, 2004b; Haller 2004: 39), cosmopolite urbanity infused Mediterranean merchants, brokers and seamen with curiosité sympathique along with quotidian collective sharing (Bromberger and Durand 2001: 734). Peaceful coexistence was famously (if somewhat fabulously) exemplified in Malta. Although the Knights of the Order of St. John stemmed from warring European kingdoms locked in traditional ferocious hatred, on this small, constricted island they lived in reasonable if imperfect accord. More crucially, familiarity at close quarters among Maltese in general bred not only expectations but the practice of civil behaviour, in what came to be seen, however nostalgically idealized in retrospect, as an epitome of European urbanity and, given its Arabic-based Sicilian-derived vernacular and its proximity to North Africa, “a bridge between Europe and the Arab

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world” (Monsarrat 1975: 340; Haller 2000; Giovanni Buttigieg in Eaves 2013). The cosmopolitanism of port cities in the Islamic eastern Mediterranean became embedded and formalised in the millet system that granted nonMuslim communities protection and autonomy, and in the traditional role of the intermediary-translator dragoman (Driessen 2013). It was enhanced after the Crimean War by Ottoman decay, Western imperial expansion, and economic growth that enriched immigrant entrepreneurs and enabled wealthy Frankish merchants to build schools and cultural institutions. In 1908, the same man “was choirmaster for the chief Jewish synagogue, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Temple” in Trieste. Forty years later, Jan Morris (2001: 100, 107) sensed the presence of ghosts that “seemed to embody the very mixture of race and languages, the civilized continuity of culture, that I imagined for my lost continent as a whole”. To be sure, what Morris lauded as harmony others lamented it as cacophony, like the pied-noir Arabist Jacques Berque in Jerusalem, or Bosnian literary Nobelist Ivo Andriü who limned successive nocturnal Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish calls to prayer in Sarajevo, where “the difference is awake which divides the sleeping people and sets them against one another” (Andriü 1920 [1993]: 33-34; Bromberger 2007: 294295). Yet exuberant confluence among diverse peoples and faiths was the essence of these cities, of which Lawrence Durrell’s (1962) Alexandria was the quintessence (Ilbert and Yannakis 1992; Haag 2004; Bromberger 2007: 292-293), until mid-twentieth century nationalism made Salonika “thoroughly Greek, Trieste Italian, Izmir Turkish, Tangier Moroccan and Alexandria Egyptian” and exiled the Maghreb’s Sephardic Jews to their ancient Palestinian “homeland” (Driessen 2005: 138-139; Trigano 2009). Essentialist homogenization fuelled by chauvinist and fundamentalist sectarians in the 1950s and 1960s all but extinguished convivencia in most Mediterranean urban centres Haller 2004). The Turkification of Istanbul in the 1955 pogrom cost that city not only its ancient Greek but its rooted Armenian and Jewish communities (Vryonis 2005; Pamuk 2005: 155-159, 225). Lebanese civil wars of the late 1970s and 1980s deprived Beirut of the last remnants of cosmopolitanism. It survives in attenuated form in Malta, which uniquely bridges Catholic and Arab culture (Knipe 2005), in the island of Djerba, whose thousand-odd Jews host Tunisian-French Jewish pilgrimages (Udovitch and Valensi 1984; Stone 2007; Gall 2014), among the itinerant Maghrebian traders of Alicante (Peraldi 2007), and in such remnant imperial outposts as Gibraltar and perhaps Melilla and Ceuta (Haller 2000, 2003, 2004: 35-39).

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Civilized commingling had previously made the Mediterranean the very embodiment of European cosmopolitanism—a legacy as notable as its monuments of art and architecture. Sixty-five years ago, Robert Graves (1949 [1972]), long resident in Mallorca, conceived the ancient Mediterranean as a refuge against modernity. His Seven Days in New Crete fantasised a future in which a chosen remnant revert to Bronze and Iron Age life in a latter-day Crete, with subsequent enclaves added in Rhodes and Cyprus. Sealed off for three generations against the outside world, these new Mediterranean islanders redeem civilisation from the corrosive errors that had brought catastrophe. However, it is not as Graves’s secluded enclaves, but rather as part and parcel of the busy, fluid, ongoing world, that Mediterranean continuity and convivencia could best serve us in actuality—antiquity, coexisting with but not crowding out, modernity. The unique quality of Mediterranean interaction continually evokes new metaphors. Reassessed by some anthropologists in terms of “creolisation”—a unified medley of divers cultural and ethnic groups (Herzfeld 2001: 674-675), it was later retitled “polyphony”—voices that come together without melding to strike the right tone, a collaborative concern to mute individualism so as to shore up diverse harmonies (Fabre 2002: 22). Creolisation and polyphony alike rework terms from other realms to shed light on—and to shore up—the Mediterranean genre de vie. Poets like Kavafis, Seferis, and Elytis deploy the Mediterranean Sea as a metaphor for the basin’s myriad ambivalences—Ptolemaic Hellenism, traditional modernity, cosmopolitan insularity (Tsoukalas 2002: 44-45). Writers like Kazantzakis, Sciascia, and Lorca voice but also transcend Mediterranean romantic stereotypes (Shore 1995: 4-5). From a mere two journals devoted expressly to Mediterranean studies in 1960, there are fifteen today. The Malta-based Journal of Mediterranean Studies is likened by its editor to “that well-loved Mediterranean institution, the coffee shop”, its special issues termed mezes or antipasto (Sant Cassia 1991a; Alcock 2005: 332). Indeed, the traditional Mediterranean diet itself, long famed as healthful, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 as a cherished and now endangered masterpiece of intangible heritage (Turmo and Medina 2012). Efforts to bridge divisions between Muslim and Christian and Jew, Turk and Greek, Europe and North Africa and the Levant have lately been launched in the arts and environmental affairs as well as in heritage conservation (Guarino 2000; Driessen 2001; Ferrari 2014). International aid promotes heritage partnerships throughout the area: since 1998, Euromed’s 27-country collaborations have ranged from preserving

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archives in Algeria and documenting (and reviving) Byzantine classical music to developing a heritage trail along Phoenician maritime routes and promoting Maghreb traditional architecture (European Community 2002; Mare Nostrum III 2004). Managing and communicating the common Mediterranean cultural heritage was Euromed IV’s explicit remit for 2008-2012 (Euromed Heritage 2009). Yet thus far such efforts remain confined largely to professional elites and spark little popular interest aside from the touristic and diplomatic deployment of what Dieter Haller (2004: 32) terms “banal Mediterraneanism”. The southern and eastern Mediterranean is only peripherally involved in and benefited by collaborative projects finalised and financed in far-off Brussels. Although devoted to refashioning a unified Mediterranean identity, the Euromed programme in general suffers from prevailing perceptions, exacerbated by terrorism since 2001, of the Islamic Mediterranean as an economically dependent yet strategically threatening antechamber to Europe (Schäfer 2007; 2012; Schäfer and Henry 2009; Henry 2013), and of the Mediterranean itself as “a permanent fault-line between the prosperous North and an impovrished South” (Calleya 2012: 415). And as quarrels over the flood of refugees from Africa illustrate, Mediterranean countries and peoples seldom share common strategic goals, let alone a collective identity (Calleya 2009: 51; Lutterbeck 2009). Nor did they see eye to eye in the past. “It was at the very moment when the Arabs in Sicily were repressed with the utmost violence that was constructed, in 1165, the Zisa, a jewel of the art called “Arab-Norman” … Mudéjar art thrived in Christian Spain at the very time that Muslims were being persecuted, then expelled … And if the French today count couscous among their favourite dishes, this is not for all that an indication of Arabophilia” (Bromberger 2007: 298).

Nor does new-found Egyptian interest in its Jewish heritage presage any welcome for living Jewry, while Spain’s enthusiastic embrace of émigré converso Sephardim remains more rhetoric than actuality (Slackman 2009; Liphshiz 2014). If “cultural syncretisms and improvised constructions … are accelerating today in domains as diverse as cooking, music, dance, literature”, the rarity of mixed marriages and the resurgence of faith-fueled vendettas shows the persistence of rigid social differentiation alongside convergent Mediterranean genres de vie (Bromberger 2007: 297-298).

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Enduring resilience The emergence in 1831 of the volcanic islet Ferdinandea (Graham Island) off the Sicilian coast was a salutary reminder of a mutability as innate to Mediterranean nature as to culture, and even to its eventual mortality. In a remote aeon to come, the inland sea will be swallowed up by the relentless pressure of the African continental plate thrusting up against the southern shores of Europe (Stewart 2005). But within the confines of human timescales Mediterranean peoples seem likely to endure. Their fabled resilience has weathered such catastrophes as the loss of Santorini and Pompeii. To be sure, hubris has put paid to notable Mediterranean powers: Carthage, razed to the ground at the end of the Third Punic War; Sparta, defeated by the Achaean League and destroyed by the Visigoths. And some Mediterranean folk, notably Iberian Moors and Jews, have been extirpated or exiled. But others have survived repeated invasion and subjugation, waiting out wave after wave of tyrants and usurpers, latterly largely transalpine. Not coincidentally, it is transalpine celebrants who, having previously chronicled Mediterranean “degeneration”, now romanticise Mediterranean endurance. Instinctual defensiveness was said by an English writer to make hedgehogs of the Maltese, “rolling themselves up in a protective ball at the first sound or smell of danger, and letting the warlike world thunder past above their curved backs. A hundred times in the past, Maltese hid their heads, absorbed the shock, and learned to outlive it altogether” (Monsarrat 1975: 47). A German journalist alleges that modern Spanish Mediterranean folk emulate their forebears’ endurance. “Our culture survives by allowing itself to be overwhelmed”, an Andalusian told Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1990: 255). “This strategy has defeated every conqueror: the Phoenicians and the Romans, the Vandals and the Visigoths, the Arabs and the kings of Castile. We corrupted the Napoleonic invaders, and we’ll deal with tourism as well. Adaptation … makes us unconquerable”.

These crude stereotypes of passive, conservative, unchanging natives are not, however, merely outdated colonialist myths; they are internalised as self-perpetuating realities on the ground over much of the Mediterranean as well (Herzfeld 2005: 60).

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Conclusion: Nationalism redux A century ago, Europe’s nation-states, old and new alike, had gained such size and power that smaller entities were resented as anachronisms that impeded progress; centrist theorists like Heinrich von Treitschke and Friedrich Ratzel thought their extermination, inevitable. So swiftly were the whales gobbling up the minnows that British foreign minister Joseph Chamberlain memorably declared in 1905 “the day of small nations has passed away. The day of Empires has come” (Diggines 1985: 204). A century later it has gone: decolonisation in the wake of the Second World War reversed the trend. As scores of ever smaller entities gain sovereign status, the world seems almost to revert to Aristotle’s view that 5,040 inhabitants made an ideal state (Lowenthal 1989: 79-81; Lowenthal and Clarke 1980). Indeed, it is widely felt that no locale, however small and impotent, should be denied self-determination. “We mark with reverence the feeling of a people that they are a people”, remarked a columnist of autonomist demands by one such dot on the map, “however absurd their claims may appear to others” (Levin 1977). The growth of autonomy in the Mediterranean echoes this global trend. International and European programs reward the transfer of authority from the larger nation-states to their peripheries. Regional devolution in Spain and Italy promotes self-rule in Andalusia and Sardinia; European Union adherence strengthens sovereign Malta and Cyprus. Gibraltarians “were not expected to be as troublesome as it was feared the Maltese and Cypriots would be, and indeed already were in the mid-1920s”, recalled a former Imperial Governor (Garratt 1939: 151). The population of Gibraltar was “so small, so cosmopolitan, so parasitic that it [could] not develop a real nationalist movement”. Yet it most successfully did so. And in recent years Gibraltar has again reminded the world of its people’s selfdetermining voice. What Franco and some of his successors derided as the flotsam and jetsam of the Rock, today seem more like harbingers of an increasingly fragmented Mediterranean political order (Constantine 2009: 402-28; Grocott and Stockey 2012: ch. 5). National integration has been fortified, however, along the shores of the Adriatic, the Tyrrhenian, and the Aegean. Croatia’s coast and offshore islands and Slovenia’s coastal sliver, grant-aided from Brussels and UNESCO, are increasingly assimilated into their newly sovereign states as prime sources of national pride and tourist largesse. They promote an over-arching “national” identity not only, like Genevieve Nootens’s (2006: 45n5) national states, to enhance allegiance, but to emphasise the primacy of being “Croat” and “Slovene”. Similarly, in Greece, national identity

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continues to be enforced as single-mindedly Hellenic; any suggestion of Turkish, Macedonian, or Albanian ethnic and cultural influence is denied as unpatriotic subversion (Athanasiou 2006). Uniting secular nationalists and religious Muslims, “Ottomania” in Turkey celebrates past imperial sway (Danforth 2014). “Turks are attracted to the heroism and the glories of the Ottoman period”, says the director of Topkapi Palace, “because it belongs to them” (Ilber Ortayli, in Bilefsky 2009; see Bilefsky 2012). Greek nationalism was, in this respect, a harbinger for the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean. The demise of imperial hegemony—Bourbon, Habsburg, Ottoman—and of ensuing British and French protectorates gave rise to the virulent nationalism of post-colonial states throughout the Levant and North Africa. New national rulers embraced or felt forced to sanction populist, ethnic and religious vendettas that destroyed the multicultural diversity of the old port cities. From Rabat to Tunis, Cairo to Tel Aviv, Istanbul to Salonika, and Dubrovnik to Trieste, as noted above, the Mediterranean became ethnically purified and socially impoverished. Other recent events contributed mightily to this deracination: Jews sent to Nazi death camps; the fracture of Yugoslavia into xenophobic Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian nations; growing tensions between the new Israeli state and its Arab minority, its dispossessed Palestinians, and its Muslim neighbour states, their own nationalist zeal fuelled by anti-Zionist animus. Resurgent nationalism segregates Mediterranean peoples by faith as well as by ethnicity identity, putting sacred places especially at risk. Perpetual arenas of conflict because they are so numerous and so close to one another, Jewish, Christian and Islamic heritage sites are increasingly threatened by sectarian politics (Ferrari 2014: 3, 13). Competing monotheisms revere the same God but reprobate one another’s Prophets, leaving no synagogue safe outside Israel, no church secure in the Maghreb, no mosque serene in Greece. Growing exclusivity lends force to the charge that “le lac intérieur est devenu … presque un cordon sanitaire” (Chastagnaret and Ilbert 1991: 3). Nationalism also exerts a major influence on current brouhahas over antiquities as both a source of national pride and of vital touristic revenue—notably in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey. Not coincidentally, these are the only Old World countries in which all finds are national property and their export abroad is banned. A spate of recent trials and lawsuits revolving around demands for repatriation, especially from American museums, of dubiously provenanced antiquities to Italy and Greece have made front-page headlines. To be sure, the items at issue represent only the small tip of a much larger iceberg of illicit booty that constantly drains out of lands of origin or entombment. But high visibility

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and the astronomical sums such treasures fetch on international markets offer heritage watchdogs in Athens and Rome, and now Cairo and Ankara, causae belli too attractive to forgo rhetorical sabre rattling. How far Greeks and Italians generally are gratified by the repatriation to their nation of a few dozen items from museums abroad remains conjectural; the return of a Greek vase unearthed in Sicily seems unlikely to buttress modern Italian identity. Italy’s biggest restitution prize, the 6th century BC Euphronius krater retrieved from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, aroused little interest when it went on view at the Villa Giulia in 2009. “A Greek pot sold to an Etruscan buyer and stolen from an Italian site and ending up in New York … has become a Greek pot in a Roman museum dedicated to Etruscan art” (Kimmelman 2009), where it sits “rather forlornly” viewed by few, beyond school groups (Donadio 2014). Few Egyptians cared, given the recurrent clandestine sale abroad of antiquities in government safekeeping (Tokeley 2006: 236), that their antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass, demanded back the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and Queen Nefertiti’s bust from Berlin’s Neues Museum (Frenkel 2009; Parker 2009). Few Turks turned a hair over the theft from a seldom-visited provincial museum of an item from the Lydian Hoard repatriated by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993 (Arsu and Robertson 2006). But zeal for heritage is intrinsic to national identity, and an international climate favourable to restitution, encourage, even compel, cultural spokesmen in Mediterranean states to flex national muscles in a cause reminiscent of the post-Napoleonic restitution from Paris celebrated by Felicia Hemans (1816 [1914]): LAND of departed fame! … Home of the Arts! where glory’s faded smile Sheds lingering light o’er many a mouldering pile; Proud wreck of vanish’d power, of splendour fled, Majestic temple of the mighty dead! … Fallen Italy! rejoice again! Lost, lovely realm! once more ‘tis thine to gaze On the rich relics of sublimer days … Oh! … hail, with wonted pride, those works revered Hallow’d by time, by absence more endear’d … Raise thy languid head From the cold altars of the illustrious dead, And once again, with fond delight survey The proud memorials of thy noblest day … Degraded Rome! thy noon is o’er

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Once lost, thy spirit shall revive no more … Still, still to thee shall nations bend their way, Revered in ruin, sovereign in decay! … Long be these works, revered by ages, thine, To lend one triumph to thy dim decline … From power’s meridian hurl’d, Yet claiming still the homage of the world.

Echoing both Hemans and Homer is Italian homage to the current recovery from American museums of illegally exported antiquities. At their exhibition in Rome’s Presidential Palace on the 27th of December 2007, the Minister of Culture Francesco Rutelli invoked the epic poem “Nostoi”, the homecoming of heroes from the Trojan War. He personified the restituted antiquities as exiled citizens: “Excavated from the bowels of the earth … deprived of their identity, and reduced to mere objects of beauty, without a soul, [these pieces] conclude their odyssey here today” (Peters 2009: 169-170). Whether restored glories of the past will revitalise Mediterranean heritage with greater success than the return to Rome of Napoleon’s loot remains an open question. But only when Crete or Cyprus or Chios, not to mention Sardinia and Corsica and Sicily, come to feel in self-confident possession of their legacies, can the parlous and sometimes self-destructive wounds, noted above, begin to heal, and the Mare Internum truly become an inclusive Mare Nostrum.

Notes 1

The Aegean Sea, far more than the Adriatic, the Tyrrhenian, the Ligurian, even the Ionian, is for Greeks the Mediterranean (Jouanny 2002: 2; Abulafia 2005: 67). 2 Less gloriously, Sacramento as the capital of insolvent California in 2010 became “Athens of the Golden State” after the capital of near-bankrupt Greece. 3 For a contrary view, stressing Mediterranean divergences, see Brent D. Shaw (2003). 4 Excessive devotion to an imagined past is an old story in the Mediterranean. Uniquely among ancient empires, Greece and Rome were obsessed with their glorious pasts, expending much effort in nostalgically hyping largely invented traditions (Boardman 2002: 190-192; Higbie 2003: 292). 5 Only with Mussolini did Italian servants, urged to don the mantle of the ancient, turn sullen toward expatriates (Campbell 2009: 9, 79, 119). 6 Adalberto Libera’s ultra-modernist showpiece Casa Malaparte on Capri, infusing archaic Mediterranean forms with the spirit of the avant-garde, was a rare instance of creative use of the past (Welge 2005: 85).

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7

Attracted by the matrifocal nature of Evans’s Bronze Age civilisation, Sigmund Freud accepted its “unimpeachable” truth lock, stock and barrel (Gere 2006: 216217). 8 With 308 million international visitors in 2011, the Mediterranean accounted for one-third of the world tourism. Numbers are projected to rise to 500 millions by 2030 (Euromed 2012) (Benoit and Comeau 2005: 395; http://www.pl;anbleu.org.publications/Dp_tourismeUk.pdf, September 2008). 10 “It used to be said that if every copy of Erotokritos were suddenly destroyed, the text could still be reconstructed from Cretans’ own memory of it” (Rowland 2005: 243).

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Stone, Nomi. 2007. AL-BILAD AL-HAQANIYA? Otherness and homeland in the case of Djerban Jewry. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 6:257272. Storace, Patricia. 1997. Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece. London: Granta. Stothard, Peter. 2005. One for the album: The hanged poet of Paphos— fifty years of philately and philhellenism in Cyprus. Times Literary Supplement, 25 March: 14-15. Strachan, Ian Gregory. 2002. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Tabak, Faruk. 2008. The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Thoden van Velzen, Diura. 1996. The world of Tuscan tomb robbers: Living with the local community and the ancestors. International Journal of Cultural Property 5(1):111-126. Tokeley, Jonathan. 2006. Rescuing the Past: The Cultural Heritage Crusade. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Trigano, Shmuel, ed. 2009. La fin du judaïsme en terres d’Islam Paris: Éditions Denoël. Tsoukalas, Constantinos. 2002. Between ‘East’ and ‘West’; the meaning of the Mediterranean in modern Greece, and possibly elsewhere as well. Mediterranean Historical Review 17(2):32-46. Udovitch, Abraham L., and Lucette Valensi. 1984. The last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia. London: Harwood Academic. Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa, and Francesco Francioni. 2009. Legal protection of cultural objects in the Mediterranean region: An overview. In Vrdoljak and Francioni, eds. 2009: 1-28. Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa, and Francesco Francioni, eds. 2009.The Illicit Traffic of Cultural Objects in the Mediterranean. Florence: EUI Working Papers, AEL 2009/9, European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana. Vryonis, Speros, Jr. 2005. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul. New York: Greekworks. Waldren, Jacqueline. 1996. Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca. New York: Berghahn. Wallace, Alia. 2013. Presenting Pompeii: Steps towards reconciling conservation and tourism at an ancient site. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology [S.l.] 22:115-136.

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Wallace, Saro. 2005. Bridges in the mountains: Issues of structure, multivocality, responsibility and gain in filling a management gap in rural Greece. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18:55-85. Walsh, Kevin. 2004. Caring about sediments: The role of cultural geoarchaeology in Mediterranean landscapes. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 17:223-245. Wann, Mai. 1987. Chiot Shipowners in London: An Immigrant Elite. Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, Research Paper no. 6. Welge, Jobst. 2005. Fascism triumpans: On the architectural translation of Rome. In Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, 83-94. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Williams, Michael. 2003. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago: University Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1906 [1987]. A dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus. Times Literary Supplement, 11-17 September: 979. Zarkia, Cornélia. 1996. Philoxenia: Receiving tourists—but not guests— on a Greek island. In Boissevain, ed. 196: 143-173.

PART I URBANIZATION AND TOURISM: ASPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN COASTAL REGIONS THROUGH GEOPROSPECTIVE APPROACHES: THE LATIN ARC’S COASTAL AREAS AND THE REGION OF NICE CHRISTINE VOIRON-CANICIO AND SOPHIE LIZIARD

Abstract This chapter presents a new geographical approach, called geoprospective, which deals with the prospective of territorial changes. Geoprospective differs from usual prospective approaches in that it assigns more importance to the spatial dimension at each stage of the analysis process, and more precisely to expected, unexpected, or in-embryo spatial changes. The anticipation of spatial changes is investigated by ways of projecting objective and/or subjective knowledge about space, and by simulations whose purpose is to evaluate the plausible spatial impacts of future changes on a given territory. Two applications concerning the Latin Arc’s coastal areas at two scales will illustrate the relevance of taking the spatial dimension into account in prospective approaches in order to comprehend territorial changes. The first study deals with the littoralisation process and aims to estimate the future perspectives of littoralisation. The second study focuses on the anticipation of irreversible changes, i.e. the urbanization of agricultural lands, in an urban area with coastal tourism—Nice, France’s fifth largest city.

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1. Introduction The Mediterranean coastal regions are amongst the most challenged areas in the world, due to environmental, socio-economic and geopolitical pressures. Despite the implementation of environmental policies, several sources of pollution—agriculture, transport, energy, urbanization—as well as the degradation or draining of non-renewable natural capital have been increasing along with the intensification of land occupancy in coastal regions. By 2025, urban population is expected to reach 220 million in Eastern and Southern European countries and 156 million in European rim countries. A third of this increase is estimated to take place in the Mediterranean coastal regions (Blue Plan 2008). Thus, the fundamental question for the Mediterranean rim countries is how to achieve sustainable development at different geographical levels: global, regional, national and local. For over 35 years, all 21 countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea have been developing, in conjunction with the European Community, a Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) under the aegis of UNEP. One of MAP’s main objectives is to link sustainable resource management to the development of Mediterranean coastal areas. Various research bodies have been asked to produce knowledge in order to alert decision-makers and to conduct prospective studies to help shaping visions for the future—among them, Blue Plan, IPEMED (Institut de Prospective Economique du Monde Méditerranéen), CIHEAM (Centre International de Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Méditerranéennes). How does Geography meet that demand today? Does it take into account future anticipation? In an article published in 1998, the French geographer Denise Pumain asked “Would Geography know how to invent the future?” (Pumain 1998). So far, geographers have studied spatial transformations generated by changes in society, policies and techniques, and they have analyzed spatial crises by providing information on the spatial consequences of events such as natural disasters, rather than trying to identify situations which are likely to generate changes, such as a loss of attractiveness or, on the contrary, the emergence of new developing areas. However, in the last ten years, geographers, in collaboration with other scientists, have gone into the field of prospective by devising novel approaches to anticipating spatial change, called geoprospective (VoironCanicio et al. 2005, Houet et al. 2006). The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the relevance of geography in anticipating the future of territories in a sustainable development perspective. First, the utility of a geographical diagnosis carried out prior to defining scenarios of prospective will be discussed.

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Then, the methodological features of the geoprospective approach will be presented and its efficiency will be illustrated through two case studies.

2. Main objectives Different methods are used to support decision makers in better understanding the change processes and anticipating the possible consequences of their management policies choices. One of the methods frequently used to describe the interactions between society and the environment is the DPSIR causal framework, which estimates, by means of indicators, the relationship between five main subsets: Driving, Pressure, State, Impact, Response (Smeets et al. 1999). Human activities (economic factors, consumption, demography, technologies) constitute the driving forces of the system in question. These activities exert pressure on the environment (pollution, land occupancy, etc). As a result, the condition of air, water and soil is altered, which in turn has various impacts notably on both, the health of the living and the economy. Corrective actions are applied to each subset through public policy. However, this kind of diagnosis does not take into account neither the territory’s spatial layout nor its organization, whereas they both play a considerable part in the way a territory is able to react differently to recommendations or implemented policies. For example, the “Factor 4” project aims to reduce energy consumption in European countries by a factor 4, before 2050 (Von Weizsäcker et al. 1998). However all territories do not respond to that injunction in the same way. Indeed, they react differently according to their economic level, their standard of living, their spatial structures (compact city or urban spread) on the one hand, and the behaviour of those involved on the other hand. Spatial prospective differs from the DPSIR method in that it takes into account spatial structures and dynamics. Both are considered as major criteria in drawing up scenarios of the future. The spatial prospective seeks to highlight in what way a territory is likely to alter a spatial trend, slow down or correct environmental damages. For this reason, it is a useful approach in helping to build a territorial project. Nowadays, three different types of methods are used to build scenarios for the future: narrative methods, modeling (predictive model, Bayesian model) and hybrid methods using both qualitative and quantitative methods (Agent-Based Models and Role-Playing Games) (Becu et al. 2008). Geoprospective belongs to the third category. This one aims at anticipating the possible changes of territories (demography, activities, land-uses, landscapes) on a rather large scale, using methods taking spatial

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dynamics into account through models, by performing simulations and spatializing several evolution scenarios (Costanza et al. 1998, VoironCanicio 2012). Geoprospective belongs to the set of prospective approaches developed in the 1990s by the French School led by Michel Godet (Schwartz 1998, Godet 2001) to investigate the future of territories by using scientific tools. The prospective approach is different from long-range planning in at least two aspects: it assumes that the future is not an extension of the past, and that there may be several plausible futures. Furthermore, geoprospective differs from usual prospective approaches in that it gives more importance to the spatial dimension at each stage of the analysis process, and more precisely to expected, unexpected, or in-embryo spatial changes. What matters in the geoprospective process is not so much the event generating the change (natural risk, financial crisis) as how the space will react to this event. Moreover, geoprospective has several features in common with methods focusing on the capability of human organizations, such as governments, companies and scientific institutions, to perceive creatively what is going on in their environment and to imagine what is implied (Ratcliffe and Sirr 2003). Indeed, the geoprospective process has to be performed through interacting with groups of actors concerned by the problem to solve, here related to littoralisation. In order to achieve this, geographers (MassonVincent et al. 2012) have recently devised a complementary approach, called geogovernance, based on the use of spatial analysis methods and tools. It aims to make relevant territorial information available to all those concerned along the construction chain of a territorial project. The objective is to contribute to make territorial complexity intelligible and bringing out socio-spatial issues in the territory being studied. This approach, combined with geoprospective, is relevant for planning policies, in accordance with the tenth principle contained in the Rio Declaration in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992): “Public participation: Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by Public Authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes”.

Unlike usual methods of prospective, geoprospective approaches take spatial structures and dynamics into consideration for anticipating land-use changes and building projects in cooperation with a territory’s inhabitants.

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Two applications will illustrate the relevance of taking into account the spatial dimension in prospective issues. They concern different aspects of the littoralisation process, on the coastal areas of the Latin Arc (VoironCanicio 1994, Cortesi 1995, Vanolo 2007, Camagni and Capello 2011). This process, also named coastalization (Blue Plan 2001, Cori 1999), refers to the population concentration on the littoral and to the resulting urbanisation widespread on the coastal belt (PAP/RAC 2007). The first application aims to seek the future perspectives of the littoralisation, at the provincial level. The purpose is to highlight the potential development of the littoralisation process, for each province. The second application anticipates the consequences of urbanization in the periurban area of Nice, and more precisely, the irreversible changes which could occur in the landuse.

3. Tools and methodology The future perspectives of littoralisation are investigated in two ways. The first one applies statistical tools to detect the spatial evolution of territories and to seek the possible changes of the spatial structures of population. The second one uses projections of objective and subjective knowledge about space, to evaluate the plausible spatial impacts of landuse changes. Both resort to spatial analysis and mapping, in a GIS environment.

3.1. Using spatial statistics to analyze littoralisation spatial dynamics and their future perspectives Unlike statistical analysis generally based on population trends at the municipal or provincial level, spatial statistics give the possibility to analyse the distribution of population according to the distance to the coast. We focus on the population spread characteristics within a 40 kmwide coastal strip (divided into four 10 km-wide strips parallel to the shore) by means of spatial statistics. The aim is to estimate the future perspectives of littoralisation in a spatiotemporal context. The characteristics of population spread (and available land) are assessed in the light of what they could induce in the future development of the littoralisation process, even if it can’t be specified in how much time the possibilities detected here will be developed. Through several spatial indicators, we estimate the suitability for littoralisation of the various provinces (or groups of provinces, when they have a common hinterland),

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and more precisely the plausibility of a population concentration continuing along the shore, in the first 10 km-wide coastal strip. Population data at the municipal level are taken from national census organisations (INE, INSEE, ISTAT). The land use data come from the latest version of Corine Land Cover database (2006). Protected areas data come from the Common Database on Designated Areas provided by the European Environment Agency (8th version, 2009). Four indicators (a, b, c and d) are taken into account to describe past trends of population concentration on the coast, the current population spread, the existing spatial structures and the urbanization potential: a. Past coastal concentration dynamics are considered through the evolution of the population spread in the four 10 km-wide strips between 1960 and 2008. b. The coastal current demographic weight is compared to the other strips, according to the percentage of population in the 0-10 km zone in 2008. c. Spatial structures are analysed by calculating the Local Indicator of Spatial Association (Anselin 1995) which defines homogeneous and heterogeneous areas according to population growth rates at municipal level. Local indicator of spatial association (LISA) is: “Any statistic that satisfies the following two requirements: a. the LISA for each observation gives an indication of the extent of significant spatial clustering of similar values around that observation; b. the sum of LISAs for all observations is proportional to a global indicator of spatial association” (Anselin 1995, pp.94).

d. The present ratio between artificial areas (i.e. neither natural nor agricultural land) and those which could be urbanised (agricultural and natural land, except protected areas) shows the current land consumption (the use of land for urban purpose) and the remaining potential of land that can be urbanized. Each indicator is divided into modalities, which reflect different spatial organisation (indicators a. and c.) or intensities (indicators b. and d.). A value from 0 to 4 is given to each modality according to its importance with regard to coastal concentration. For example, concerning coastal concentration dynamics, if the demographic weight of the 0-10 km strip (the percent of total population) has continued to grow over the decades between 1960 and 2008, coastal concentration will most probably increase in the years to come. A zero corresponds to characteristics that are opposite to a continuation of coastal concentration in the 0-10 km strip (for example a decrease in the population of the 0-10 km strip in the last decades). Values from 1 to 4 correspond to a graduation between non-

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defavoring characteristics (as a stagnation of the demographic weight of the 0-10 km strip) and favoring characteristics (as a continuous population increase in the 0-10 km strip). As an initial approach, modalities are defined for each province (or group of provinces) and they are then simply added to obtain a general estimate on their suitability for littoralisation, i.e. the propensity for coastal concentration to continue in the 0-10 km strip. The various modalities for each indicator and the associated values are summarized below: a. Past coastal concentration dynamics (for the period 1960-2008): - A continuous population increase in the 0-10 km strip, despite a recent slowdown, and a continuous decline of the demographic weight of three inner strips: 4 - An increase of the 0-10 km weight of the strip associated with a low increase in the 10-20 km strip (and a decline in the two other strips): 3 - An increase of the 0-10 km of the demographic weight of the strip associated with contrasted evolution in the three inner strips: 2 - A slowdown in the 0-10 km growth of the strip and a stagnation of its demographic weight, and a freeze of the decline of the 1020 km strip: 1 - A decrease of the 0-10 km demographic weight of the strip in favor of inland strips: 0 b. Coastal current demographic weight (0-10 km strip): The higher the percentage of population in the first strip in 2008, the more advanced the littoralisation process is. This leads to a saturation of the littoral with a shift of highest population growth rates to the 10-20 km strip. Thus, the propensity for coastal concentration to continue in the first strip decreases when the percentage is high. - Less than 20%: 4 - 20% to 50%: 3 - 50% to 80%: 2 - Over 80%: 1 c. Spatial structures resulting from the calculation of LISA in the 010 km strip for the period 2000-2008: A coastal first strip with homogeneous zones with high rates of population growth is more likely to remain attractive. Homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion set against the coastal concentration (0), while the non-existence of homogeneous attractive zones does not prevent it (1).

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-

Existence of one or more homogeneous attractive regions: 3 Local heterogeneity of demographic growth: 2 Non-significant local autocorrelation (non-existence of statistically significant homogeneous or heterogeneous zone): 1 - Existence of homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion: 0 d. Current land consumption in the 0-10 km strip: The higher the percentage of land consumption, the more saturated the coast is, a fact that may slow down the coastal concentration process and deprive the propensity for coastal concentration from continuing. - 0% to 8%: 4 - 8% to 15%: 3 - 15% to 25%: 2 - 25% and over: 1

3.2. Geogovernance using surveys and 3-D modelling One of the most important tools of geogovernance remains the survey, more precisely the necessary fieldwork aiming to find out the way people feel about their surrounding environment. Data collection consists in interviewing people in order to obtain information on the values, expectations, fears and images associated with the studied region. The aim is to find out how individuals relate to that territory through the landscape, using a 3-D model in synthetic resin as a mediation tool. Using a model is preferred to using a map because the third dimension facilitates people’s immersion in the space of an already known territory, and mobilizes both their visual and tactile sensations. 3-D modeling is generally used within projects devoted to address issues bound to a territory, and has been identified as a way forward for facilitating negotiation and conflict resolution. The main goal here is to find out how the inhabitants perceive their territory and imagine the future landscapes and land use changes in the years to come. Our method involves four steps: 1. The depiction of the geographical knowledge about the territory. Information is collected by researchers via verbal answers or drawings on the physical 3-D model (colored lines and plots) in order to locate places of identity, areas to be protected, tension or risk areas, as well as the present and possible limits of the town, agricultural land, woodland, etc. in an undetermined future.

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2. The conversion of the data depicted on the physical model into a digital mapping. Each drawing related to a thematic question is entered into a GIS, in several distinct layers -for instance the layer representing the town limits, the layer of the places that should be protected etc. More than 25 layers have been obtained from each model. That conversion from the physical to a digital model opens the way to numerous analyses. 3. The mapping of each thematic data coming from all the interviewed persons or from a specific panel (farmers, mayors), and the comparison of the obtained maps with maps based on other sources. For instance, we use the land-use database M.O.S (Mode d’Occupation des Sols) which provides land-use information at the parcel scale from aerial images of the department of Alpes-Maritimes in France (2007) and agricultural information collected in the studied region, from high resolution orthophotography (15cm x 15cm) which makes it possible to identify the activity intra-parcel such as crops or vineyards, grassland, wasteland, artificialized mineral surface (Emsellem et al. 2010). 4. The performing of an elaborate spatial analysis, by calculating for example the probability of a parcel to shift from one status to another.

3.3. Coupling geogovernance and geoprospective modelling Faced with the threat of farmland disappearing, it seems relevant to calculate the probability that a parcel will shift from an agricultural to an urban status. This change can be considered as irreversible. Therefore, it seems useful to identify the parcels which are more threatened in the short term. The analysis is based on two hypotheses: i) The pressure exerted on agricultural parcels is not the same everywhere, as it depends on urban pressure. We observe that the built-up sprawl occurs essentially in the vicinity of the existing built-up. ii) The way actors perceive land-use in a given area has an influence on the future transformation of that area. Thus, if a portion of space is nowadays perceived as a no longer agricultural one, although some parcels are still cultivated, the fate of these parcels seems to be already written. For this reason, the perception of the surveyed persons has to be introduced in the model and the geogovernance approach has to be linked to the geoprospective modelling. For each agricultural parcel,

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the probability of a shift from an agricultural to an urban land-use has been calculated according to the framework presented on Fig. 1-1.

Fig. 1-1. Framework showing the factors used to estimate the probable land-use change, from agriculture to urbanization

The built-up density has been calculated for each pixel of the map by modelling the decrease of built-up density around each existing built-up element (database of land use in 2006). The model is based on a reversed S curve (logistic function). The probability of built-up sprawl is close to 1 near a built-up element. Then it decreases rapidly and is zero beyond 300 meters, according to field observations. A second probability is calculated using people’s perceptions. If the parcel is perceived as already urbanized, the perceived probability is 1, otherwise it is 0. A final map has been performed by adding both probabilities. We have assumed that the transition from agricultural to urban depends much more on the urban pressure than on the people’s opinion. Then, both probabilities have been weighed differently. According to the uncertainty of the people’s opinion, the perceived probability has been given a lower weight (0.4) than the probability calculated from the observed built-up (0.6). The higher the result, the more probable is a change of status in the years to come.

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4. Applications 4.1. Analyzing the future perspectives of the littoralisation process at the provincial level in the Latin Arc This application deals with the littoralisation process of the Latin Arc and aims to bring out the littoralisation perspectives in the years to come. The research is conducted in all the Latin Arc’s fifty nine (59) coastal provinces of Spain, France and Italy, with demographic data at the municipal level and land-use data at the scale of 1:100,000. The purpose is to determine the current stage of coastal development in each province, analyzing the spatial dynamics observed since the 60’s (concentration of population, urbanization, etc.), and estimate the propensity for coastal concentration to continue in the 0-10 km strip, designated here as the suitability to littoralisation. The four indicators described in the methodological section (the past coastal concentration dynamics, the current demographic weight, the spatial structures resulting from the calculation of LISAs and the consumption of available land) have been summed up. The results of the sum for each province or group of provinces are presented in Table 1-1. Provinces have been classified in order of increasing value and grouped into seven classes (Fig. 1-2). The discretization method is a manual one. When several provinces have the same total value, they are grouped into one class. When the value is not shared by several provinces, the provinces with close values are grouped to have a homogeneous number of provinces in each class.

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Table 1-1. Indicators values perspectives of littoralisation Provinces Alpes-Maritimes Bouches-du-Rhône Napoli Genova Barcelona Livorno, Pisa Lucca Var Valencia Catanzaro, Reggio de Calabre, Vibo Valentia Corse du Sud, Haute Corse Catania, Messina, Ragusa, Syracusa Roma Baleares Salerno Aude Cádiz Gard Hérault Cagliari, Carbonia-Iglesias, Medio Campidano Granada La Spezia, Massa Carrara Girona Caserta Pyrénées-Orientales Potenza Savona Caltanissetta, Agrigento, Palermo, Trapani Viterbo Murcia Alicante Málaga Grosseto

and

the

corresponding

Indicator c d a+b+c+d 0 1 2 0 1 3 1 1 4 1 3 5 2 1 5 0 3 5 0 1 6 3 2 7 3 2 7

a 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0

b 1 2 2 1 2 2 3 2 2

1

2

1

4

8

1

1

2

4

8

1

2

2

3

8

2 4 3 2 1 2 2

3 1 3 3 2 4 3

1 0 0 3 3 1 2

2 4 3 1 3 2 2

8 9 9 9 9 9 9

1

2

3

4

10

4 3 4 2 2 2 4

2 2 3 4 3 4 2

0 3 0 0 3 1 1

4 2 3 4 2 4 4

10 10 10 10 10 11 11

4

2

2

3

11

2 2 4 4 3

4 3 2 2 3

1 3 3 3 1

4 3 2 2 4

11 11 11 11 11

future

Class

1. Extremely unsuitable to littoralisation

2. Very unsuitable to littoralisation

3. Unsuitable to littoralisation

4. Without specific suitability

5. Suitable to littoralisation

Anticipating the Future of the Mediterranean Coastal Regions

Provinces Imperia Oristano Castellón Latina Tarragona Cosenza, Crotone Olbia-Tempio Sassari Almería Ogliastra, Nuoro

a 4 4 4 3 4 4 4 4 4 4

b 1 3 2 3 2 3 2 2 2 3

Indicator c d 3 4 1 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 4 3 4 3 4 3 4 3 4

63

Class a+b+c+d 12 12 6. Very suitable 12 to littoralisation 12 12 13 13 7. Extremely 13 suitable to littoralisation 13 14

Fig. 1-2. The various classes of littoralisation suitability in the Latin Arc

The provinces classified as “extremely unsuitable to littoralisation” (class 1) are those which have long been urbanized and whose littoral is saturated, thus resulting in a shift of high population growth rates towards more inland. These provinces are characterized by a continuous decrease

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of the demographic weight of the 0-10 km strip, which, nonetheless, is still very high (more than 80% for the Alpes-Maritimes and Genova, more than 50% for Barcelona and Napoli). Available lands are scarce, except for Livorno-Pisa and Genova which have a constraining topography favoring the urban concentration. For instance, 39% of the potential urban area is already urbanized in the provinces of Napoli and Bouches-du-Rhône, even more for the Alpes-Maritimes (46%). The calculation of LISAs for the last decade generally shows the existence of homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion (Livorno-Pise) or non-significant local autocorrelation (Napoli) on the 0-10km strip. The class 2 (“Very unsuitable to littoralisation”) gathers three kinds of provinces. The Var and Valence provinces are rather similar to the class 1, except that land consumption is lower (22%) and that some homogeneous attractive areas result from the calculation of the LISAs. Among the provinces very unsuitable to littoralisation, some insular (Corse du SudHaute Corse, Catania-Messina-Ragusa-Syracusa) and peninsular provinces (Catanzaro-Reggio de Calabre-Vibo Valentia) have concentrated a great part of their population in the 0-10 km strip, but this dynamic has stopped during the two last decades. For the period 2000-2008, a non-significant local autocorrelation or a local heterogeneity of demographic growth emerge from the LISAs. Concerning the two last provinces of class 2, Roma and Lucca, a weak dynamic of coastal concentration is counterbalanced by the inland eponymous cities. Thus, the calculation of LISAs does not reveal any homogeneous coastal area of demographic growth. Some other provinces whose development did not occur only on the coast can also be found in class 3 (“Unsuitable to littoralisation”), such as the french departments of Gard, Aude and Hérault. The demographic weights of their 0-10 km strip are some of the lowest, because the population concentrates in other inner strips. The slight increase of the coastal demographic weight on the 0-10km strip is associated with other increases in inner strips and limited by a rather high consumption of available land (respectively 15%, 33%, and 22%). Salerno has a different kind of inland development consisting in a low increase of the two first strips weight (0-10 km and 10-20 km). The calculation of LISAs reveals some homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion in the first strip, limiting its littoralisation suitability. Some provinces of the class 3 are not concerned by these inland dynamics. The Baleares and Cádiz have an intense coastal demographic concentration (85% and 72%). During the last decades, the

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weight of their 0-10 km strips stagnates or reduces, whereas the decline of their 10-20km strips slows down or stops. Among the provinces with no specific suitability to littoralisation (class 4), some provinces have developed not only on the 0-10 km strip, but also on the 10-20 km strip (Pyrénées-Orientales) or on other strips inland (Granada, Girona, Caserta). Either their 0-10 km strip contains homogeneous attractive areas (by the calculation of LISA), but an advanced stage of human occupation (16% of consumption of available land in Pyrénées-Orientales), or the 0-10 km strip contains some homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion, and much more available land (Granada 3%, Caserta 8%, Girona 12% of consumption of available land). Finally, class 4 consists in provinces with a strong coastal concentration that seems to reach a ceiling, with an extension of the growth to the 10-20km strip (La Spezia-Massa Carrara and CagliariCarbonia Iglesias-Medio Campidano). The distinction between provinces with inland population concentrations and provinces with an almost exclusive coastal population concentration also appears in class 5 (“Suitable to littoralisation”). However, the provinces of class 5 with an inland population concentration are suitable to littoralisation because their current demographic weights of the 0-10 km strip are lower (Potenza 10%, Viterbo 13%). Moreover, no homogeneous zones of low attractiveness or repulsion are identified by the LISA, but it shows the existence of one or more homogeneous attractive areas (Murcie) or at least a non-significant local autocorrelation (Grosseto, Potenza, Viterbo). The provinces of class 5 with an almost exclusive coastal population concentration have not reached a saturation threshold, unlike the provinces of the class 4. Indeed, the 0-10 km strips of these provinces have rather high demographic weights but lower than those of class 4 (Alicante 58%, Savona 65%, Caltanissetta-Agrigento-PalermoTrapani 68%, Málaga 69%). A strong dynamic of coastal concentration is currently exerted on the first strip, at the expense of all the other strips. The saturation of the 0-10 km strip has not yet been reached. As in class 5 (Alicante, Málaga), class 6 contains some provinces characterized by the development of seaside tourism in Spain (Castellón, Tarragona). These provinces share the same modalities with those of the class 5, except that they have a less advanced consumption of available space (9% and 13%). The other provinces of class 6 also have wide open spaces available for urbanization (Latina) or even more (Imperia, Oristano) than Castellón and Tarragona. But their demographic weight of the 0-10 km strip is higher (Imperia) or the LISAs indicate no homogeneous attractive areas (Oristano).

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Class 7 (“Extremely suitable to littoralisation”) is homogeneous because the corresponding provinces share the modalities favoring littoralisation suitability: a continuous population increase in the 0-10 km strip (and a continuous decline of the three inner strips’ demographic weight), homogeneous attractive areas and a very low consumption of available land (between 3 to 6%). The only criterion that does not reach its maximum value regarding littoralisation suitability is the current demographic weight of the 0-10km strip. Indeed, population rates for 2008 are rather low (Ogliastra-Nuoro 39%, Cosenza-Crotone 46%) to rather high (Olbia-Tempio 63%, Sassari 63%, Almería 73%), but they are not among the lowest. These provinces are agricultural provinces that are not highly urbanized. Thus, the question of the evolution of agricultural land facing urban pressure is pivotal. According to these results we notice that half of the provinces along the north-western Mediterranean coasts are suitable to more littoralisation, i.e. open to develop higher concentration of population and activities. As the pressure for littoralisation should remain intense in the next decades, the littoralisation would propagate more along and inside the coastal belt, except if, in the meantime, territorial policies try to contain it.

4.2. Anticipating irreversible changes, the example of the Var Valley farmland The study focuses on the coastal urban area of Nice, the fifth largest city of France. The Var Valley extends to the doorstep of Nice, the French Riviera capital. This region is undergoing strong land pressure and an extension of urbanization towards the hinterland. The valley has become a highly-coveted area in the last twenty years or so. Indeed, because of the scarcity of available land on the coastal strip, the low Var Valley is seen as the future extension area of Nice. The rich farmland which provided the grounds for the fame of Nice’s agriculture fifty years ago—citrus, olives, wine, vegetables and flowers—is progressively being replaced by residential areas, road infrastructures and industrial estates. The rural landscape is deteriorating. Thus, in 2008, the French government decided to declare the area a “prized territory”, and launched what is called an Operation of National Interest (OIN Plaine du Var) with a view to develop the valley in a coherent manner whilst making it a sustainable territory. The public body that runs the OIN had the innovative idea of carrying out a preliminary study aimed at knowing how the various actors of the valley perceived the project. The research consultancy in charge of the

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consultation requested the collaboration of the Nice University geographers who were then working on the geogovernance concept. The Var Valley is a ribbon of 10,000 ha mostly located in the periurban zone of Nice, where 400 ha were dedicated to agriculture in 2007. In accordance with the land speculation and growing tensions concerning the future of farmlands, the agricultural issue has been elevated to a high stake for the planning of the valley. Paradoxically, one of the main difficulties in conducting a project such as the OIN is the lack of knowledge concerning the state of the territory and its land-use on a fine scale. Thus, our first goal was to build relevant spatial information which would become the foundation of the future territorial project. As there is no recent geographical information on farmlands at the intra-parcel level, the first step of our research focused on the consumption of agricultural areas by analyzing the database and the high-resolution orthophotos taken in 2006 and 2009. We observed that, on the one hand, the agricultural lands were gradually reduced and fragmented and, on the other hand, agricultural activity in 2009 was not dominant any more in the agricultural zones. Wasteland, secondary vegetation and artificial surface (gravels or waterproofed grounds) have rapidly sprawled. Cortesi argues that “working on the local scale means that we are able to record reactions of the population and public organizations to environmental change and to consequent action taken or planned to deal with it” (1995, p.16). We agree with this remark and we add that geographers also need to anticipate the reactions of the population and their spatial consequences, such as a high demographic increase leading to a saturation process of the coast. That is the reason why particular attention was given to field surveys consisting of interviewing a sample of farmers and the mayors of the 15 municipalities included in the OIN perimeter, using a physical 3-D model (Fig. 1-3). The first purpose of the analysis was to find out, then map in a GIS, the limits of agricultural lands and urban areas, differentiated per category of actor. For instance, the layer of agricultural lands gathers all the zones regarded as agricultural by the mayors. It has been collated with orthophotographs and land-use data to observe the possible discrepancy between the observed data and the perceived ones.

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Fig. 1-3. The physical 3-D model of the Var Valley, as a medium of survey (1: 50,000 scale; 50 cm x 26 cm size)

The resulting map (Fig. 1-4) points out three main tendencies: a) Farmlands are scarce and mostly present in the low part of the valley. More precisely, on the right bank, they extend into the plain, close to the river, while on the left bank they are located not only on the flats but also on the slopes, b) The state of agricultural areas is little known and cultivated areas are grossly overestimated by local Mayors, in terms of surfaces, c) The huge discrepancy between areas perceived by Mayors as agricultural and the actual agricultural land is another striking fact. There are three plausible reasons that can be assumed for this gap: rapid changes in land-uses during the last decade, the difficulty in differentiating among wood land, wasteland and cultivated areas, and the

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persistent image of the prosperous farming of the Var Valley during the sixties, when this territory was at the top of the French horticultural production. All land-use changes are not of the same importance; some of them are irreversible, some others aren’t. The process of changing from agriculture to forest is reversible. On the contrary, the conversion of a farmland to an urban parcel is non-reversible because it causes irrevocable changes on the soil properties. In the same way, going back to a rural landscape when the urban landscape has become dominant, is quite impossible. Thus, our further spatial analysis has been conceived with two concepts in mind: land use consumption and irreversibility. The former refers to “the erosion of agricultural space and the practically irreversible occupation of land by man-made structures intended to meet an ever-growing range of needs” (Reho et al. 1990, pp. 8-9). The latter, connected to the decrease of agricultural space, refers to the impossibility to return to a previous state. Probabilities of irreversible change from agricultural to urban land have been calculated at the pixel level. The map of the Figure 1-5 points out zones where numerous farmland changes are located, subject to be irreversible. The zoom indicates zones where the probability of agricultural land being replaced by urbanization is the highest. These are mostly located on the left bank of the Var Valley and in the municipality of Nice, close to the village of Saint-Isidore or the hills of Crémat and Bellet (vineyards). They concern some parcels in periurban areas where there have been planned infrastructures, such as the “Nice Stadium” large sports complex. The irreversibility of a change such as from the agricultural to the urban status is a major factor for the future of any kind of territory. It is therefore essential to identify the places likely to be affected by this transformation in the short or medium term, so as to take the necessary measures when there is still time.

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Fig. 1-4. Comparison between areas perceived as agricultural by Mayors and the actual agricultural land in the lower Valley of Var River

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from agriculturaal to urban Fig. 1-5. The highest probabbilities of irreversible change fr land in the Vaar Valley

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5. Conclusion “Mediterranean coastal belts are so long … and researchers were so few … and most of them, specialists in specific regions rather than of the whole Mediterranean” (Cori 1995, pp. 13).

This statement of B. Cori, in the early 90s is still relevant today. Much more scarce are researches about the future changing patterns of landcover and land-use on coastal areas. Moreover, the traditional field of competence for geography is the analysis of spatiotemporal phenomena. Up to now, situations generating major transformations have been mostly analyzed. Geographers tend to seek information regarding the consequences of events such as natural disasters, rather than to attempt to detect situations likely to generate changes. However, geographical methodologies and tools can anticipate demographic dynamics and land-use changes. Those methodologies belong to the set of geoprospective approach, a recent yet most promising area of research. Whereas it is impossible to make predictions because of the complexity of human organizations, geoprospective demonstrates that uncertainties do not prevent the various territories from being considered from a prospective point of view, whatever the scale is. Such knowledge, even though imprecise and uncertain, helps policymakers anticipate the spatial trends and choose the best territorial policy options. The first application shows that it is possible to make territorial diagnoses with a prospective aim. The prospective is achieved by identifying and interpreting spatiotemporal configurations. In that application, the reasoning is based on the state of advancement of the littoralisation process and on the perspectives of population concentration in the coastal strip. The littoralisation has reached an advanced stage in some of the Latin Arc’s coastal regions and may have many implications in regards to pressure on land, water resources, land-use conflicts, sociospatial segregation, pollution and landscape degradation. Exploring the possible evolution of the littoralisation process at a medium scale (level of a province or a municipality) is necessary in order to be able to anticipate such impacts. This application is however a basic example of the prospective approach and has still to be developed. In particular, determining profiles of present littoralisation and possibilities for future evolution of the littoralisation by performing a hierarchical classification from the highlighted characteristics of spatial dynamics coast, would help to better understand resemblances and differences within each class, and go further beyond a mere addition of indicators.

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Moreover, it might be relevant to integrate other factors, such as relief which is a major spatial constraint. Its influence requires an in depth analysis because it could affect the littoralisation process in several ways: a pronounced relief may confine the population to a narrow coastal plain and limit its spread, yet it may be seen as a strong residential attraction in terms of sea view and contribute into the population of areas overlooking the coastal plain. Other variables of great significance have also to be taken into consideration, such as land values, view sheds, quality of environmental factors, transportation and accessibility, etc. The transformation of territories is indeed a phenomenon, difficult to grasp because of the portion of uncertainty and ‘irrationality’ in the behaviour of the people involved. The interest and originality of the anticipation of changes in the second study lie in the combination of two kinds of spatial information: Some come from data on observed land-use, others on subjective information linked to what is perceived by the interviewed. Geoprospective, coupled here with geogovernance, aims to show how the population’s various points of view on future land-use changes can be spatialized, and how to measure the coming changes within the territory with new spatial indicators, such as the irreversible land-use change indicators. Both geoprospective methods are reproducible to other contexts. The strip method could be applied around an urbanized area or for example, along a main axis of communication. Also, the change probability could be calculated in another context, for example, to detect old individual houses areas that would probably disappear in the neighborhood of a new centrality such as a park of leisure. Geoprospective demonstrates in a novel way the social usefulness of Geography. Indeed, it is relevant for depicting the opinion of inhabitants about the current changes, providing information about spatial impacts of population trends and housing expansion, detecting places where landcover changes could lead to irreversible damages and consequently, for helping policy-makers to identify the main spatial problems that planning policies will have to address in the future.

References Anselin, L., (1995). Local indicators of spatial association LISA. Geographical analysis, 27, 93-115. Becu, N., Neef, A., Schreinemachers, P., & Sangkapitux, C. (2008). Participatory computer simulation to support collective decision-

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making: Potential and limits of stakeholder involvement. Land Use Policy, 25(4), 498-509. Blue Plan, (2001). Urban Sprawl in the Mediterranean Region. Sophia Antipolis. http://www.planbleu.org/publications/urbsprawl.pdf. Accessed 8 June 2012. —. (2008). The Blue Plan’s sustainable development outlook for the Mediterranean, Sophia Antipolis. http://www.planbleu.org/publications/UPM_EN.pdf. Accessed 8 June 2012. Camagni R., & Capello, R., (2011). Spatial Scenarios in a Global Perspective: Europe and the Latin Arc Countries. New horizons in Regional science, Cheltenham, UK, Northempton, USA: Edward Elgar. Cori, B., (1995). Foreword. In G. Cortesi (Ed.), Urban Change and the Environment, The case of the north-western Mediterranean (pp. 1314). Milan: Guerini. —. (1999). Spatial dynamics of Mediterranean coastal regions. Journal of Coastal Conservation, 5, 105-112. Cortesi, G., Capineri, C., & Spinelli, F., (1995). Recent Changes and Future Perspectives in the Latin Arc. In G. Cortesi (Ed.), Urban Change and the Environment, The case of the north-western Mediterranean (pp. 331-347). Milan: Guerini. Cortesi G., (1995). Identity and Pattern of Urban Change in the Northwestern Mediterranean. In G. Cortesi (Ed.), Urban Change and the Environment, The case of the north-western Mediterranean (pp.15-35). Milan: Guerini. Costanza, R., & Ruth, M., (1998). Using dynamic modeling to scope environmental problems and build consensus. Environmental Management, 22, 183-195. Emsellem, K., Mannoni, P.-A., & Voiron-Canicio, C., (2011). Evaluating land use in an urban/rural interface, the case study of the lower Var valley (France). Proceedings of the 17th ECQTG, Athens. Von Weizsäcker, E., Lovins, A. B., Lovins, L., (1998). Factor 4:Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use. A Report To The Club Of Rome. London: Earthscan. Godet, M., (2001). Creating Futures. London: Economica. Houet, T., & Hubert-Moy, L., (2006), Modelling and projecting land-use and land-cover changes with a cellular automaton in considering landscape trajectories: an improvement for plausible future states, EARSeL eProceedings 5, 1/2006, 63-76, http://las.physik.uni-

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oldenburg.de/eProceedings/vol05_1/05_1_houet1.html. Accessed 15 February 2012. Masson-Vincent, M., Dubus, N., Bley, D., Voiron, C., Helle, C., Cheylan, J-P., Douart, P., Douguedroit, A., Ferrier, J.-P., Jacob, F., Lampin, C., Maignant, G., & Piot, J.-Y., (2012). La Géogouvernance : un concept novateur ? Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography. doi: 10.4000/cybergeo.25086. PAP/RAC, (2007). State of the Art of Coastal and Maritime Planning in the Adriatic Region. Synthesis report. Priority Actions Programme / Regional Activity Centre. http://www.pap-thecoastcentre.org/pdfs/ Synthesis_Report_Final_WEB.pdf. Accessed 8 June 2012. Pumain, D., (1998). La géographie saurait-elle inventer le futur ? Revue européenne des sciences sociales. Tome XXXVI, n°110, 53-69. Rambaldi, G., & Callosa-Tarr, J., (2002). Participatory 3-Dimensional modelling: guiding principles and applications, ASEAN Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation. Ratcliffe, J., & Sirr, L., (2003). The prospective process through scenario thinking for the built and human environment: a tool for exploring urban futures. Futures Academy, Dublin Institute of Technology. http://www.thefuturesacademy.ie/node/81. Accessed 8 June 2012. Reho M., Santacroce P., (1990). I consumi di suolo. Metodi ed esperienze di analisi. Milan: Franco Angeli. Schwartz, P., (1998). The Art of the Long View. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Smeets, E., & Weterings, R., (1999). Environmental indicators: Typology and overview. Technical report, 25, European Environment Agency. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/TEC25. Accessed 8 June 2012. Vanolo, A., (2007). Innovation and polycentrism in the Mediterranean Latin Arc. In N. Cattan (Ed.), Cities and Networks in Europe: A Critical Approach of Polycentrism, Montrouge: John Libbey Eurotext. Voiron-Canicio, C., (2012). The Geoprospective approach. In M. Campagna et al. (Ed.), Planning Support Tools: Policy Analysis, Implementation and Evaluation. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Informatics and Urban and Regional Planning INPUT2012 (pp. 538-547). Milano: Franco Angeli. Voiron-Canicio, C., Olivier, F. (2005), Anticiper à l’aide d’un SIG, les conséquences de la paralysie urbaine en temps de catastrophe : application à la ville de Nice, In ISTED (Ed.), Systèmes d’Information géographique et gestion des risques (pp. 55-58). Paris: ISTED. Voiron-Canicio, C., (1994). A la recherche d’un arc méditerranéen, Méditerranée, 79, 15-23.

CHAPTER TWO INTERMEDIATE SIZE CITIES AND THE NEW URBANIZATION PATTERN IN GREECE PAVLOS MARINOS DELLADETSIMAS

Abstract The chapter attempts to highlight the importance of the current urbanization phase that Greece is experiencing and to elaborate on some of its major characteristics. These characteristics derive from the new relationship established -especially in the early ‘80s- between the urban agglomerations and their rural hinterlands, stipulating in turn an emerging role of intermediate-sized cities and regional concentrations. The chapter argues that the formation of the new role of medium-sized cities in Greece also poses additional demands at the policy level, taking into account the recent administrative reforms and even more the acute crisis conditions which the country has been lately experiencing.

Introduction The aim of this chapter is, first, to highlight the importance of the current urbanization phase that Greece is experiencing and then to elaborate on some of its major characteristics. This new urbanization process began taking shape during the late ‘70s, operating in parallel and partly substituting the previous one that in many cases, had exhibited clear indications of its exhaustion. The basic feature of this new process has been the new relationship established between the urban settings and their rural hinterlands, stipulating, in turn, an emerging role for medium-sized cities and regional agglomerations. The chapter will subsequently concentrate on the examination of the role that these intermediate-sized cities have been exhibiting over the last three decades. Their role evidently varies from region to region and has been manifested differently in each

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case; for instance, through the intensification of pre-existing trends; through their transformation from former industrial to service economies; through their evolution as transportation nodes; through the intensification of a traditional mono-functional economic performance (e.g. tourism); and finally through the spatial dynamism generated by economic social and administrative integration processes. The new role of intermediate cities in Greece also poses new demands at the policy level that this chapter aims to take into account as well, namely recent administrative reforms and even more the acute crisis conditions which the country has been lately experiencing. In the context of this chapter, eleven (11) Greek cities will be examined other than the two main agglomerations of Athens and Thessaloniki (Fig. 2-1). The first three are those placed higher in the hierarchy of mediumsized cities of the country, while the rest are the ones selected according to geographical location and other distinctive characteristics. Reference will also be made to other cities, which are not part of this preliminary selection. The chapter also attempts to sketch an approach on the issue and to raise some critical questions of concern; the task to studying the new urbanization pattern in Greece is obviously major and requires to be effectuated on the basis of further empirical research, in a case-to-case (urban-regional) context. Needless to state that the new pattern is conditioned not only by the underlying globalization factors (ICTs, transportation-accessibility changes, international migration, new governance structures and advanced service industries) but also by the acute crisis conditions that the country is currently experiencing. Mediterranean Basin countries are characterized by intensified population and building densities, involving areas of increased concentration (especially in coastal and plain zones) alternating with less urbanized segments or even abandonment. This should be seen as the outcome of a long-standing historical evolution of exceedingly varying urbanization and urban development patterns, in each distinct national territory. These patterns reveal highly diversified specificities and particularities of the various development models, regarding: industrialization processes, the role of land rent in spatial and economic growth, the role of land ownership and housing and an overall changing importance portrayed by tourism, the supply of goods and services and the construction sectors.

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Fig. 2-1. Thee urban networkk in Greece and d the cities connsidered in the context of this study

Of coursse, these processes are also o differentiateed on the basiis of their institutional settings andd the policies adopted throoughout the Post-War period fosteering concentrration or deceentralization ddynamics. It could be argued, that nowadays, most m Mediterraanean countriees are experieencing the coexistence of new urbanization u dynamics, inn parallel with w the perpetuationn as opposed to t the decline of the existinng ones (Seccchi 2000); this is evidenntly portrayedd and will be shown s below for the case of Greece.

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The Dominant Post-War Urbanization Pattern The 1960s and 1970s determined the major characteristics of the PostWar Greek economy and society, since the ‘50s coincide with the reconstruction period following the devastating effects of World War II and Greece’s Civil War. In the ‘60s, the country has experienced high growth rates in investment, production and productivity. The developmental model was based on a policy of concentrated investment in large industrial plants and major infrastructural works. Hence, an industrialization boom was triggered by massive initiatives in the metallurgical, alumina-aluminium, chemical, petrochemical and shipbuilding industries, stipulating the growth of a polarized manufacturing sector, divided between heavy industrial complexes and an array of small firms. In the ‘60s and mid ‘70s the impressive annual GDP growth rate of the country, of 6.7% percent, was primarily led by the industrial sector (Lyberaki 1996a: 2). The service sector participated in the trend, but its relative share expanded only in later years. Nevertheless, the overthrow of the dictatorial regime in 1974 created exceptional political conditions, which encouraged a noteworthy albeit temporary- growth process. Since the mid ‘70s, under the effects of two oil crises, growth rates in Greece began to decline and a gradual deindustrialization process was initiated. The economic and social development in the ‘60s and ‘70s has marked, among other things, the breaking up of the Pre-war (relatively) dispersed spatial structure and the making of a highly centralized and urban-based pattern. Distinct outcomes of the latter escalating urban polarization — manifesting as appearing as materialization of Pre-War trends- and the dominance of the two main metropolitan agglomerations; Athens and Thessaloniki, that have since then overwhelmingly governed the economic, social and spatial developments of the country. The period involved the restructuring of all production factors and outstandingly high economic growth rates, accompanied by massive internal and external migration flows. On aggregate from the ‘50s to —‘70s rural out-migration amounted to more than 1.5 million people; approximately 50% of these flows concerned out-migration from Greece. This trend has followed distinct consecutive phases: the first concerning out-migration flows to the European industrialized North and the second one to other countries abroad (US, Australia, Canada). Especially from the early 1960s, over two-thirds of permanent out-migration flows had Western Europe as their main destination and 80% percent of those the Federal Republic of Germany (following a bilateral employment agreement between the two countries). Out-migration concerned primarily rural populations (there is a

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direct relationship between outflows from rural areas and inflows into foreign countries destinations, Delladetsima 1979) especially from Northern Greece. In the 1970s, however, out-migration drastically decreased; in regards to internal migration trends, these have concerned: a) migration from rural areas to intermediate and medium-sized regional centers b) migration from intermediate-sized centers to the two metropolitan areas and c) migration from rural areas directly to the metropolitan areas, Athens in particular (Delladetsima 1979: 4-5). Outmigration flows to metropolitan areas have been the all embracing ones in the 1970s. On the whole the dominant urbanization until the late pattern ‘70s has been characterized by: I.

II.

An increased population mobility from the countryside to the main regional agglomerations, to the major core urban areas (mostly) and abroad. Clearly as far as internal migration trends (approximately 700,000 people) are concerned, the core destination areas have been Athens and Thessaloniki. By the late ‘60s, 29% per cent of the country’s population was concentrated in Athens, while Thessaloniki established itself as the second most important metropolitan area of Greece. The population of the city experienced a 6.8% increase between 1941 and 1951 and 27.7 % between 1951-1961. Since then, the two cities have carried the developmental burden, followed by some other medium-sized agglomerations, especially those located along the main highway axis of the country: Patras-Athens-LarissaThessaloniki, connecting the Northern and Southern regions of Greece. (Delladetsima 1979). Hence, the 1960s assume a high level of significance in relation to the size of population mobility that took place at the time. Between 1951 and 1961, four (4) urban centers grew by more than 30%; thirteen (13) between 20-30 %; thirteen (13)by 1020%; seventeen (17)by less than 10%; while seven (7) urban centers demonstrated net but not significant growth rates. On the whole, thirty one (31) out of fifty five (55) urban agglomerations in Greece exhibited growth rates that exceeded 10% (Papageorgiou 1972: 49). During this period, the ratio between rural to urban populations changed in favor of the latter. The dismantling of the subsistent local economies and also of the productive capacity of certain rural and island hinterlands; this has meant increased labour supply and reduced labour costs for the core agglomerations. At the same time, however, the urban-based industrial sector exhibited an inability to absorb this labour surplus, which was predominately channelled in the construction and supply of services,

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sectors. The post-war industrialization process, assumed an enclave outlook, posing relatively limited demand on the labour force (Mouselis 1978); thus, it can neither be considered as the driving force of the large-scale labour movements of the 1960s, nor has it directly benefited from them. Migration movements and the dismantling of certain rural economies can be better understood and explained as an integral part of the survival strategies of rural households and the respective small-scale family enterprises. A tacit but increased tension between the city and the countryside, arising from an inherent awareness on the threat posed by the new developments to certain rural populations seeking to preserve existing or traditional relations of production. This was manifested throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s with numerous local social movements against major investments (infrastructural works, industrial installations, water dams and power stations, extraction industries) and their related land expropriation schemes, that were either, crushed by State authorities or lessened with the aid of socio-political integration mechanisms via financial and employment compensations: the Megdova damp (Karditsa Prefecture), the Bauxite extraction and Aluminium plant in Central Greece (Viotia Prefecture), the mining extraction in the island of Milos (Cyclades Prefecture), the lignite extraction zones and energy plants in Kozani and Ptolemaida (Kozani Prefecture), and many others. The expansion of modern rent relations in spatial development, incorporating the rural hinterland. Modern rent relations were introduced first with major investments and industrial branch plants, with the widespread of the tourist development sector, with transportation improvements especially in road networks and gradually with the diffusion of second home ownership; it developed firstly in the peri-urban areas of the major agglomerations and expanded to the entire territory especially in coastal and insular areas.

During this period, most small or medium-sized urban centers, ascertained their developmental position, by simply resisting the broader urbanization trends. This was made feasible, since they managed to attract part of the regional population outflows. In other words, intermediatesized cities have sustained part of the population of their region that would have been largely absorbed by the two main agglomerations of Greece and the industrialized Northern European countries. In turn, medium-sized cities have determined varying forms of “resistance”, depending on the capacity of their economic basis, by exploiting their conventional role visà-vis some inherent relative advantages. The latter have been for instance,

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the economic sustainability of certain sectors (towns with wealthy agricultural hinterlands, tourist resort areas), accessibility advantages (transportation nodes and port areas), regional administrative centers and towns that benefited from investments in heavy industry and energy installations. More specifically, between 1961 and 1971 cities like Patras, Heraklio, Larissa and, to a certain extent Volos, have managed to absorb part of the regional out-migration flows and since then, to become the key urban developmental determinants. In other cases, the acute regional outmigration flows were so accentuated that the urban centers assumed a moderate role in influencing and/or attracting them. The city of Ioannina for example, has exhibited between 1951 and 1961 a moderate population increase (1%), while the following decade due to the acute out-migration trends has experienced a huge population reduction reaching 13%. Moreover, negative regional trends have not correlated to the growth of other cities (Serres, Kalamata) which simply portrayed a stable if not stagnant role in such process. Finally, in other cases the role of the city (e.g. Komotini), as a regional centre, became more accentuated in the following decades.

The Emergent Urbanization Pattern By the mid and late ‘70s, the Greek GDP continued to grow faster than the European average (3.3 percent), but at a decelerating pace (Lyberaki, 1996a:2, 1996b). Investment exhibited steady growth, reaching, by 1979 the 1973 levels. On the whole, by the late ‘70s, growth trends, had to some extent, been revived (Giannitsis 1993). Moreover, for the first time in post-war development, the 1980s saw the service sector increasing its GDP share (Lyberaki and Mouriki 1997). During the ‘8Os, the participation of the industrial sector in GDP fell from 20.8% percent to 19.6% percent while the service sector increased from 51.2% to 56.7% percent (Vaitsos and Giannitsis 1987: 21). On the whole, this period saw a decrease in the GDP annual rate of growth to 1.5% percent; a decline in fixed capital investment; a decline in the production growth rate (to 1.0 %); an increase in inflation; public deficit and unemployment increases (Sakellari 1995: 57, Caloghirou, 1993). The negative trends, however, were counterbalanced by capital investments made available with the entry of the country into the European Common Market (1981) and the European Union (1999). In 2001, the country became a European Monetary Union member. The economy of Greece regained momentum due partly to EU Structural

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Funds, related EU investments, and the increased availability of credit. This was manifested in the economic growth rates (4% growth during, 1997-2007) and in consumer spending increases. Nevertheless, since the early ‘80s, the fluctuations in the economic conditions of the country have, first, affected traditional industrial centers such as Piraeus, Patras, Volos and Thessaloniki and in turn triggering a widespread deindustrialization process, in cities such as Lavrion, Chalkida and Kozani. Other northern-central regions of the country and -especially Eastern-Macedonia- underwent a significant economic restructuring process, stipulating mostly a shift in the service economy. The deindustrialization trends have also denoted a major change in the dominant urbanization pattern (Demathas 1997) and the emergence of a new one. This new urbanization pattern, again, engaged population outflows from the rural hinterland, but was neither as traumatic as in the previous phase and obviously not of the same intensity and magnitude in all regions. Within this process, the contrast between city and countryside has not been as accentuated as in the past years, while, at the same time socio-economic problems assumed highly specific spatial dimensions, in the entire urbanrural territory. The main destinations of the new out-migration flows were mostly the peripheral urban centers. The first major indication of this change was the fact that population increase rates of the two metropolitan areas exhibited decline or stabilization tendencies. Since then, between 1981 and 1991, the population of Athens exhibited a stabilization trend (0.9% increase and 0.73% annual rate), whereas Thessaloniki and its hinterland maintained positive growth trends (6,1% between 1981 and 1991) but with lower rates, than the previous decades. Evidently, population trends on their own do not denote that the leading economic role of the two core areas of the country has been lessened; on the contrary it has been steadily extended and intensified (Interaction/Ministry of National Economy 1991, Koutroumanides and Loukakis 1993, Giannitsis and Mavri 1993). Research on producer and knowledge based services (Delladetsima-Kotsambopoulos 2000) has revealed, for instance, that Athens has been dominating the geography of advanced producer services, concentrating 53% of national business service employment and 35% of establishments. Furthermore, the latter have also been reinforced by an overwhelming concentration of banking and advanced service sectors headquarters (76% of business consultancy employment, 94% of stock exchange and related services, 98% of leasing, 79% of computer services and 88% of advertising). Athens has been, similarly, dominating the country’s share of larger establishments, with 65% of those with over 10 employees. Location quotient (LQ) data

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confirm this picture. For the producer service sector as whole, Athens exhibited a LQ of 1.4. Excluding banking, the LQ exceeds 1.6. The LQs of the more advanced producer services, such as business consultancy, financial services, advertising, and information and computer services generally exceed 1.5. In this respect, the only other significant centre of service concentration is Thessaloniki; the advanced producer services as a whole contained 9.1% of employment and 9.8% of establishments. The city holds a significant role in accounting, computer services and business consulting. Location quotients are around 1.0, with the exception of stock exchange and related services and leasing. As the second largest metropolitan centre of the country, Thessaloniki has exhibited an impressively high LQ of over 2.2 in business consulting indicating its distinctive role in Northern Greece. Smaller cities such as Patras and Heraklio, have LQs of around 1.0, for more routine services like banking, insurance, real estate, accounting and miscellaneous activities; they have low LQs for business consulting, computer services and advertising, reflecting their status as centers of local significance. Out of this situation an up-and-coming role for most intermediate-sized cities has accordingly emerged exhibiting high rates of population growth through intensification and diversification former trends. In principle, the intermediate-sized cities have absorbed the new waves of inter-regional migration flows and have established new roles in their regional settings. Obviously the terms and conditions of these roles have varied a lot from region to region and on a case-to-case basis. Set in this context, and taking into account the particularities of each local socioeconomic setting, it seems there are only few cases of medium-sized cities, that have been able to grasp and exploit the changing conditions and adjust positively. These are cities that have managed to re-invest accumulated resources and benefit from a rather disjointed regional development policy (based on economic incentives and resource transfer made available by the EU structural policy) that have led to the shaping of a relatively sustainable economic and social environment. On the whole, the newly emerging urbanization pattern has been involving various city typologies the most important of which being the following:

a) Agglomerations that dynamically play a major regional vis-à- vis national role (Patras, Larissa, Heraklio) These are three major medium-sized agglomerations of the country: Patras, Larissa-and Heraklio that have established a major position, not

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only within their regional setting, but also in the context of the national territory. The city of Patras. According to the 2011 census the municipality of Patras—as determined by the amalgamation former municipality and other 4 adjacent ones) amounts to 213.984 permanent inhabitants constituting thus, the third biggest local authority of the country. The Peripheral Unit of Achaia (former Prefecture) between 1991-2001 increased its population by 7,46%, while during 2001-2011, it decreased by 2,62%. Although the integrated municipality also experienced a population decrease (reflecting suburbanization dynamics and the accentuated role of other minor urban agglomerations of the Periphery) it has consolidated a major nationalperipheral role with significant potential deriving from its economic-social and knowledge capital. The city of Heraklio. The municipality (2011 census) experienced a 10% increase since 2001 reaching 173.993 permanent inhabitants. Evidently this increase was also due to the incorporation into one administrative unit of other adjacent municipalities. Heraklio has historically experienced steady growth trend that intensified in the 1980s and 1990s (13,68% and 14,22% respectively). It has thus assumed the major economic growth pole of the insular region of Crete, by “benefiting” from its links with its high productivity agricultural hinterland and its key position as the primary node of tourism development. The latter has stipulated the development of other economic sectors such as services, construction and retail. A key developmental parameter has also been the presence of H.E.Is and major research Institutes. The city of Larissa. Clear indications of population increase for the agglomeration-municipality of Larissa are revealed in the 2011 census. The permanent population census has reached 162.591 inhabitants (this includes the former municipality of Larissa and other four adjacent municipalities that were amalgamated into one unit after the administrative reform). The agglomeration is a major agricultural, transportation, industrial and (more recently) energy node. It has benefited from its productive agricultural hinterland and the formation of strong agrobusiness districts within the agglomeration. This, in turn, has perpetuated an industrial and service development (related to marketing, sales, management, quality control and other value-added products).

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b) Agglomerations that sustain their role as regional centers (Volos, Ioannina, Chania) The second typology of intermediate or medium-sized towns concerns agglomerations that are sustaining their economic role by experiencing either positive growth trends or by partly losing their share, but still maintaining their relative importance as regional centers. The city of Volos. The permanent population of the agglomeration of Volos amounts to 144.449 inhabitants (2011 census). The municipality is now composed by four amalgamated units. The agglomeration has a sustained stability in population growth trends and currently appears as to have exhausted its potential as a leading regional centre. The city has relied a lot on the growth of the conventional service sector and the accentuated role of the University of Thessaly. Volos however has experienced a drop back in benefiting from its relative advantages, such as the port, its industrial base and the tourist sector. The city of Ioannina. The population of the agglomeration in the latest census (2011) has reached 112.486 inhabitants experiencing a relative increase since 2001. The economic structure of the city has been relying on the construction sector, conventional public sector services and on the role of the University, one of the biggest H.E.I in the country. Since the late ‘90s it has been benefiting from accessibility improvements, generated by the operation of the major highway (Egnatia Odos) connecting north-west and north-east Greece (Egnatia Odos Observatory 2005). The city of Chania. The agglomeration-municipality of Chania amounts to 108.642 inhabitants (2011 census). The city experienced significant population increases, especially between 2001-2011, denoting a strong urbanization trend and the incorporation of the rural hinterland in the urban economy. The economic structure of the agglomeration has also been characterized by the limited growth of the industrial sector in favor of the service sector and of tourism. As a factor of developmental potential is the presence of H.E.Is.

c) Agglomerations that maintain a stable or declining regional role (e.g. Kavala, Serres, Kalamata, Drama) The cases in this typology are many and in many respects, constitute the majority of intermediate-sized cities. In the context of this work we refer to the following cases:

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The city of Serres. The municipality of Serres amounts to 76.817 inhabitants. Historically the city has proved rather weak in absorbing a segment of the population outflows in the ‘60s and ‘70s. On the whole, population growth rates for the adjacent areas (former Prefecture) and the city of Serres have been far lower than the ones of the broader periphery (Central Macedonia). The city of Serres has not been in the position to act as a major peripheral centre and the Prefecture has sustained a predominantly agricultural outlook. The city of Kavala. The municipality of Kavala experienced between 2001-2011 a 2% increase and hence with the incorporation of a former adjacent municipality it now amounts to approximately 70.501 inhabitants. This increase took place with a regional framework exhibiting negative population trends. Historically, the city experienced its sharper population increases in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Since then it has sustained a stable population trend relying mostly on a rather balanced developmental profile. Its economic structure involves an oil extraction company, a phosphoric fertilizer plant, marble and glass enterprises and a national fish-pier; it is characterized by an even distribution of its employment structure between primary, secondary and tertiary sector activities. The city of Kalamata. The current (2011) population of the municipality is 69.849 inhabitants. The city consolidated its role as a regional centre during the ‘70s. This occurred following a period in which the surrounding regional territory (former prefecture) undergone negative de-population trends, especially between the ‘50s and ‘70s. In the ‘90s it manifested positive growth trends (4,5%) indicating an economic improvement based on accessibility (road transportation) gains, conventional service sector development and a growth on self-employed individuals. The urban economy relies also on its agricultural hinterland; based mostly on olive-tree plantations and related value added products. The city of Komotini. The population of the municipality according to the 2011 census amounts to 66.919 inhabitants. The city experienced population increases, only in between 1991-2001. During the ‘80s the prefecture exhibited negative population growth trends and the city managed to sustain part of them, displaying in turn reserved population growth rate. Nowadays the area is highly urbanized and characterized by a distinct social and labor market structure (new migrants, Muslim minorities and Roma), relying a lot on the presence of the University of Thrace and the increased housing demand and building sector growth. The city of Drama. The municipality of Drama according to the 2011 census consists of 58.944 inhabitants. From 1961 to 2001 the population of the (former) prefecture decreased by 14,07% while the city played a

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significant role in containing regional outflows; its impact however, has been less effective than in other cases. During the ‘90s there were clear population increase trends in the prefecture and the city. However, agglomeration is developing in a context of a feeble agricultural hinterland, a decreasing industrial sector and high unemployment rates. Clearly, there are many other cases that have not been analyzed, in the context of this chapter, such as the cities of Rhodes and Corfu that have constructed their economic role, through the intensification of their monofunctional development, as major tourist destinations and administrative capitals, further stipulating the growth of sectors complementary to tourism: such as construction, services and industrial SMEs. Of relevance are also agglomeration economies generated by the spatial economic social and administrative integration of cities in close proximity as is the case of the Kavala-Xanthi-Drama-Komotini conurbation in the region of Eastern Macedonia (N. Greece), and many others. Regardless of the city differences and the emerging typologies, it is clear that overall we are dealing with the making of a “new urban structure”, in which some intermediate-sized cities could play a focal role, with the making of this “new urban structure” illustrated by some common trends: o Urban sprawl and peri-urbanization, involving the actual expansion of urban land uses of the major centres; linear built up area developments of housing and other uses along coastal areas; incorporation of minor localities and towns in major conglomerates etc. Artificial land cover take up —by various sprawl categories- is above the European average, exposing an inherent inability to implement a consistent land and land-use policy (Delladetsima 2012). This process is also accompanied by the growth of second-home ownership; a trend that, in the long run, has been inflicting constant change on the regional rural societies and economies, subordinating them to a new “urban” pattern. All these latter trends result into an overall reduction of agricultural land, conditioned by land use changes and an overall devalorization of agricultural land due to reduced production capacity and the expansion of higher-value land uses. Cities expand as a “continuum” and tend to integrate with other territorial systems forming entities which are neither “city” nor “countryside” (Sechi 2000), but highly interconnected with both. o Increased accessibility conditions through the construction/improvement of infrastructure (new road and railway networks, ports and airports,

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high-speed sea vessels etc), internal urban accessibility and commutingtechnological improvements, that overturn existing relationships between regional towns and between cities and their rural (or island) hinterlands. These conditions are further accentuated by major public (e.g. health complexes, universities, energy installations) and private investments (e.g. in retail and leisure, industrial complexes) that increase the attractiveness of the various agglomerations, against their surrounding peri-urban and rural hinterlands. o Consecutive implementations of administrative reforms (regional decentralisation, amalgamation of municipalities and local communities) in wider administrative entities, often leading to further subordination of rural communities in the context of their urban agglomeration economies. Of relevance is the recent reform of Law 3852/ 2010 that has, among others, amalgamated adjacent municipalities into the main ones producing an unprecedented “official” population increase of almost all peripheral agglomerations. As a matter of fact the 2011 census clearly reveals an unprecedented growth of the main cities (this is why it is not presented in this study) due to the incorporation of all minor surrounding towns and villages into the municipalities of the main agglomerations. o The dominance of the service sector (Konsolas, et al. 1988, Karakos and Koutroumanides 1998, Kafkalas 1999), in the process- and in particular of the conventional services-gravitating towards recreation, tourism and public sector activities. This trend is also accompanied by an extended share in the economy and social structure of these urban areas of the construction sector, seen as the outcome of increased consumer spending and the combination of all the aforementioned trends. Regardless of the processes described above, on the whole, intermediate-sized cities have been unable to benefit systematically from any accessibility gains (expressed mostly in population increases, increases in tourist flows, regional GDP increase) created by major transportation infrastructures. This could be the case of the cities (e.g. Ionannina, Igoumenitsa, Komotini, Ȁavala, Xanthi ) adjacent to the major North-West, North-East highway axis of Egnatia Odos (Fig. 2-2). Notwithstanding the population gains that these cities have accumulated, they have not managed to restructure their economies, by investing in production, innovative activities nor advanced services. In addition, it could be argued that this inability refers to the city of Patras, that experienced unprecedented strategic accessibility gains with the

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construction of the Rio-Antirio H. Trikoupis bridge, a 2.280 m. bridge, connecting the Peloponnese to mainland Greece- which could potentially form the basis for the creation of an integrated international transportation node.

Fig. 2-2. The Egnatia North Axis and its catchment area influence Source: The Egnatia Observatory

The same applies to the development and presence in many mediumsized Greek cities of Knowledge Infrastructure and Higher Education Institutions (H.E.Is), the most important of which being in the cities of Ioannina, Heraklio, Patras and Volos. These have little achieved in terms of promoting new local production systems, knowledge and innovation dynamics (MIET 1995, Moulaert and Delladetsima 1998, Delladetsima and Kotsambopoulos 2002), as it has been the case for other European contexts (Wood et al. 1993). In fact, decisions on the development of H.E.Is have virtually been founded, in a policy vacuum. The official policies adopted by the State, in relation to H.E.Is, appear to be out of focus on educational-research grounds, and have been based on unsubstantiated notions about their role in regional development (Labrianidis 1993, Getimis and Labrianidis 2003, Chryssakis 2003). Political, populist and short-term economic criteria prevail (related to the benefits of local consumption-retail markets, real

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estate-rented sectors etc) against long term sustainable educational, research and urban-regional strategies (Delladetsima 2011).

Concluding Remarks As is well known Greece went into recession, in 2009, as a result of a world financial crisis, which had an impact on its access to credit, world trade and domestic consumption. Due to high public debt and unsustainable public deficit, the country has been forced to request emergency economic assistance from Eurogroup countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank. Nowadays, public debt, inflation, and unemployment in Greece are far above the respective euro-zone average and the Greek Governments have embarked in an application of severe austerity policies, Government spending cuts, reducing the size of the public sector and drastically reshaping the labour and pension systems. All developments also render the economy of most urban areas (especially those gravitating around public sector services and the construction sector) highly vulnerable, with the exception maybe of those that rely mostly on the tourist sector and those with a more robust economic basis (Larissa, Patras, Heraklio). The aforementioned crisis situation in Greece poses an urgent need to study its impact on present urbanization processes through the acknowledgement of all of its parameters. It could be argued that one form of response to current developments is to consolidate the role of intermediate-sized cities and regional towns by stimulating and strengthening their positive elements (accessibility benefits, links with the agricultural hinterland, Knowledge Infrastructure etc) deriving from this evolving process, in view of defining a broader alternative policy setting, for intermediate-sized urban areas. As past experience has demonstrated, a focal problem, has been the inability of public policy and lack of tools to cope with the varying and escalating forms of demand, posed by prevailing urbanization processes. This chapter has essentially aimed to provide some preliminary considerations that could form the basis for a more comprehensive and in-depth study of urbanization trends currently experienced in Greece. Some final remarks that assume importance, especially with respect to Greek spatial development and planning, are worthy of being pointed out: A. First, there is a clear need for further research and empirical work that should involve a full spectrum of urban agglomerations and cities in the Greek territory. The new urbanization phase, as a larger social and

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economic phenomenon, within the crisis context, constitutes an area that requires systematic study, in order to identify its basic parameters and their differentiations, among various localities and regions. In other words, there is a need to identify all positive developments stemming up from the dynamism of current urbanization trends and to support or reinforce them accordingly. B. Second, the urbanization pattern requires specific policy responses, on behalf of the central, regional and local governance systems. In other words, newly-emerging circumstances require new regulatory mechanisms and planning strategic rationales. As past experience has shown, a key factor stipulating the inefficiencies of the planning system has had a lot to do with the latter’s inability to cope with changing forms of demand (in innovative investments, environmental protection, knowledge based development) which arise during the various urbanization phases. As a matter of fact, a first positive development has been registered with the establishment of the major regulatory spatial development plans for the biggest agglomerations of the country (Patra, Larissa-Volos, Heraklio and Ioannina) other than Athens and Thessaloniki (Arvanitaki et al 2009). This initiative derives from a central Ministry (Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climatic Change) and is the first time ever, that an official policy has “recognized” the existence of agglomeration economies, other than those of the two main metropolitan areas of the country. The objectives of all these plans concern the containment of urban sprawl, the determination of the productive structure of different areas, environmental-sustainable development objectives and integrated approaches to dealing with the problems of each distinct agglomeration.

References Arvanitaki, A., Themou, M., Gekas, V. (2009), The compact city model and its implementation prospects in Greece (in Greek). Athens: Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climatic Change. Caloghirou, J., (1993), State Markets, Industrial Structures and Public Policies in the Greek Territory (in Greek), in Giannitsis, T., (edited), Industrial and Technological Policy in Greece, Athens: Themelio, pp. 95-129. Chryssakis, P.,M., (2003), Financing of Scientific and Technological Research: Quantitative Dimensions and Interuniversity Differentiations (in Greek), Panepistimio, Academic Society, 6.

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Delladetsima. P.,M., (1979), Migration Movements and Labour in PostWar Greece, Urbanization and Industrialization Seminar Papers, Development Planning Unit, London: UCL. Delladetsima, P., M. Kotsambopoulos, A. (2002), "Greece Knowledge Intensive Services and Economic Development”, in Wood, P., (edited), Consultancy and Innovation The Business Service Revolution in Europe, London: Routledge, pp.246-281. Delladetsima, P., M., (2011) Planning for knowledge infrastructure and capacity building in a distinct insular regional context (Cyclades/Southern Aegean): The role of higher education institutions’ research actions”, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Vol. 24, Nos. 1:2, March-June, pp. 107-131. —. (2012), Sustainable development and spatial planning: Some considerations arising from the Greek case”, European Journal of Spatial Development, no 46. Demathas, ǽ. , (1997), The Balanced Multi-central Urban System as a Field of Action of the European Spatial Plan (in Greek), International Conference European Networks and Middle Size Cities, NTUAUniversity of Thessally-Prefecture Authority of Magnisia, Volos 1113/4. Egnatia Odos Observatory (2005), Current Conditions in the Regions on the Path of the Egantia Motorway: Cohesion mobility balance environment, First spatial impacts report, Thessaloniki: Egnatia Odos. Getimis, P., Labrianidis, L., (2003), Peripheral Universities shouldn’t be used as tools for regional policy (in Greek). Panepistimio. Athens: Academic Society, 65-86. Giannitsis, T., (1993) (edited), Industrial and Technological Policy in Greece (in Greek), Athens: Themelio. Giannitsis, T. and Mavri, D., (1993), Technological Structures and Technology Transfer in the Greek Industry (in Greek), Athens: Gutenberg; Interaction/Ministry of National Economy (1991), Greek Business Consulting Firms Market (in Greek), Athens: Ministry of National Economy. Kafkalas, G., (1999), Thessaloniki: Reduction of the Mono-central Performance of the Urban Agglomeration of Thessaloniki and the role of the Tertiary Sector (in Greek), Thessaloniki: Diti. Karakos. A., Koutroumanides, T., (1998), Regional structure of the service sector in northern Greece (in Greek). Topos, 14/98.

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Konsolas, N., Sidiropoulos, H., Papadasklopoulos, A., (1988), Structural and Interregnal Changes in Industrial and Service Sectors in Greece 1971-1981 (in Greek), Athens: IPA Koutroumanides, T. and Loukakis, P., (1993), Occupational Analysis of Space Distribution in Greece during the period 1978-88 (in Greek), Technical Chronica, 13/4, p.p. 261-283; Labrianidis, L., (1993), Regional Universities in Greece (in Greek), Thessaloniki: Paratiritis. Lyberaki, A., (1996a), Greece - EU Economic Performance at the National and Regional Level, European Planning Studies, 4/3, p.p 313-329; —. (1996b), Adjustment and Resistance to Change Virtues and Vices of the Greek Economy. Journal of Modern Hellenism, 12, p p. 1-19. Lyberaki, A., Mouriki, A., (1997), The Soundless Revolution (in Greek). Athens: Gutenberg. Ministry of Industry Energy and Technology (1995), Consulting Services Network in Attica (in Greek), Athens: MIET. Moulaert, F., Delladetsima, P.M., (1998), Producer services and regional development in the Aegean: Lesvos and Chios, DGXII-F5. Mouselis, N., (1978), Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, London: Macmillan. Papageorgiou, G., (1972), The Regional Employment of Greece (in Greek), Athens: EKKE. Sakellari, E., (1995), Business Consultants: Their Biggest Client is the State (in Greek), I Epiloghi, 3/95, p.p. 68-76 Secchi, B., (2000), Prima lezione di urbanistica., Bari: Edizioni Laterza. Vaitsos, K., Giannitsis, T., (1987), Technological Transformation and Economic Development (in Greek), Athens: Gutemberg. Wood, P., Moulaert, F., Gaebe, W., Strambach, S., (1993), Employment in Business Related Services—An Intercountry Comparison of Germany, The UK and France, Brussels: EC-DG5.

CHAPTER THREE GLOBALISED TOURISM AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT: AN APPARENT CONTRADICTION? A TEST IN LIGNANO SABBIADORO, FRIULI VENEZIA GIULIA REGION, ITALY IGOR JELEN, NORBERT WEIXLBAUMER AND MAURIZIO STANIC

Abstract The tourist economy is assuming a growing relevance in the actual reality, possibly becoming the most important and even the driving factor for cultural and territorial systems. The opening of markets at a global scale would possibly accelerate such a scenario, since presumably, the greater the market is, the stronger the standardization pressure on the local scale is expected to be. The Mediterranean space, in its different articulations, shows a possible counter/tendency in this process, evidencing a resistance to standardization (which the macro data describe as something more than a culturalist “common place”); it continues to represent the culture of the “slow”, of the uniqueness, of authenticity, based upon traditions and communitarian belonging, with typical natural and agricultural resources, style of life and social-cultural habits, in contrast with massification and industrialization of tourist activities. A circumstance in which it is possible to observe a contradiction, since the attention for the “small” and for the “slow” could be in contrast with the necessities of corporate and global business, which at the contrary relies on scale economics; a contradiction which needs to find, at least in part, a solution in order to secure for the Mediterranean systems the necessary efficiency, preserving at the same time, the authenticity of traditional

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cultures. In order to focus on such a question—which is possibly one of the structural causes of the stagnation that affects several Mediterranean economies -, we performed a test on the tourist place of Lignano, region Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG), on the Upper Adriatic Coast.

1. Introduction: Tourism as pulling economic activity: niche development or scale economies? Macro data show that tourism is increasingly exerting an important role in economics, with the potential of assuming a key role within entire systems at local, regional or even national and international scale (http://media.unwto.org/en/press-release/2012-01-16/international-tourismreach-one-billion-2012). The current opening of the markets at an authentically global scale would induce a further sequence of evolutions, provoking unpredictable repercussions on local environments: tourist economics, both from demand and supply aspects, assume forms and intensities of different impacts, developing in innovative sectors, prospecting new attitudes in a frame of rapidly changing motivational standards. The dramatic reduction in transport costs, as well as the simplification of procedures and organization modalities, enhance the overall mobility for any layer of the population, regardless of income and origin, in a way that often, makes evident that (considering some differentials) it would be cheaper to stay “around” than to stay “at home” (Gerbaux F., 1998; Gosar A., 1999; Casari M., Corna-Pellegrini G., Eva F., 2003; Knafu R., 2003). It is the paradox of global tourism: the option of “travelling” would often become less expensive than the the one of staying “at home”, in the own domestic residence. This tendency finally configures an enormous mass of tourists moving from North to South, from East to West of the planet, and vice versa: a phenomenon affecting all levels, in particular the local systems, which are not always capable to confront new circumstances, intercepting (and not just subjecting to) this mass of movements, adapting their offer and the whole social context. This applies not just to infrastructures and facilities, but also to the organizational culture, management capability and work force training: a challenge signifying the chance for a possible development, that, if disregarded, would signify the risk for local systems, in an exactly reciprocal way, of regressing in an emarginated position. Furthermore, such evolution is taking place in an ambiguous context, characterized by the intersection—both on the structural and ideological levels—of post/modernity and globalization: two contemporary but, in this

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case, opposite movements that combine mass standardization with, as per reaction, the recovery of the “local”, of the “unique” and of the “qualitative” in a context of “down-sizing” and “down-switching”. These are the slogans of the “post mod” epoch (after the post modernity “turn”), in which the mass (namely, the true protagonist of previous century modernity), with its peculiar standardization force in any sense, seems to dissolve, leaving the place to niches and “fragments”, and in general to more articulated markets, eventually inducing to personalisation of products and services. The direct consequence of this confusion is the evolution of diverse and alternative ways of doing tourism and of using the touristic resources. In fact, the search for quality, and of a qualitative way of doing tourism appears in contradiction with a quantitative way of organizing hosting services, namely with mass tourism and with the profitability that just this kind of tourism is able to develop. On one side, world wide chains of standard hosting facilities, on the other, family-run bed & breakfast and guesthouses; or, in other terms, strategic planning vs. spontaneous modes for arranged hospitality, guided and disciplined travellers’ groups vs. improvised and “explorer” tourists, investments administrated by multinational companies vs. local scale adaptations, global market vs. seasonal small-sized businesses. A contradiction typical of a transition time in which tourism activities assume a particular connotation: the tourist factor—with its cultural significances—is characterized by both, a continuing evolution that suddenly creates new market segments, and a rapid obsolescence rate of facilities, as well as of cultural structures. An evolution on demand which is making necessary the re-definition of the figure of tourist as one of “non consumer”, in terms of a generic traveller or host, or even of a seasonal resident. An image contradicting the consolidated idea of the “modern” tourist, namely the idea of a visitor with standard expectations and periodicity, who is disposing of specially formulated and predisposed for him, goods and services, in a distinct circuit from the one that is currently used by local population; a new category to be added to the segments of the standard “middle class” tourists (prevalent in times of modernity), whose behaviour was (and still is) much easier to foresee (Cohen E., 1974; Crompton J.L., 1979; Leed E.J., 1992; Ont 2011). This is a characteristic aspect of global society, already extremely mobile by itself: an evidence obtained considering the bulk of travelling motivations, which are as well the motivations for the occasional change of residence, namely, besides tourism “strictu sensu”, business, private visiting, hobbies, conferences or just motivations derived from a generic

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possibility of using extremely cheap travelling and hosting conditions. Evidences that to some extend, could possibly signify, the arising of a new stage of civilization, to some extent, the affirmation of a “multiple dwelling” and of a neo-nomadic society, to which the current tourist classifications hardly can be applied: it is a question concerning dimensions, modalities, times and facilities. It is the case of new forms of individual and cultural mobility, of second homes, namely of temporary residencies, with weekend homes becoming for some people their actual “first” home, or the third, the fourth home etc., depending on individual lifestyle (Steinicke E., Cirasuolo L., ýede P., 2011).

2. The dilemma of post modern tourism economics: combining growth with authenticity The crucial question in this scenario is indeed the combination of scale economies with niche economies, in order to get a better profitability for companies and, at the same time, to preserve and to give value to local quality, culture and technologies, which cannot function otherwise but only as details economies, per micro/ or individual units, well preserved in original geographical involucres (outside that, they would probably be extinguished) (Sedmak G., Mihaliþ T., 2008). It means the combination of standardization economies with economics functioning in the exactly opposite manner - as scale dis/economies, indeed. Considering that, the more the company would grow, the higher the risk of losing the capability of reproducing “authenticity”; this also applies to any aspect of the tourist cycle and to services of any type (Heynen H., 2006). As a possible solution to such a dilemma, one could suggest, on the basis of geographical / economic literature and experience, the implementation of a coherent territorial policy: a pattern in order to coordinate the companies in a tourist “district” where, next to multinational companies, niche economies could survive, in the frame of micro-companies, continuing the various forms of traditional economy (and above all to the basic value of hospitality, intrinsic indeed for all the cultures of the world, but which must be re-codified in economical terms). In this context, local (supposedly) qualitative operators can find the opportune environment in order to pursue development strategies, without losing in spontaneity and the always inspiring connection with the native place and tradition (Bennett T. et al., ed. 1983; Boyer M., 1999). In this effort, it is possible to observe some successful experiments, which focus on that purpose, that have taken place in the last decades in Italy and elsewhere. It is the case of the network of “agriturismi”,1 offering

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self-produced goods, combining agro/alimentary prominences and tourism experience “at the farm”, reaching a considerable market ramification; it is the case of the “albergo diffuso” (“diffused hotel”, www.albergo diffuso.com), with clusters of restructured rural homes provided with centralized hotel services (reception, promotion, maintenance etc.). Another case is that of a cooperative organization of several agro/alimentary niche productions, which, starting from a marginal activity, in remote and economically weak areas, and connecting thousands of small farmers, has often reached the dimension of a multinational company (as was the case of berry fruit production and sale in Trentino and Calabria, Jelen I., 2012). Furthermore, it is the case of the extraordinary spread off of the “slow food” (www.slowfood.it) Piemonte based movements, in its various interpretations (see e.g. www.terramadre .info and www.slow-tourism.net): a cultural and economic philosophy signifying the recovery of local resources and cultures, and in general signifying the “back to the land” (or to nature, to the tradition, to local community) ideology. All such policies spontaneously originate in society and economics, and have been recently, promoted, at last, by appropriate (post modern) national and regional laws, which aim to combine corporate organization with local tradition and individuality. This trend implies the existence of a development pattern, articulated per districts and networks, with concentration of different types of activities, which are potentially in competition with each other, but which, when linked in the same tourist cycle, can indeed develop cooperation tendencies. In such circumstances, in a particular place (a coastal area, a mountain valley, a historicalarchitectural old quarter, a wine district) large facilities may be combined with local activities, which usually set continuity or originality, as their success factor. Finally such combinations would possibly induce a “spill over” effect, nourishing thus, qualitative and quantitative growth. This pattern may lead to the development of both, agglomeration economies for activities (Krugman P., 1995), and centrality for infrastructures (Bonetti E., 1964, in Christallerian sense), where the diverse skills and professions may rely on “threshold dimensions”, namely mass of demand and clients attracted by further activities, inducing a synergic effect amongst the different businesses (e.g. the excursion guide, the traditional artisan, the typical “trattoria”, the ski or the surf teacher). A cluster in which all the operators could get the consciousness of belonging to the same system, contributing of making of the “district” an organic mechanism, recognizable by the same geographic-corporate label, easy to

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communicate and to promote (since more primitive is the “sign”, more ample is the diffusion potential, as the marketing principle prescribes). Finally, such pattern would permit to a certain locality to develop its whole potential, offering to the visitors an expected standard (for comfort, safety, rest, silence or entertainment, social complacency, quality, services) and representing for the companies the possibility of profitable functioning. Such model would be capable of developing the reciprocity pattern of a Marshallian district adapted for tourist purposes (Bagnasco A., 1977; Jelen I., Weixlbaumer N., 2011; Scott A., Storper M., ed., 1986; Scott A.J., 1986): a district in which the guest of a large hotel can find the traditional informal restaurant, and where, at the same time, the guest of a restaurant may use the services offered only by a large facility (the typical cases in these times are swimming pool, wellness, spa, or sport facilities, organization of excursion, international cooking etc.). Such articulation would bring great benefits for the whole system, while, at the same time, these benefits will be extended or combined with a promotion offered by the large hotel chain, maintaining some niche activities and taking advantage of their qualitative standards. In these terms the tourist district organization would represent a device in order to satisfy any demand, flexible enough for adapting to the changeable market, but capable at the same time of exerting a multiplier effect on local scale. In this sense, the local system would become able of facing the globalization tensions, overcoming the fundamental contradiction between scale and niche economies.

3. The passage to structured economics and correspondent effects on territorial order Then the question shifts, from the micro economics level, to the regional planning and political dimension, since, not always, the spontaneous force (the initiative of the companies) is sufficient for the local system to mature, a self-adjustment effect, namely, for making out of a simple aggregate of facilities a district with governance capability, realizing a long term cumulative development. In fact, excluding the possibility that the public sector would directly govern the tourist economy, the question that arises is in which way would-it be possible to predispose of a mechanism for making possible the integration among single companies (both, big and small). It is the question of the elaboration of a way for providing incentives and also—to some extent, indirectly—constricting the local companies to reasoning in terms of “district”, namely in a cooperative and organic way.

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It is the dilemma of economic geographers (and of regional economists) since the time it has become evident, that the entrepreneurial initiative is the essential source of any true economic value, but which also, in parallel, remains necessary in order to reconcile the individualistic energy with territorial/social redistribution criteria, as to avoid system bias effects (then a regulative approach) (Scott A., Storper M., ed., 1986; Scott A.J., 1986). This applies especially in a region like Friuli Venezia Giulia, in Italy and most probably elsewhere across the Mediterranean (Southern/ Mediterranean Europe as per UNWTO classification), where the tourist offer is based traditionally on middle and small-sized facilities, often overlying family groups, with high quality standards but lacking in strategic and planning (non-directly productive) capability. Such business units seem to function well at the time of the conjuncture (thanks to its flexibility and qualitative management), but to be weak in the long term; in a sense, they often perceive themselves as only precarious businesses, whose owner does not invest much in structural increase and development, but just in current maintenance necessities. A situation that has been defined in terms of corporate “dwarfness” (in Italian, “nanismo delle aziende”, see table 3-1), obstructing the maturation of companies, as well as the passage of the whole system, from an initial pioneer stage (with many small companies informally managed) to a regulated one, represented by a balanced mix of large-structured and small-specialized companies (EIU, diverse editions; Jelen I., 2012).2 Table 3-1. Companies’ dimensions per number of employees in FVG (2007-2008)

10.441 10.129

9.732 9.338

10-49 employees 2.807 2.736

37.865 38.028

25.705 25.581

2.107 2.213

Industry One employee 2-9 employees 2007 2008 Services 2007 2008

More than 50 employees 403 404 243 254

Source: Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2011

This question would deserve further discussion about the structurally smallness of the companies in the tourist sector in FVG—and in other Italian and Mediterranean regions—, showing the contemporary difficulty, both, for local companies to grow and to reach a competitive dimension,

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and for multtinational opeerators to peneetrate local maarkets in orderr to make investments. Such passaage, indeed, is considereed to be cru ucial for converting tthe local systeem into an effficient econom mic system, en nabling it to compete iin the open market and to pursue p a self-ccumulative gro owth.

Fig. 3-1. Friuuli Venezia Giulia Region and a its locationn in the Upperr Adriatic; www.maestrooantonio.org/reggioni/friuli.htm ml

The misssing of such trransformation n could be assoociated to som me biases, connected too the same strructural weakn ness of the coompanies. Theese would be incapablle to develop and to beco ome in the loong term e.g.., from a seasonal guuesthouse, ann internationaal recognizedd hotel-firm, from an occasional affair, a brooker agency, and actuallyy to become,, from a precarious aand individuaally-run busin ness, a true company, caapable of elaborating a corporatee strategy, of assumingg risks and making investments (about the paassage from a “simple” to a structured ecconomics see e.g. Berrry B.J.L., Connkling E.C., Ray R D.M., 19899).

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This structuration deficit exerts effects, both, inside the corporate organization and on the surrounding environment, for companies considered both, incapable of adapting the internal procedures (maintaining a conservative personalistic management mode), and of developing a code for dialogue with the wider economic and institutional environment (making of the own business something “exclusive”, to be jealously administrated). In fact, amongst the problems induced by such condition, we can register the incapability, of the single companies, of cooperating with other companies and with any other actors in order to coordinate the individual action for the several public-scale questions (urban planning, collective mobility, public functions etc.). On the contrary, under these circumstances the companies tend to maintain self referential and low transparency attitudes, finally degenerating in several forms of “grey economy”, which tend to become systemic. It is the case of scarcely efficient and reliable administration, of hidden bookkeeping, of insufficient conformation to official prescriptions; it could be the case of the hire of illegal or semi-legal work force, which will not be properly registered, just employed part-time and shall not be provided with social or professional insurance. Such company is motivated by its strive to become an efficient firm or by the effort to “spare” in terms of prescribed rules, of social and eventually work-safety, urban planning, waste management costs, demonstrating in general a low capacity of updating to the several standards (in a rapidly changing context), becoming finally something socially inadequate (Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011). .

4. The risk for systemic biases Such question would characterize usually the low-structured companies, and is directly correlated with the question of the under-size of business units: a condition making difficult any kind of specialization and any kind of dialogue among the companies, as well as further operators like banks (which obviously need reliable accounting books and documents), insurance companies and (obviously) public institutions. Such situation would exert further problems at the public level, which would reverberate in a general bad management of territory, of urban and social functions, finally accumulating (invisible) costs in the long term. It is the case, in general, of the distortion of the competition game (since the more “astute”, dare-devil and scruple-less entrepreneur will prevail, not necessarily the best), and it is the case — on territorial level of a disordered urban growth, inducing phenomena such as high density

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edification, based on speculative practices, on manipulation of master plan prescriptions and on a low quality urban design. A problem that, beyond a certain threshold, would provoke just damages, with landscape destruction, territory consuming, over-crowded traffic, in general with the progressive weakening of public apparatus. Furthermore, such inefficient urban pattern is making possible the phenomenon of the proliferation of “second homes”, with the spread out of low qualitative mass-constructions, using industrialized techniques for apartment buildings, compounds and rows of weekend homes. A phenomenon which would continue until the total occupation of the usable surface and that, furthermore, would obliterate the traditional and natural landscape, annihilating any possibility of pursuing an idea of corporate design, and eventually marginalizing local work forces and traditional expertise (e.g. a certain use of building material, a peculiar aesthetic and style, typical architecture decorations). Such building industry-driven economics would induce a low value multiplier (namely inducing low local economic fall out), finally damaging paradoxically any kind of (not just the tourism) development pattern. In fact, it maintains the character of a speculative operation or— eventually—the character of a defensive-investment practice for middle classes, who, especially in time of “decreasing revenues”, are looking for conservative investments, trying to “patrimonialize” their savings (namely a tendency of conservative investing, just accumulating and “treasuring”, instead of innovative investing: a tendency well known in economics, eventually characterizing at the end of macro-economic cycles).3 But possibly the worst bias—deriving equally, from an insufficient territorial organization, and scarce participation of economic operators to local governance—concerns the so-called commuting car tourism, both individual and motorized, from the nearby urban areas, which is further developing due to the cheap costs for individual transportation (gas and oil) and of a certain evolution of the social modes. This is a big problem for FVG and for the Italian standards, considering that the 2009 data show for the region a figure of 758.581 automobiles for a population of 1.235.000, with a ratio of 0,6 cars per person, extremely high and indicating a car proliferation bias (presumably, for generations of getting obsolescent cars) (FVG, 2011). It is also to be considered that such phenomenon is probably spreading off to the detriment of collective mobility system, which in fact remains essential in order to pursue an equilibrated development of the tourist sector. Actually, such mobility system would probably invite “throwaway” travels, exerting some effect on highway services (gas pumps, highways

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agencies, mechanics) and possibly on daily-basis visiting facilities (like along-the-road restaurants and bars), but exerting almost no impact on the rest of the local system: as when the travellers were more interested in the car travel just for itself, and not in the tourist experience or in visiting the destination (FVG, 2011). Such a way of doing tourism is impeding any empathic identification, producing indeed an effect not much different of that deriving from watching an anonymous movie at the television — through the window of the car: a disputable evolution of tourist practices, with the automobile transfer just provoking a light shock on visitors, even when lined up in the traffic for hours on some highway, as the essential moment of an inconsistent mobile activity. Indeed this commuting movement would impede any true flowrishment of the tourist product, reducing the tourist experience to an alienating automobile rush (Jelen I., Weixlbaumer N., 2012). Furthermore, such biases would induce collateral effects and evolutions, amongst them, it must be considered the risk for sudden “waves” of commuting tourist “invading” some localities (namely, perceived in these terms by the local people), and furthermore for some urbanistic drift, producing on long term irreversible effects: facilities and services tend to re/organize in a chaotic or in a dispersed way, rather than per central places grouping around inter/modal traffic exchange points (e.g. a railway station, the pedestrian square of a village, or a geographic amenity, like a coastal area, a beach, a mountain view), thus maximizing (rather than minimizing) distances and costs. This is generally true for any territorial element and for any kind of activity, which tends to localize within a “string strip development” model, along roads—and not by districts. Such model is diffusing particularly in different regions of Italy (but perceivable elsewhere in Europe), conditioning further urban and economic options, impeding finally the possibility of both, scale economics, with tourists staying in some place just for a few days or few hours and quality improvements. Actually, it is difficult to develop quality standards for occasional volatile tourists, who seem not to be interested in any aspect of the territory they are visiting—namely, they are just passing through. At the end of a vicious cycle, such commuting-based tourism would induce probably a fragmented territorial structure, inefficient as well for the residents.

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Table 3-2. Arrivals and overnight stays on Upper Adriatic coastal destinations (2010) Region—State Region Veneto Region Friuli Venezia Giulia Slovenian Istria Croatian Istria and Hinterland Total

Arrivals 7.689.815 1.147.146 559.267 2.627.918 16.797.678

Overnight stays 34.724.425 6.096.924 1.981.141 17.731.881 88.203.997

Source: Zago M., 2011, adapted

5. The case of Lignano, Friuli Venezia Giulia, on Italy’s Upper Adriatic coast Lignano is situated on the Friuli Venezia Giulia coast, a locality composed by a long sandy peninsula, modeled by Upper Adriatic streams by the mouth of the Tagliamento River, dividing the internal laguna waters from the open see. Such landscape and position are similar to many others locations on the sandy riviera of alluvial Po’ Valley (pianura Padana), which are considered to be one of the most frequented tourist complexes in the world (Touring Club Italiano, Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1988; Le guide de l’Espresso, 1980). Such area is comprehensive of historical sites (Venice, Trieste, Aquileia, Palladian villas in Adige Valley), thermal springs (Abano, Colli Euganei, Arta Terme) and natural attractions (in the surrounding inland areas, Julian Alps and Dolomiti mountains), representing a sequence of touristic places, bathing facilities and further attractions stretching over hundreds of kilometers. The tourist history of Lignano—as for the other localities in this area— traces back to the end of the 20th century, when the upper class of the new rapidly growing industrial cities began to discover these areas, suitable for sea baths and summer holiday. At that time, after an extended reclamation campaign, carried out the long of that century on the whole lagunahinterland, and thanks to the improvement of transportation (train, motorcar, laguna ferries like “vaporetti”), these places gained improved accessibility.

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Fig. 3-2. View w of Lignano Peninsula Source:it.bingg.com/images/ssearch?q=map+ +lignano&view= =detail&id=124 4 DD11EA323C C91B71ADAE E39AC0C99391 14723A0A&FO ORM=IDFRIR

Under thhese circumsstances the ellite began too practice thee activity which is posssible to be deefined as “tou urism” or “leissure” in modeern terms, which would progressiveely lead to a “revolution”, “ m more than off social or economic chharacter, of thhe territorial organization: while the laguna and the coastal pplains used to be inaccessib ble, or more acccurately put,, avoided, because theyy had been afffected by maalaria, and beccause of a geeneralized difficulty off settling and urbanizing in n a swampy area, at modeern times they suddennly became attractive a targ gets (Istituto pper l'Enciclop pedia del Friuli-Venezzia Giulia, 19978; Regionee Autonoma F Friuli Veneziia Giulia, 1976; Tourinng Club Italiaano, 1988). In fact, tthe modern teechnique in building and teerritorial man nagement, thanks to tthe use of ceement and stteel structurees, made posssible the economic usse of such peeripheral areass, of the new reclaimed lan nd and of the precarioous Laguna islands, i which h, since thenn, began to develop d a complementtary role on recreational places for hiinterland mettropolitan areas. Until that moment, the area wass just seasonaally inhabited by small groups of L Laguna hunterrs and fisherm men, without any stable seettlement,

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based in “casoni” villages (typical reed and straw fishermen homes, thatched laguna cottages), linked by a network of laguna channels, developing a particular low intensity survival economics. The strong acceleration of the Lignano tourist history began with the “economic miracle”, in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe, in the 50’s and 60’s, when the Laguna beaches became the target of a constantly increasing wave of middle-class tourists coming from the nearby highly urbanized area of Pianura Padana and from the nearby Middle-European space. Under these circumstances the Upper Adriatic localities discovered to be the closest sea-gateway to the European hinterland, soon to become a favorite place for visitors from Austria, Bavaria and in the last decades (after the fall of the Berlin Wall), from Slovakia, Hungary and other Middle-European countries (Cardinale, a cura di, 2005). Besides the closeness to such a huge tourist basin, that needs to be considered as the main factor for tourist development, the most precious aspect of Lignano remains the natural attraction represented by the 8 km long and 0.5 km wide fine sandy beach bordering the Peninsula, inserted in the typical landscape of dunes (originally 10-15 m. high), pine-tree forests and Mediterranean vegetation, and of the surrounding laguna and river mouth environment. A long strip of easily accessible beaches, with a huge, practically unused, surface, inhabited and empty for a long time, which in a few decades has become the place of rapidly growing tourist settlements, baptized—comprehensibly—with inviting names such Sabbiadoro (“Golden Sand”), Pineta (“Pine-tree Forest”), Riviera and, for the new “skyscrapers” quarter (considering that standard, buildings with 10 or 15 floors), “Lignano City”. A growth soon assuming the rhythm of a booming urban development, which gave Lignano the typical aspect of a 60s (“late modernity”) architecture, obliterating the scarcely evident traces of the previous fishermen culture (“casoni” villages, laguna farms, traditional instruments and equipment, wooden boardwalk and fishing ranches, forming a comprehensive unique and fragile “genre de vie”), as well destroying wide surfaces of the Pineta and of coastal dunes (which nowadays are visible just in some places of the beach landscape) (Istituto per l' Enciclopedia del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 1978; Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1976; Touring club italiano, 1988). At the final stage of this growth (in the ‘80s) the city encountered a certain saturation (of environment and landscape, as well as of edification surface and of revenue occasions), which provoked a certain blocking

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effect, some urban problems, week-end crowding and real estate chronic “bubbles”. Fortunately enough, some parts of the Peninsula and of the Laguna beach have been well preserved, thanks to a conservative policy issued relatively early at the regional and national level (already at the beginning of 20th century, and then especially with the so-called Galasso law in 1985), and thanks to the survival of some big properties and heritages (especially owned by the Church, now adapted as natural parks and forests, as well as sportS and social facilities), which have been soon excluded off from edification purposes and for real estate business. And, not last, thanks to the role played in these decades of massive growth by a small but efficient lobby of environmental activists and civil society organizations (WWF and Legambiente Lignano sections). Nevertheless, the town (as many as other towns on the Upper Adriatic coast, as Jesolo, Rimini etc.) soon assumed the aspect of a modern place, equipped for motorized mobility, characterized by a high density of edification, with all the advantages and disadvantages the urban theory of those times did represent (Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011). Table 3-3. Arrivals and overnight stays in Lignano Sabbiadoro (19502010)

Year 1950 1960 1970 *1973 1980 1990 2000 2010

Italians Foreigner Foreigners Total Italians Total overnight s overnight overnight arrivals arrivals stays arrivals stays stays 5.924 114.621 1.406 11.107 7.330 125.728 70.537 980.628 70.366 835.300 140.903 1.815.928 196.249 3.170.008 166.638 2.095.699 362.887 5.265.707 230.904 3.654.874 179.280 2.406.283 410.184 6.061.157 148.177 2.618.571 194.776 2.876.918 342.953 5.495.489 195.308 2.284.160 163.315 1.359.395 358.623 3.643.555 208.097 1.762.327 299.274 2.086.082 507.371 3.848.409 283.367 1.839.765 322.530 1.910.451 605.897 3.750.216

Source: Beccalli C., 2011, adapted; * = max for overnight stays

6. The tourist structure From the beginning, the tourist structure of Lignano developed in the sense of both, “open” hosting facilities (hotel, guesthouse, meublé, apartments for rent, camping, restaurants, school and social tourism

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structures as the “colonies” for kids) and “second home”, either for rent or for private use. Such trend induced different building industry evolution, with few large scale planning-construction projects, and artisanal-style apartment building (often self-constructed) and middle-class “villas” spread out everywhere on the territory. Today, there are in Lignano about 170 hotels (116 of these are registered on bookings.com, see table 4), generally middle-rank and middle-sized, and about 10.000 apartments for rent, 6.000 of them managed by about 80 agencies (real estate brokers), and the rest privately offered. Such built stock traces mainly to the early 60’s urban layer, and is progressively getting obsolete (as evidenced by interview by Enrico Bocus, president of Asscom, commercial association in Lignano, MessaggeroVeneto newspaper, August 19th, 2012, p.2). Such fragmented development configures a “diffused model” (typical for the Italian territorial-economic system), comprehending often (as mentioned) family-run business on a seasonal base, consolidating a tradition of small companies operating just for the summer period, as secondary activities — not really as true entrepreneurial activities. Such mode of operating presents both, opportunities and risks: the structures are equipped for a short summer season, therefore cheap and easy to build up and to maintain, without heavy equipment (e.g. without heating appliances or covered garages), employing mainly temporary Personnel, often members of the owner’s family. This situation is due to several reasons, amongst them the extreme cost of hiring permanent Personnel, because of other social costs,4 and is similar to that of local institutions, who have to face extreme seasonal variability, in a place booming, from 5.000 inhabitants in Winter, up to 200.000, or more population in summer. Actually, seasonal Personnel for both, private and public purposes (for the different urban functions, administration, safety, mobility etc.) is less expensive but at the same time presumably less qualified (without a specific professional skill as e.g., paradoxically, without knowledge in foreign languages), consisting of owners’ relatives, often of youngsters or students in summer break, or of low qualification immigrants or occasional workers. Such family-operated modality configures an informal environment, where personal relations are prevalent, therefore creating opportunities for informal economics (and for “grey economics”), making management costs cheaper. This situation evidences further asymmetries in seasonality and service standards: the Personnel (often hired on a solidarity relationship basis), though intensively employed in the summer period, after the end of the season goes back to the usual winter activities, such as school, house-

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keeping or some commercial business (considering that often the tourist business on the coast is complementary to some activity carried on in the hinterland cities, which in summer season would actually “move” to the Coast). Meanwhile, for the same reason, the owner, instead of staying “de facto” unemployed, would deal with maintenance (therefore, making possible the further spare on amortization and structural costs), or with further non-seasonal duties, such as refurbishing, appliance repairing, cleaning, some administrative work, namely all what is possible to make “in economia” (or in “grey economy”, avoiding heavy investments). It is the typical Italian phenomenon of “submerged economics”, with micro-companies trying to escape systematically a heavy bureaucracy, avoiding taxes and social costs, and further context-induced costs (the periodical conformation to official prescription for accounting, safety, urban rules, etc.), thanks to the possibility of working informally, with the help of relatives, friends, neighbors etc., without paying VA or employee taxes. It has been defined as the “Italian submerged economics paradox”, which could be estimated around the 17-21% of the GDP, but which is especially high in such sectors as detail wide market-oriented services, hospitality and tourism.5 Such an economy is based on typically family-run 3 or 4 stars small hotels (40-50 rooms, 100-120 beds), equipped with just “light” facilities, and with a very narrow seasonality (overlying the school calendar), impeding in fact the possibility of amortize any relevant investment (which are therefore rare, with the exception of apartment stores built up before the current real estate crisis). The major example is the absence of luxury or middle rank hotel chains (there is in Lignano just one 5 stars, and two or three more in the whole FVG region), and the (incredible) absence of a single indoor swimming pool, or of thermal baths, “spa” and “wellness” facilities of a certain dimension (which amongst others, could be useful for making the season longer, in a region, the Upper Adriatic, where the sea bath season is rather short). The standard offer is indeed concentrated in comfortable family-run inns, “modern” but not innovative, offering an excellent hospitality service but not suitable for further development (in terms of scale economies).

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Table 3-4. Seasonality for Lignano tourist facilities—hotels Available available indoor outdoor fitness spa and founded Sept. 15th, October sw. sw. centre* wellness* st 2012 31 , 2012 pool* pool* 1 star 1 2 stars 8 3 stars 43 1 17 3 4 stars 16 16 3 2 5 stars 1 1 1 1 No stars 2 Total 116 71 19 35 Hotel

* = available Sept.15th Source: www.booking.com

In general, such companies prove to be flexible (in organizing services) and cheap, but they are suffering in providing to the tourists more elaborated and knowledge—intensive services—namely functions that just companies with “strategic” capability can provide. It is the case of promotion and advertising (in fact, it is difficult to find Lignano beaches on the catalogue of a tour operator in Europe or elsewhere in the world), of organization of local wide-scale services, e.g. sport facilities, excursion, cultural events, all these services only larger tourist chains may supply. Furthermore, such small companies—whenever they can work on details, offering an extremely personalized and qualitative service— contribute with difficulty to the functions possible to provide just at the public level (efficient mobility, urban improvement and innovations). An example of such difficulty is nowadays the reconvert of the roads (conceived for the 60s modernist motorized traffic) for pedestrian or bicycles, or for further non-motorized leisure traffic, namely the “emancipation” of “tourist territory” from the increasingly heavy traffic (as observed through published sources, social dialectic on media, local news paper). In general, Lignano represents an economic environment in which it is rather difficult to make big investments, for pursuing periodical structural renovation, and which is virtually impossible to penetrate for outside investors (who cannot make any “grey economics”, therefore suffering from the competition opposed by local companies): currently, no hotel international chains, no international tour operators nor brokers are operating in Lignano—a significant indicator of the situation of a locally “closed” economy.

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Presumably, such tourist economies are destined to suffer of periodical obsolescence: the relying on small operative units also means small investment rate, mainly managed inside the family, amortizable just in short season (for facilities with about 70-80 nights/year average occupation rate). This also means the proliferation of medium-small buildings, occupying pervasively the surface and, furthermore, obliterating the traditional landscapes, which today cannot be recovered to improve authenticity standards—a marketing segment of increasing relevance. As a further example of such inadequacy, it is to register (on the other extreme of the tourist offer spectrum) the almost totally absence of “agriturismi”, namely of fishermen-run facilities, who could offer to tourists the experience of the Laguna traditional life and nature, as well as excursion possibilities (which currently are available just during the high season, in a narrow set of variants).

7. Lignano clients and markets Lignano build up its tourist industry on the basis of a geographical and functional innovation, but assumed, rather early on in its development cycle, a conservative attitude. Nowadays it is facing a certain saturation, with companies and structures just exploiting a favorable position as the closest place on the sea for a wide population basin, offering good cost/quality ratio—thanks to the family informal organization, cutting fixed costs; furthermore, it soon began to suffer of insufficiency in public and territorial (not strictly corporate) functions. Indeed, the local hospitality industry, instead of pursuing some development strategy, tries to survive avoiding wide investments, being satisfied of low profitability, and just intercepting, in the interval JuneSeptember, the flows of summer visitors, showing a typical “accordion” capability to seasonal asymmetry: Restaurants and hotels open “when” there are clients, when they are (almost) sure of being visited, but they are, at the same time rather, incapable of actively behaving, namely to invest and to “open up” in order to offer the market incentives, and to attract visitors out of the seasonal periods and out of the usual segments. These are relatively small companies which are subject to market flows, with routine clients as a target; it is the case of family groups practicing periodical holidays, often accustomed by friendly relations with the hotel and restaurant owners (in general, therefore, not claiming bills or receipts about their expenses); of groups of youngsters and students visiting traditionally the locality in correspondence to some holidays (Wohlfahrt and Pfingsten in Austria, “matura” high-school end in Italy),

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choosing Lignano for end-of-school parties and open-air, beach entertainment. Furthermore, Lignano’s usual visitors are “random” car-using tourists (namely visitors who have to organize their holidays using private automobile for flexibility or accessibility reasons), namely people residing in the range of few hours from the Upper Adriatic coast (usually a few hours using the highway, from Milan and Munich, Vienna or Bratislava). Furthermore, as the biggest share of Lignano tourists, are weekend or on a daily-basis commuters: indeed the Lignano facility is, in some sense, just “parasitically” exploiting the flow of commuters from the nearby urbanized areas, either owners of second homes or “random” car-tourists, with flexible deadlines, with the intention of a short vacation; often they are transit-travelers on the road to Italian Peninsula’s most famous cities (Venice, Florence or Rome). A trend evidenced by the increasing spread between the “arrivals” (always increasing in absolute terms) and the stagnating “overnight stays” figure (Table 3-3). In all these cases, Lignano gives the impression of accessibility, of a locality suitable for a not planned spot holiday, offering a wider set of possibilities, with the beautiful beaches mostly free, ideal for families, for not an elitist but a comfortable stay. Such tourist segments, indeed, demonstrate an (apparently) high “return” rate (then a high customer loyalty), a major benefit for the local companies: anyone knows that in Lignano it is possible to find affordable accommodation (middle-rank hotels, private rooms, apartments, camping, social tourism structure etc.) for families, groups of any size and any kind of tourism (bikers, caravans, car with roulottes etc.). Indeed, the tourism industry of Lignano—as a simple benchmarking analysis can demonstrate—is implementing less value than expected and possible (then accumulating loss in terms of not realized opportunities). Above all it is accumulating steadily a bulk of (invisible) costs in public functioning, in terms of environment impact, urban surface saturation, obsolescence of facilities, missed innovation, and of loosing competition capability with emerging markets and marketing sectors (as the global dynamic makes nowadays evident). At the same time, the Lignano tourist industry, relying on a flexible organization, proves to be capable of adapting to conjunctures and—anyway—to “survive” on the long term.

8. Final remarks about Lignano: factors blocking growth The situation in Lignano is an indicative sample of the Italian and possibly of another, Mediterranean economic tourist industry: the tradition

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of both, qualitative and individualistic way of making business per small business units induce a situation, in which it proves to be difficult to standardize the offer and, in general, to pursue a strategy of long-term development (in geographical-cultural terms, such attitude probably means an imperfect assimilation of modernization processes). It is the case of localities with a big potential, that on one side, cannot pursue the quantitative growth, generating adequate corporate organizations (capable of facing the fast growing market flows and competition), on the other side, cannot neither preserve nor properly valorize the local peculiarities. Often, such incapability means the spread out of biases of different significances, like urban miss-management (e.g. second home proliferation and low quality built-up and urbanistic), uncontrolled growth of automobile commuting, limited seasonality and scarce attitude to innovation strategies (namely insufficient substitution ratio in structures and scarce attention to promotion). Problems that are especially relevant at this time of passage to globalsized market and of contemporary post-mod turn to qualitative tourism, with the search of authenticity (for local culture, experience, food, communication, “humanity” etc.) that is becoming an important marketing factor: the environment of the Mediterranean culture, “resisting” the standardization pressure, has to be re-converted in economic value but in a “post productivist” way. In fact, this operation proves to be extraordinarily difficult; it means the adaptation of local and traditional resources (in the case of Lignano, Laguna environment, vernacular architecture and spontaneous culture) in corporate terms, in order to develop scale economics, but without losing in “authenticity”. Such a situation, combined with the attitude of the individualistic way of doing business—defined in literature as a “dwarfness” bias—is in fact blocking growth, with small companies (not or not yet organized in districts) just taking advantage of a situation to make profit, but unable to carry on investments on a wider scale. The problem reverberates on the entire local system. Such situation evidences a tendency of “spending” immediately the profits, instead of predisposing a “set aside fund” in the budget, in order to be able of periodically renovating investments and structures: a bias deriving from an insufficient planning attitude, evidenced in both, private and public sides. Indeed, in the long term, all the disadvantages, namely the “evil” of the “diffuse model”, otherwise celebrated as a possible compromise between modernization and the local way of life (resisting the standardization), are resurfacing. In this case the “diffused model” proves to be unable to produce growth or any agglomeration economies (of

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Christallerian or Marshallian way); on the contrary, it seems to incline towards such phenomena as the “grey economy”, familism, low profitability, recurring structural obsolescence crisis, low value added economics and short seasonality. Further “system biasing” factors are insufficient professional knowledge standards (e.g. no formation of a specialized work force, since the facilities usually employ precarious people), and, on a territorial scale, increasingly urban problems, especially of mobility. A set of urbanistic— structural “traps” that are making further growth impossible and even the renovation of invested capital—both, in economic and cultural sense, with an increasing impact especially for public services (that have to face asymmetries; no public administration can be so efficient to face, that it is urgently necessary to temperate). In fact, both options—the turn to qualitative way of doing tourism as well as the further development of scale-economics—are not possible, due to territorial saturation and to different mentioned structural biases. A figure showing a development cycle similar to that of FVG and Italy (and eventually of that of further Mediterranean countries), allows us to imagine further systemic bias.6 In fact Italy’s tourism economics boomed in an early stage of “late modernity” (in the rank per country tourist arrival, 1st in 1970), then progressively lost positions, regressing to the 3rd position in the 80’s and 90th, 4th in 2000, and 5th in 2005 (after France, USA, Spain, and China, as per UNWTO data). The same happened in Lignano; its long term history as a tourist centre is making evident a trend: after a fast booming stage, the locality started to suffer from of all such biases, that at the beginning of the growth period were not visible, and that weren’t at this time considered at all (a question of urban-environmental accountability for organizational and social costs). Lignano—as well as in general the Italian tourist industry—has an urgent need to improve its strategic planning capability, something that presumes the improvement of the capability of the local operators (private and public) of working together in order to define the idea of the “common good” (e.g. the extension of the season, the re-organization of public mobility and also of the voluntary reduction of the “grey economy”, the elaboration of a corporate design etc.), necessary for making any further evolution of the model, possible. A “vicious circle”, with virtually no growth, just evidencing rent positions conserved by small, therefore adaptable and “light” companies, with a low rate of value creation, able of becoming eventually “invisible” to tax authorities and other institutions. In the same time such a model is not appropriately exploiting the local precious resources, which means

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from the point of view of economic geography and economics on the wider global scale, a loss of opportunity and an incumbent stagnation.

Notes 1

There are in FVG in 2009 about 524 “agriturismi”, a rather fast developing sector, but still a low figure in comparison with that of the contiguous region Trentino-South Tirol, where there are 3.192 such structures; this sector is potentially exerting a function as a multiplier of agricultural-qualitative activities, signifying the recovery of a new relation with the place, correspondent to the post modern “turn” in tourist activities; Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2011:113. 2 Recently the Italian Minister for Regional Affaires, Tourism and Sport, Piero Gnudi, purposed a new “Piano nazionale per il turismo” (Tourism National Plan), elaborated in cooperation with the Boston Consulting Group, with the purpose of facing this problem defined in terms of excess of “mini hotels” in the touristic structure; this plan is not yet known in details but already cited by the media; Jacchia A., 2012. 3 An effect meaning a bias, since this money would be much more profitable for the whole system when invested in high value-added activities, such, regarding tourism, innovative corporate initiatives; in general, “second home” investments prove to be low productive and also counter-productive; other regional urban authorities in Italy, like the Tuscany and Trentino-South Tirol authorities, usually dis/incentive such practices. Among further causes pulling the building industry, and then exerting a bias effect on territory and economics, it is the possibility in this way of using “grey” money, then as a commonly adopted “money washing” practice. 4 Indeed a typical bias for the end-of-the-cycle Western welfare-state condition; in the last decades sometimes such problems has been avoided hiring immigrated employees, a tendency currently, due to crisis circumstances, changing again, creating the premises for the coming back of local work force also to low qualification places. 5 As defined and estimated even by Stratfor Global Intelligence, which demonstrates in this way a special interest in a question exerting a strategic destabilizing potential; cited by MessaggeroVeneto, August 19th, 2012, p.5; see as well Jacchia A., 2012 and http://www3.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/non_calendario/20100713_00/ 6 In some peak periods it should be considered that people of the hinterland “avoid” going towards tourist coastal resorts because of parking problems or of the risk of remaining blocked in traffic “jams”, even when there is availability in beach or accommodation facility; actually, the most important tourist places in FVG paradoxically enough, are not accessible by rail (Lignano, Grado, Carnia, Valcanale), provoking thus, a structural “brake” in their development.

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References Bagnasco A., 1977, “Tre Italie: la problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano”, Il Mulino, Bologna Beccalli C., 2011, “La promozione delle località balneari dell’Alto Adriatico, tra crescita, stagnazione e declino”, in Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011, pp. 147-182 Bennett T. et al., ed. 1983, “Formations of pleasure”, Routledge, London Berry B.J.L., Conkling E.C., Ray D.M., 1989, “Economic Geography”, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliff Boesch M., 2008, “Laudatio per il Grande Premio Binding 2007 Slow Food International, Binding-Preis für Natur- und Umwelschutz 2007”. Schaan (Liechtenstein): Binding Stiftung (motivation for the attributing of Prize Binding Foundation to Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food movement) Bonetti E., 1964, “La teoria delle località centrali”, Trieste, Università degli Studi Boyer M., 1999, “Histoire du tourisme de masse”, Collection Que sais-je?, 3480, Puf, Paris Cadeo R. et al., 2010, “Dossier sulla qualità della vita 2010”, Sole24Ore, www.ilsole24ore-.com/speciali/qvita_2010/home.shtml Cardinale B., a cura di, 2005, “Sviluppo glo-cale e società nei paesi del sistema adriatico”, Atti del convegno internazionale, Teramo 9-11 giugno 2004, Società Geografica Italiana, Roma Casari M., Corna-Pellegrini G., Eva F., 2003, “Elementi di geografia economica e politica”, Carocci, Roma, 2003 CIPRA, 2007, “Wir Alpen!”, 3. Alpenreport, Bern, Haupt Verlag Cohen E., 1974, “Who is a tourist? A conceptual clarification”, in The sociological review, pp.527-555 Cret Ciure F., Nosilia V & Pavan A., a cura di, 2012, “Multa et Varia”, Biblion Edizioni, Milano Crompton J.L., 1979, “Motivation for pleasure vacation”, in Annals of Tourism Research, 4, pp. 408-24 Eiu, diverse editions, “Country Profile - Country Report”, The Economist Intelligence Unit, London Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011, “Relazioni transfrontaliere e turismo. Sinergie e strategie di cooperazione e sviluppo turistico nell’Alto Adriatico”, Gorizia in IUIES Journal. Quadrimestrale di Studi Internazionali , vol. 5, n. 1-2, Ottobre 2011 Gerbaux F., 1998, “Débâtes et controverses en Europe autour de la notion de tourisme doux”, in Zerbi M.C., a cura di, 1998, pp.67-80

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Gosar A., 2008, “Sustainable tourism development in the Upper Adriatic: the case of Istria”, paper presented at the conference “Contemporary challenges for the Mediterranean basin”, The Mediterranean Renaissance Program, IGU International Geographical Union, Home of Geography and the Italian Geographical Society, Roma, 24 febbraio 2008 (manuscript) —. 1999, ”Zrno za zrno pogaþa, kamen za kamen (turistiþna) palaþa”, Dela 13, Oddelek za Geografijo Filozofske Fakultete, Univ. v Ljubljani, pp. 27-46 Heynen H., 2006, “Questioning Authenticity”, in National Identities, September, pp.287-300 Istituto per l'Enciclopedia del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 1978, Enciclopedia monografica del Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Udine Jacchia A., 2012, “Troppi mini alberghi, parte il piano ‘riqualificazione’ “, Nov. 1st. 2012, p.31, Corriere della Sera Jelen I., & Weixlbaumer N., 2011, “Turismo globalizzato e culture locali”, in Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011, pp.47-63 Jelen I., Weixlbaumer N., 2012, “Un approccio sistemico per lo sviluppo del turismo”, in: Cret Ciure F., Nosilia V & Pavan A., a cura di, 2012, pp.577-600 Jelen I., 2012, “Appunti di geografia politica ed economica”, Aracne, Roma Knafu R., 2003, “Approche critique de la notion de ’tourisme durable’. Le cas des espacés marginaux et ’extrêmes’”, in Zerbi, a cura di, 1998, pp.39-56 Krugman P., 1995, “Geografia e commercio internazionale”, Milano, Garzanti (Italian edition) Le guide de l’Espresso, Itinerari per il Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1980, Bergamini G., Editoriale L'Espresso Leed E.J., 1992, “La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’Odissea al turismo globale”, Il Mulino, Bologna Maja A., 2010-2011, “Segmentazione turistica e un’analisi delle strutture ricettive in Friuli Venezia Giulia”, master thesis, Faculty of Political Science, Univ. Trieste MessaggeroVeneto, newspaper, Udine Ont, 2011, “Analisi dei prodotti turistici”, Osservatorio Nazionale del Turismo, Roma, www.ontit.it Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, 1976, Piano urbanistico regionale generale del Friuli-Venezia Giulia. 4 volumi Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2011, “2011-Regione in cifre”, Trieste, www.regione.fvg.it

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Rifkin J., 1995, “La fine del lavoro”, Milano, Baldini &Castaldi (Italian edition) Savelli A., 2001, “La complessità come attrazione turistica. Una ricerca sulla riviera adriatica dell’Emilia Romagna”, in Sociologia Urbana e Rurale, 66, pp. 103-127 Scott A., Storper M., ed., 1986, “Production, Work, Territory”, George Allen and Unwin, Boston Scott A.J., 1986, “Industrial Organisation and Location: Division of Labor, the Firm, and Spatial Process”, in Economic Geography, n.3, pp. 215-231 Sedmak G., Mihaliþ T., 2008, “Authenticity in mature seaside resorts”, in Annals of tourism research, 4, pp. 1007-1031 Slow Food, www.slowfood.it Steinicke E., Cirasuolo L., ýede P., 2011, “‘Amenity migration’ e nuove tendenze demografiche nelle aree tradizionali di spopolamento in Italia”, in Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, 2, pp.273-293 Terra Madre, www.terramadre.info Touring Club Italiano, 1988, Friuli Venezia Giulia UNWTO, World Tourism Barometer, Interim Update, April 2010, Organization www.unwto.org UNWTO, 1996, “Agenda XXI per il settore dei viaggi e del turismo”, Madrid Urbanc M., Boesch M., Jelen I., 2007, “Kultura in regionalna politika: Kultura kot dejavnik regionalnega razvoja Alp, in Geografski Vestnik, 79/1, pp.39-48 Weixlbaumer N., 1988, “Gebietsschutz in Europa: Konzeption— Perzeption—Akzeptanz“, Institut für Geographie der Universität Wien Zago M., 2011, “Il turismo marittimo e intercostiero dell’Alto Adriatico: orientamenti del turista, strategie dell’imprenditore”, in Gasparini A., Zago M., a cura di, 2011, pp.109-146 Zerbi M.C., a cura di, 1998, "Turismo sostenibile in ambienti fragili", Università degli Studi di Milano, Istituto di Geografia umana Cisalpino, Milano 1998

CHAPTER FOUR NETWORKS OF DEPENDENCY AND PARTNERSHIP, IN TIMES OF CRISIS: TOURISM SUSTAINABILITY IN THE AEGEAN, GREECE THEANO S. TERKENLI

Acknowledgments Besides the full support of this research by the local/ tourism factors who participated in the survey, I would like to acknowledge my colleagues of Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, Drs. Fusun Baykal and Gozde Emekli for our collaboration on the cross-border project, in the context of whose research design and implementation emerged this case-study. My most heartfelt thanks, also, to Achilleas Sougioltzis, Head of the Travel Agents Association of Lesvos, for his critical reading of this essay, to George Tataris of the Cartography and Geoinformation Lab of the Department of Geography, University of the Aegean for producing the chapter’s maps, and to Eudokia Rantou, graduate student, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, for the production of the tables of tourism statistics for Lesvos. Last, but not least, my thanks go to Ȃr. Christos Ioannides, Head of the North Aegean Charter of the Greek National Tourism Organization and to Ȃs. Angeliki Poytaki at the Tourism Sector of the Prefecture of Lesvos, for their generous help with tourism data collection.

Abstract This chapter addresses current problems and prospects of local tourism development, brought about or remedied through various sorts of partnership and dependency networks. We pursue this objective, in two

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steps, with the aid of a) a structural typology of tourism networking categories and b) a case study in tourism, on the island of Lesvos, Greece. We propose that networks in tourism function in both, positive and negative ways, towards local tourism development. Whereas “dependency” (“negative” type of networking) is viewed as an opposite pole to “partnership” (“positive” type of networking), in our operationalization of the study’s basic terms, “partnerships” are used in the text indiscriminately to imply a balanced positioning of power in the liaison between parties that make up the partnership. In this context, we highlight the significance of the position and level of leadership or participation of the local community or regional stakeholders, in such networks, using the case study of the island of Lesvos, Greece, and point to ways of employing such partnerships in order to emerge from the current credit/ economic crisis.

1. Introduction As global competition grows, established but also aspiring Mediterranean tourist destinations struggle to survive or carve a niche in the tourism market, by overcoming chronic or emerging problems and by creating viable new opportunities for growth (Koutoulas 2008, Ioannides et al. 2001, King et al. 1997, UN 1994, UNWTO 2011). In networks of connectivity at various geographical scales, lie both, shortcomings and opportunities for tourism growth, leading to relationships of actual and potential inter- and intra-regional dependency. Therein, also, lie the means of restoring various sorts of inequalities in Mediterranean tourism development, in terms of access and resources, through cooperation. Current conditions of “crisis” bestow Mediterranean tourism with further prospects or concerns, which will be addressed here, in the case of Greece. It has been adequately documented in tourism literature that, especially through various transnational companies, networks of international tourism trade have contributed towards an extension of metropolitan dominance over weaker destination peripheries and ultimately led to a loss of self-reliance, for local societies and small communities or regions (Bianchi 2002, Ghimire 2001, Britton 1982). Unequal exchange, in economic terms, has, until recently, received less attention in tourism than in other kinds of trade (Fyall et al. 2012, Urry 2002:57, Harrison 2001), an area to which this study aims to contribute. Existing challenges in collaborative planning and management of tourist destinations have recently brought about notions, such as that of co-opetition (OECD 2012), emphasizing the need for cooperation, rather than horizontal competition

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(Kyriakides et al. 2009), among tourism entrepreneurs, public bodies and NGOs, for purposes of local and regional tourism promotion and advancement. The term “co-opetition” connotes the state of simultaneous co-operation and competition among stakeholders in a tourist destination (OECD 2012). Moreover, recent research on the role of the State in tourism development has emphasized that the political is implicitly interrelated with the economic, in the political economy of tourism (Williams 2004), necessitating thus, a broader and more comprehensive perspective to the study of tourism trade inequalities and interdependencies. Strictly economic and political networks of connectivity, (inter) dependence, exchange, or mutuality (such as those operating on the basis of multinational corporations, market alliances, cross-border or regional collaborations, etc), have been well established and already much investigated. Beyond these types of networks, several other types of traderelated networks, at various geographical scales and sectoral levels, may play a significant role in local tourism development and growth. Such networks include various sorts of partnerships among tourism stakeholders, in terms of tourism planning (i.e. intra-regional top-down tourism plans, initiatives or development investments); in terms of policy/ administration (i.e. national organizations’ role in institutional, legal or policy-making structures and processes); and/ or in terms of tourismrelated trade (i.e. farmers’ cooperatives or alternative tourism development endeavors, based on networks of cultural/ natural paths, etc). This chapter explores various such forms of partnerships and—more generally—networks operating in tourism, in an attempt to understand the ways, in which they promote or impede local tourism development. The term “network” is employed, here, in its broader social sense, rather than in its conventional geographical sense—in terms of transportation facilities or services—and is seen to encompass all forms of partnerships, connections, alliances, dependencies and other types of interrelationships that may form through and for tourism. The study elucidates the role (both positive and negative) of networks of dependency and partnership, in local tourism development, and highlights the significance of cooperation and participation of the local community, in various forms of such networks, with the aid of a case study, while placing this whole discussion in the context of the current credit/ economic crisis in the Mediterranean.

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2. Networks and partnerships in tourism: towards a typology Contemporary mobility theory increasingly relies on network theory, rather than the traditional “push-pull” model. Instead of emphasis on the differences and similarities between migration—induced human movements, on the one hand, and tourism—induced movements, on the other, there is, nowadays, increasing emphasis on consumption vs. production mobility. As a type of mobility, indeed a complex global system of human networking, tourism is also increasingly approached, through the latter contemporary approaches of human mobility and interaction (D’Andrea et al. 2011, Urry 2007, Edensor 2007, Sheller and Urry 2004, Terkenli 2000). Focusing on partnerships, which lie at the core of this chapter’s subject matter, in order to address the wide variety of partnerships created by local communities, typologies of partnerships have been suggested, according to the following criteria: the mode of partnership, the dominant motive, or the type of symbolic feature(s) involved in the process, etc. (Debarbieux 2008). Debarbieux indicates that, beyond the great diversity in their types and motives, “partnerships are surprisingly capable of combining cultural, political and economic objectives and of bringing together local objectives, national imagination, federal policies and intergovernmental priorities” (2008: 497). In the context of a case study on global city twinning, he proposes a typology of partnerships, which may provide useful insight into other types of local horizontal partnerships. The typology is built on three criteria: the number of partners involved and the size of the operation; whether or not the operation is run or coordinated at the national or supranational level; and the objectives of its initiatives. Four types of partnership networks thus emerge: a) the politically-motivated integrating network, b) the apprenticeship of local democracy and East-West partnerships, c) the economic club orientation (vs. the integrating network orientation) and d) one-off initiatives (Debarbieux 2008). Of these, the third category is pertinent to our study, as these partnerships are specific to tourism—oriented municipalities, resorts and sites, their main aim being economic gain and their organization according to the ‘”club” type — based on the idea of distinction, hierarchy and exclusivity. As we shall see, such partnerships are common in the context of the tourism industry, since tourism trade relies on and strives for maintaining and improving quality and developing a competitive edge, in order to thrive.

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Recent scholarship has begun to highlight and support the significance of tourism-related alliances and partnerships, at various levels (Fyall et al. 2012, Mosedale and Albrecht 2011, Harrill 2009, Edgell et al. 2008, ), pointing to a growing area of research, with significant potential, in the current times of the Mediterranean economic crisis. Despite a long series of barriers (ranging from in—grained local—level competition to “freeriding” and the large number of interests involved), the benefits of such cooperation are deemed to be essential to the tourism industry (OECD 2012, Morgan 2012, Penrose 2011, UNWTO 2007, Jamal and Jamrozy 2006). According to the Encyclopedia of Tourism, partnerships in tourism, generally speaking, refer to all cooperative activities sustained between the private and public sectors, or even strategic alliances, practiced within the industry itself (Jafari 2000), and, as such, represent a form of tourismtrade networking. They share certain defining characteristics: they seek better collaboration and cooperation between public and private organizations in a tourism destination; they are action-oriented; they focus on implementing initiatives, rather than research and strategy formulation; and they normally include development, marketing, information and environmental advisories (Long 1994). On the basis of this fairly common practice in “developed” countries and also emerging in some “developing” countries, tourism partnerships are increasingly advocated as a part of “good governance”, together with wider community participation and empowerment, in tourism-related decision making (Bramwell and Lane 2000). Moreover, although the rationale for government involvement in tourism has been changing in recent years—due to constraints on public sector budgets and a changing political and socio-economic climate—the importance of public-private partnership approaches to tourism development is still crucial (WTO in Jafari 2000). Traditionally, tourism partnerships have referred to the relationship of public-private shares, in undertaking all sorts of tourism development initiatives. Bramwell suggests that there is growing recognition of the potential benefits of collaborative tourism planning that includes various industry segments, public sector agencies, and (rather less often) other groups in civil society, while there is perhaps less appreciation of the substantial problems associated with shared decision-making (Bramwell 2004). In recent years, central Governments of the so-called “developed” countries have tended to opt for disengagement from tourism development endeavors, in favor of both local authorities and the private sector (Jarafi 2000). Most commonly, public-private sector partnerships are found mainly in the areas of tourism promotion and marketing functions, leaving

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all the rest to local tourism endeavors (Jafari 2000). As a result, usually few municipalities or other higher-level stakeholders are involved in such initiatives, guarding their competitive or complementary interests closely, while, at the same time, promoting and advancing their advantages and privileges. This practice has occasionally left a series of inadequacies in local tourism growth and development, while it has not benefited the sides involved, with opportunities at hand. It has, thus, created a space where various sorts of tourism partnerships may take hold and address handicaps and needs, for further growth and investment (Briassoulis 2002), opening up the grounds for new types of networking. For the purposes of our study, on the basis of the overarching character and current objectives of existing tourism partnerships, we suggest a simple typology of tourism partnership networks, as follows (Fig. 4-1). Tourism networks operate at the interface and interplay of two axes, forming the proposed typology: a) scale and b) distance. The first axis represents the vertical dimension of tourism networking, while the second axis represents the horizontal one. Partnerships (and, indeed, dependencies, or any other type of networking) may be formed at any point along these axes, or between them, encompassing the characteristics of their relative position, vis-à-vis the axes. For instance, on Figure 1, cross-border academic cooperation and women’s cooperatives are two such examples, discussed further down in this chapter, e.g. section 5. The proposed typological model may include any or all forms of interor intra-connections (networking or partnerships), between the three predominant categories of types of tourism stakeholders: 1. Public/ institutional (i.e. Universities, Research centers, Governmental scales) 2. Private/ economic actors and stakeholders (tourism intermediaries, entrepreneurs, investors, local developers, industries) (Ioannides and Debbage 1998) 3. Socio-environmental/ cultural (NGO’s, cooperatives, unions, local inhabitants/ communities, international organizations/ fora, artists/ craftsmen, and/ or other members of a community directly or indirectly contributing to partnerships or benefiting from them)

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Fig. 4-1. Moddel of partnershhip typologies

Normallyy, combinatioons of these partnership p caategories creatte, shape, inform and reproduce pootentialities fo or or obstaclees to the locaal tourism developmennt, as the casse study in the t followingg section, ind dicatively purports to sshow. The orgaanization of the t tourism trrade system i s highly strucctured, in both ways, vertical andd horizontal. Partnershipss within thiss system, consequentlyy, also are being formed an nd developed,, both horizon ntally (i.e. cross-borderr collaboratioons) and vertiically (i.e. toourism interm mediaries); their outcom mes and im mpacts may range from beneficial/ profitable p (positive) too detrimental (negative), for any num mber of the partners involved. Thhe materializaation, groupings and characcteristics of all of these sorts of outccomes are, off course, not a matter of unniformity for each e type of partnershhip, but rather a matter of deegree, as regarrds the activitties of the involved parrtners, as welll as a matter of scale at whhich these parrtnerships develop. Among the types of contemporary y partnershipss constituted by b multilevel globall stakeholderrs, at variouss geographicaal scales, thiss chapter argues that, on the basis of geographiccal particulariity, it is the horizontal h cooperation partnerships that t seem to be b the most pro romising ones— —and, so far, the leastt exploited—ffor local growth and develop opment. If such m multi-level gllobal tourism stakeholders acquire theirr strength and attain ccontrol over thhe market thrrough verticall partnerships, it is the

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horizontal networks that may counter such dominance, by forming strong local or regional alliances, towards mutually-beneficial goals. In a world increasingly dominated by transnational and trans-regional flux and multiple layers of complex interactions, geographical distance or proximity between partners holds a significant role and may be played off as a guarantee for the efficacy or the success horizon of the partnership. The latter properties of horizontal partnerships become especially useful in the case of tourism planning and development, since tourism is a phenomenon based on the interplay between geographical distance and cultural familiarity—best exemplified, as will be shown, in cross-border networking. Furthermore, they become more important in times of economic crisis, where teaming up efforts may prove a far more effective and efficient way to combat market constraints and limitations. Geographical parameters, then, are of paramount importance and lie at the basis of the formation of these partnerships. They often represent their defining or most determinant factors, as in, for example, concepts and constructs like “place identity”, “cultural landscape”, “symbolic assets”, “natural poles of attraction”, etc., constituting the destinations’ competitive edge in a fiercely antagonistic global market.

3. The case study of Lesvos, Greece 3.1. Context and layout of the study Generally speaking, islands provide good laboratories for social science research, such as in this study, due to the relative ease in securing appropriate qualitative and quantitative data, in such strictly delimited geographical units. Constrained by the sea, specifically the Mediterranean basin with its surrounding coastlines, mountain ranges and large land masses, the Mediterranean islands broadly exhibit the typical qualities of insular isolation and environmental fragility—although their quality of isolation is tempered by their exposition to tourism and all of its repercussions (Matvejevic 1999, Minca 1998, Williams 1997, Sancar and Koop 1995). Moreover, although climatic impacts are generally amplified and sustainability problems enlarged on islands—with the impact of development, globalization and increased accessibility—yet, very often, in the case of the Mediterranean, these problems tend to be contained by physical, cultural and historical factors (Vogiatzakis et al. 2008, Koussis 2001, Ioannides et al. 2001, Terkenli 2001). Environmental fragility is thus further exacerbated by the continuing onslaught of tourism, paradoxically relying on, while diminishing, the

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potential appeal of the landscape and/ or natural assets, as poles of tourist attraction (Terkenli 2012, Ioannides et al. 2001, Ioannides and Debbage 1998, Tsartas 1989). Regardless of particulars, islands, in general, tend to display certain commonalities, in terms of quantifiable characteristics (limited areal extent, isolation from major decision-making and economic nodes of activity, constrained resource bases and/ or cultural amenities or legacies) (Baldacchino 2004, Gillis 2004) and non-quantifiable ones (experiential and psychological qualities that verge on the sublime, the romantic, the elusive, the hidden, the idyllic, the faraway, etc) (CodaccioniMeistersheim 1988). Blessed with unique landscapes of global recognition, the Aegean Archipelago, of which Lesvos is part, has been exerting a powerful attraction primarily on Northern and Western European visitors, for centuries (Houston 1964, Terkenli 2000, Höchtl et al 2007). Although not uniformly spread and equally significant throughout the Aegean, tourism, nowadays, represents its primary economic activity, as also constitutes the powerhouse of the Greek economy—especially in current conditions of economic crisis. With grave difficulties in “catching up” with the rest of Europe on socio-economic grounds, this region faces a series of challenges vis-à-vis a desirable sustainable future—in which tourism plays a protagonistic role (Grenon and Batisse 1989, Chiotis and Coccossis 2000, Terkenli 2000, Ioannides et al. 2001). The tourism sector is least developed in the North Aegean island group—to which Lesvos belongs, Fig. 4-2—among all Aegean islands and island groups, with serious socio-economic repercussions (Tsartas 2010, Spilanis 2000). The insularity of the area under study probably represents the most significant provenance of its problems and potentials (Vogiatzakis et al. 2008, Raptis and Terkenli 2000). Moreover, it is on border, “less developed”—or development-aspiring—islands, such as Lesvos, our case study, where such processes are usually played out at their most dramatic. Although not one of the most touristy islands, such as the Cyclades (Tsartas 2010, Spilanis 2000), Lesvos nonetheless, shows great tourism potential, as the case study that follows implies, and as current conditions of crisis seem to render more favorable. Tourism partnership prospects and potentials were investigated in depth in a case study undertaken on the island of Lesvos (Fig. 4-2), during late Spring and early Fall of 2008, and updated in both late 2011-early 2012 and early 2014. The methodology adopted here was ethnographic: in-depth interviews with key tourism factors of the island of Lesvos, including stakeholders representing tourism and broader community

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interests, ass well as variious state ageencies, activelly seeking to promote sustainable fforms of locall tourism deveelopment.

d its location inn the Aegean Seea. Source: Fig. 4-2. The Island of Lesvvos, Greece, and George Tatarris, Cartographyy and Geoinforrmation Lab, D epartment of Geography, G University off the Aegean.

The surrvey, suppleemented by statistical ddata collectiion, was undertaken in the contexxt of a larger project, p exam mining the pro ospects of collaborative partnershipp in region nal cross-borrder cultural tourism developmennt, jointly betw ween NE. Aegean islands aand the Turkiish coast. Specifically, on the Greeek side, wheere this studyy focuses, fo our travel agents, the M Mayor’s Reprresentative, th he Prefecture H Head, the Chair of the Greek Natioonal Tourism m Organizatio on, the Markeeting Manageer of the Prefecture oon Tourism Affairs, A the Head H of the C Commercial Charter C of Lesvos and the Chair of the t Hoteliers Union of Lessvos (10 in tottal), were interviewed for our research purposess, in order too establish facctors and parameters that are conssidered signifi ficant, as conccerns the bacckground, potential andd impacts of such s a tourism m partnership tto the island.

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3.2. Survey results and analysis The findings indicate limitations and constraints, on the one hand, as well as opportunities and potentials, on the other, stemming from existing or planned networks of partnerships in local tourism development. Although the research survey focused on a specific larger partnership between the two sides, it nonetheless revealed a whole series of existing, possible and desirable partnerships with a potential impact on local tourism growth. Findings tend to agree with, support, and complement the broader theoretical framework of the study. Despite an endless array of attractions (beautiful beaches, unique geomorpho-logical/ natural and archeological sites, monasteries, hot springs, museums, “traditional” villages and sports’ facilities), tourism on Lesvos has been problematic in terms both of quantity and quality. The island’s tourism related problems mainly stem from networks of dependency of Lesvos’ tourism trade on larger tourism organizations (economic dependencies) or international treaties (institutional obstacles) that local tourism stakeholders have failed to put in the service of local tourism. On a much promising—in terms of tourist attractions—Greek island, such as Lesvos, with enormous potential for alternative forms of tourism growth, the larger trend of the past couple of decades has been diminishing tourist arrivals and a decline in package tour alliances, thus continuing dependence on big tour operators. Despite an overturn to this trend, during the past year or so (2013 and 2014 charter flight arrivals), according to statistical sources of the Tourism Sector of the Prefecture of Lesvos and the North Aegean Tourism Charter of the Greek National Tourism Organization, widespread concern remains. Charter tourism is strewn with limitations and problems; however, it readily remains the “easy solution”, as seen from a bottom-up perspective. The presence of and cooperation of tourism-oriented enterprises with the main state institution/ instrument of tourism policy in the country and on the island of Lesvos, the Greek National Tourism Organization, is of minimal and almost inconsequential significance (political deficiencies). Furthermore, a most serious shortcoming stems from the inability of the supply side to take substantial advantage of cruise tourism, one of the most dynamic and promising forms of tourism for the Aegean, on the basis of a lack of necessary legal and infrastructural conditions concerning port amenities in Lesvos (legal shortcomings, limitations of the Treaty of Schengen). The only port in Lesvos currently receiving cruise ships is the mid-sized port of the capital city of Mytiline (Fig. 4-2), which caters to regular ferry-boat traffic between Pireaus, Lesvos and other Aegean islands. Only very recently have there been signs that port accommodation

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limitations are in a process of being—at least—partially relaxed, but still caught in bureaucratic and technical impediments. The island of Lesvos represents a showcase of deficient tourism infrastructures, which often come hand in hand with the deterioration of the local environment and landscape, which lie at the basis of its tourism attraction. For the capital city of Mytiline, in specific, one of the main tourism destinations of Lesvos, besides cultural asset degradation (deteriorating exhibition spaces, loss of precious architectural wealth and visually abusive gentrification), major problems include environmental and noise pollution, garbage accumulation, stray dogs and serious traffic congestion. Several of our respondents pointed out lingering problems concerning the main port of the capital city of Mytiline; the construction of its new marina; its airport; and last, but not least, the city and the whole island’s road network. They also emphasized on seriously inadequate visitor accommodation units and host services—not to mention the stark absence of convention tourism infrastructure, such as a five-star hotel or a Conference center. Surprisingly, the Statistical Service of Greece no longer grants access to its local and regional (i.e. island) tourism statistics and neither the Lesvos Charter of National Tourism Organization of Greece (NTOG) nor local hotel or rented-rooms associations keep records of tourism statistics! Not surprisingly, this sad situation reflects on the inadequacies of the local supply side and the consequent unevenness in tourism demand, over the past one or two decades (Fig. 4-3). Specifically, as far as the supply side is concerned, in the 20-year period 1988-2009, the number of accommodation units on the island only grew from 132 to 141; room availability hardly increased, while bed availability actually slightly decreased (National Tourism Organization of Greece—NTOG). This disappointing picture is also reflected in statistical data concerning all means of access to the island (www.statistics.gr), as well as in hotel operating capacities (around 50% of their capacity, during the past decade) (NTOG). Moreover, between 2003 and 2009, the number of foreign tourists staying overnight in Lesvos hotels has dropped from about 502.000 to 379.000, while the equivalent number of domestic tourists more or less remained the same (around 270.000) (NTOG). Nonetheless, the quantitative trends concerning charter flight passenger arrivals in Lesvos, during the past two or so decades (Fig. 4-3), highly reflect national tourism trends (high growth rates in the 1980s, starting to level off in the 1990s and dropping in the 2000s), during that same period. As mentioned above, only since last year (2013) has there been an upward turn to this trend, to be verified, through the future course of tourism development in Lesvos.

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Fig. 4-3. Yearrly charter flighht passenger arrrivals in Lesvoss, 1983-2009 Source: Natioonal Tourism Organization O of Greece G

On the oother hand, onne of the mostt thriving tourrism-related businesses b on the islannd is womenn’s cooperativ ves (to be disscussed furtheer down) mainly in loocal productss, arts and crrafts-areas muuch tied to alternative forms of touurism, such as a ecotourism m and agrotouurism, fast gro owing on Lesvos Islannd (Kizos et al. 2007, An nthopoulou 20000). These alternative forms of toourism feed gastronomic g tourism, t of ggreat potentiaal for the island of Lesvos, with its i enormous cultural and culinary variiability— gastronomy representing about one thirrd of all tourisst expenditurees in such destinations. Therein lies much opportunity for Lesvvos tourism, as a well as in spill-off tourism from the t Aegean co oast of Turkeyy. As far aas the latter iss concerned, the survey reesults show th hat crossborder intraaregional parttnerships in matters m of touurism still rep present a contested fiield of Greekk-Turkish coo operation, on the basis off inherent trade and bbureaucratic innequalities, as a well as rem mnants of a parochial Cold-War m mentality and historically-fu uelled animossity among som me. Such partnershipss, though mucch desired by y certain key stakeholders and local agents and entrepreneurss, are opposed by others oon more poliitical and

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legal/ bureaucratic grounds. The latter are ultimately bound to tie Lesvos to networks of inequality and dependence on the already established and thriving package tourism of the Turkish side of the Aegean Sea. In the remainder of this chapter, we will turn to a more in-depth discussion of the key factors that come into play in tourism development and networking on the island of Lesvos. This discussion rests on, but develops further, interviewees’ responses and attitudes; it also encompasses the findings of additional interviews undertaken at later points in time, in order to update previous findings.

4. The challenges of tourism networking and partnerships for Lesvos: issues of vertical cooperation Ills and threats to Lesvos tourism include all sorts and categories of constraints and problems: legal/ institutional, political, economic, social, environmental, etc. All of the latter, as were put forth by our interviewees, with the aid of a survey questionnaire (Figures 4-4 and 4-5) and presented below, may find—at least partial—rectification and resolution, through appropriate, case-specific networking and/ or partnerships. Perhaps, the most significant category of constraints were deemed to be legal and institutional limitations, ranging from employment insecurity and inadequate training for those working in the tourism sector to rigid bureaucratic structures in cross-border transit procedures. Obtaining legal documents of entry into Greece has been disproportionately costlier for Turkish visitors than the other way around. The issuing of a visa costs from 35 to 60 Euro for “non-green” Turkish passports (for “green” ones there is no charge), while tickets for Turks cost between 15 and 35 Euro round-trip, as compared to 10-20 Euro round-trip ticket costs for Greeks visiting Turkey (no other charges).

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QUESTIONNAIRE ON TOURISM PERSPECTIVES OF TOURISM/ LOCAL ACTORS IN LESVOS BIOGRAPHICAL QUESTIONS QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE COMPANY What is your position in the company? What is the name of your company? The address of your company? Year of establishment of the company? Main services offered by the company? Time period the company runs? Peak period for the company? Connections with tour organizations/ operators? Tourism markets mostly served? Origin of domestic tourists? Origin of foreign tourists? Is your business profitable? What problems does it face?

Fig. 4-4. The survey interview questionnaire: question related to the company

Tourism administration and policy, at the national level, continue to suffer from insufficient measures and inefficient laws and policies, despite the recent changes effectuated on the Greek Ministry of Tourism (named so, only since 2012), its name, governance strategies and organizational structures. Moreover, the National Tourism Organization of Greece—the main legal, administrative, technical and executive tourism instrument in the country—still carries minimal tourism planning, research and development responsibilities, pointing to vertical cooperation problems and implementation deficiencies. As our respondents put it, “the State is virtually absent for local tourism agencies”. As repeatedly acknowledged during our interviews, the solutions to the latter problems seem to rest very much, as in many other areas of Greek administration, in inter- and intra-governmental cooperation in tourism stewardship (between ministries and among various government levels). Such cooperation should necessarily involve various tourism stakeholders, with the aim to establish viable, on-going and efficient frameworks of support for employee training, price/ cost inflation control, flexible laws and policies and systematic top-down planning and management measures. But this has been very slow in coming.

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QUESTIONS RELATED TO LESVOS TOURISM What does “tourism” mean for you? Is tourism, as it exists now, beneficial to Lesvos? What are its positive/negative sides? What is your opinion about the best tourism features of Mytiline? Who would you like to see in Lesvos as tourists? What do you think about the people from Turkey visiting Mytiline? How should tourism mobility between Mytiline and Turkey be? Have you ever been to Turkey? If your answer is yes, how many times and for how long? If your answer is yes, what differences in tourism facilities did you observe between Mytiline and Turkey? If your answer is no, why not? What kind of economic impacts does tourism have on Mytiline? What kind of environmental impacts does tourism have on Mytiline? What kind of social and cultural impacts does tourism have on Mytiline? What do you think must be done to develop tourism more in Mytiline? Is there anything else you would like to add?

Fig. 4-5. The survey interview questionnaire: questions relative to Lesvos

Again, the remedy and rectification of such problems calls for wideranging and multi-layered cooperation between city/ regional planners and agents of infrastructure and environmental monitoring, management and implementation—at all scales and levels. Collaboration between administrative agents and tourism entrepreneurs in boosting the islands’ tourism supply side is only one side of the solution; the active mobilization and collaboration of the civil society and pertinent NGOs in all matters directly or indirectly related to local tourism development is paramount, if these measures are to take hold. Such action has recently been assumed by a grass-roots citizens’ movement called “Aeolistas” (http://aeolistas.net), bringing together the local public and NGOs, with the purpose of contributing to the environmental, social and cultural wellbeing of the city of Mytiline, in whatever positive and democratic means and goals possible. Finally, an additional series of concerns revolve around issues of insufficient advertisement and place promotion. Indeed, as was repeatedly acknowledged in our survey’s findings, the marketing side of local tourism trade has, on occasion, been either poor or simply nonexistent. A very recent bottom-up initiative to remedy this inadequacy has been a series of local associations of tourism professionals (travel agents, hoteliers, restaurant owners, car rental agents etc) in Molyvos, Kalloni, Gera, Plomari and Eressos) aiming to promote the island touristically, i.e. through creating brochures, providing special-interest tourist activities (birdwatching, hiking, gastronomic tours etc), developing place-branding

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strategies, providing tourism-related professional training seminars, participating in tourism exhibitions, etc. (www.theotheraegean.com). Sustainable partnerships between governmental agencies at various scales and local factors of tourism development, organized around “destination management” initiatives, with the aid of marketing “experts” and the collaboration of entrepreneurs and supply side networks (travel agencies, tour guides, boat/ ferry operators) are, again, considered imperative (vertical cooperation inadequacies). Cross-border political cooperation (horizontal networking) is also paramount to the establishment of cross-border collaborations, although that often encounters other difficulties, such as national security directives, EU policies and the “monster of immigration”: unimpeded cross-border accessibility of both sides of the Aegean coastline immediately unleashes the threat of an enormous onslaught of Asian immigration into Greece and the European Union.

5. The prospects of tourism networking and partnerships for Lesvos: issues of horizontal cooperation There is, of course, also a positive side to the story of Lesvos tourism, brimming with possibilities and favoring horizontal cooperation prospects and solutions to its problems. On the opposite side of local fears and constraints, Lesvos tourism is not yet fully developed—far from it. This fact suggests a series of opportunities and potential for future local tourism growth: The phrase “So far, tourism is virtually inconsequential to the economy of Mitiline” was generally reiterated among our survey responses and mirrored in state statistics. Consequently, tourism revenues have, so far, failed to contribute significantly to the local economy and economic development of Lesvos (Tsartas 2010, Spilanis 2000). This auspiciously translates into minimal adverse tourism impacts on the island, which further translates into bright future potential, on the basis of certain parameters, such as sustainable and quality tourism development, comprehensive planning and successful marketing, as well as effective management of Lesvos’ multiple physical and cultural attractions (Figures 4-6 and 4-7). If these basic conditions are met, great potential for social, economic, cultural, environmental and political partnerships presents itself for Lesvos tourism, on the basis of participatory decision-making, as concerns all tourism factors on the island, i.e. accommodation, entertainment/ animation and infrastructure supply. Such partnerships would be much more beneficial and readily effective in Lesvos tourism development than personal or closed-group

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(i.e. family-centered) initiatives, as they would be better equipped to sort out and deal with problems of know-how, funding, technical and legal aid, etc. akin to benefits applying to economies of scale.

Fig. 4-6. The domes of St Therapon church, landmark of Mytiline, the capital port city of Lesvos. Source: author

Another series of opportunities arises from the fact that international package tourism involving Aegean destinations, including Lesvos, tends to include its neighboring counterpart on the Turkish Aegean coastline. In such packages offered by tour operators and often regional or local travel agencies, the Greek side sometimes tends to be undermined and the Turkish side favored. The tourist product of the Turkish side, as, for instance, in the Sarimsakli tourist resort/ coastal stretch across the sea passage from Mytiline to Turkey, stands beyond competition in terms of 3Ss (sea-sand-sun) package tourism. Such a competitive edge over the Greek side also presents a very promising potential for both sides—and especially for Lesvos and Greece—through cross-border collaboration in tourism research, planning and development. Indeed, the seeds for such collaboration have already been planted:

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a) At the institutional level, through joint research projects between universities of the two sides; b) Between port authorities, through pacts and regulations (the port of Mytiline, on the one hand and the ports of Ayvalik and Dikili, on the other); Chambers’ of Commerce cooperation, concerning the organization of day-trips, small cruises and tours (i.e. travel-agency and ferry-company cooperation in tours/ excursions) between the two countries; and c) Through inter-municipality initiatives, as, for example, AyvalikMitiline cross-border festivals, seminars for peaceful and cooperative coexistence, etc. (as, for instance, organized by the local movement “Siniparxi” (co-existence, http://siniparxi-epikoinonia.blogspot.com). In these ways, it is anticipated that, in the words of one of our respondents, “Turkey may and should become the primary tourism market for Lesvos”. In such horizontal partnership alternatives lies much opportunity for Lesvos tourism, as well as in spill-off tourism from the Aegean coast of Turkey. This potential was explored through a joint project on MitilineAyvalik cooperation in cultural tourism development, undertaken by the Departments of Geography of the University of the Aegean, Lesvos and of Ege University, Izmir. The results of this study show that cross-border intraregional partnerships in matters of tourism still represent a contested area of Greek-Turkish cooperation, on the basis of inherent trade and bureaucratic inequalities, unfavorable port regulations, etc, such as already described earlier in this chapter. Such partnerships, though much desired by certain key stakeholders and local agents and entrepreneurs, are opposed by others on more political/ legal/ bureaucratic grounds. For instance, the Chamber of Commerce of Lesvos is opposed to such partnerships, on the basis of inherent inequalities, i.e. multi-fold flows of outgoing tourism from Greece vs. scant incoming tourism from Turkey; administrative obstacles from the side of the Turkish state in obtaining visas to Greece, etc. According to the fears voiced by this and other local stakeholders, such proposed partnerships are ultimately bound to tie Lesvos to networks of inequality and dependence on the already established and thriving package tourism of the Turkish side of the Aegean —“organized on a more professional basis than ours”. In general, the level of centralized control on all tourism aspects tends to be much higher on the Turkish side than on the Greek side, further complicating prospects of cross-border cooperation. Nonetheless, high visa costs were partly alleviated in 2010 by the Turkish authorities, but only as these refer to a

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certain restricted category of Turkish passports, the “green” passports of public employees. Visa costs for Turkish tourists are to be altogether abolished by 2017. Perhaps the grandest opportunity for the future of Lesvos tourism stems from its currently limited presence of package tourism. This shortcoming acquires a positive twist among locals (“we don’t want any [package tourism]”), despite the fact that some short-term profit gains from this form of tourism are neither negligible nor undesirable for the local side. More significantly, however, the vacuum left from the lack of large-scale development of 3Ss tourism invites much more benign, broadly welcome—and potentially more profitable—alternative forms of tourism to the island. Generally speaking, special-interest and alternative forms of tourism on Lesvos and elsewhere contribute very much to the preservation of local resources—be they natural or cultural—and promote place identity and local pride, through involvement in common local community goals and pursuits. Certain forms of alternative tourism on Lesvos, however, such as religious and lesbian pilgrimages, are still not always deemed by various local groups as desirable and favorable for the island (Zinovieff 1992). They are routinely charged with having created a bad tourism concept and image for the island, i.e. “religious tourism=only old ladies that go to monasteries”. More promising forms of alternative tourism are encountered in social (i.e. third age) tourism, convention tourism (with a bright future, due to the presence of the University of the Aegean on the island), cultural and educational tourism (i.e. paleogeographical tourism revolving to the Natural History Museum of the Lesvos Petrified Forest: www.lesvos museum.gr), thermal and therapeutic tourism at the many thermal bath locations of the island (i.e. at Therma), ecological tourism (i.e. bird watching in the wetlands of Kalloni), gastronomic tourism (also associated with the rich traditional ouzo industry and olive-oil production), etc. (http://www.lesvos-natura.com/default-el.asp). Among the most thriving tourism-related businesses and forms of partnership on the island, are farmers’ and women’s cooperatives, specializing mainly in gastronomy and the arts & crafts—activity areas much tied or central to other fast rising alternative forms of tourism in Lesvos, ecotourism and agrotourism (http://womens-cooperative.e-lesvos.net/greek.htm). Focusing on womens’ cooperatives in Lesvos, as a case study within a case study, these cooperatives perhaps represent the best possible alternative or a saving-board to the largely failed experiment of agrotourism (Anthopoulou 2000). Indeed, agrotourism is often referred to

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in terms of a missed opportunity for Lesvos, for reasons ranging from lack of demand to minimal control on all types of accommodation units, in terms of quality, amenity, standardization, branding, etc.

Fig. 4-7. Activities in women’s cooperative of Petra Source: http://womens-cooperative.e-lesvos.net/greek.htm

Nonetheless, 14 women’s cooperatives, presently functioning in Lesvos, make, exhibit and sell (often through catering services) all sorts of local/ “traditional” food and drink products and, in some cases, rent “traditional” rooms, mostly to tourists (Fig. 4-7). Their stated objectives refer to women’s empowerment and economic autonomy, building women’s entrepreneurship, promoting local products, enabling local landscape preservation, contributing to population retention and curbing out-migration. In these regards, they have been viewed as largely “economically successful”. The emphasis of their operation rests on and fulfills most partnership terms and clauses: cooperation, mutuality, inter-group support, joint decision-making, equitable and fair labor and revenue apportionment. Their problems mainly lie in networking deficiencies (broad network participation and inter-linkages, connections with local travel agencies, access to product outlets, etc) and reaching out (advertisement, organization of promotion events and marketing expansion). They also suffer from very little specialization, while they

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have no business consulting services and follow no product standardization and specification rules. Indicatively, The Women’s Cooperative of Petra— the oldest one on the island—currently counting 35 members, of which 15 are active, advertises itself on the Internet, as follows: “Here, you do not just rent a room; you enjoy the humanness and warmth of a family. You get to know a farmer’s life in the village” (http://womens-cooperative.elesvos.net/greek.htm).

6. Conclusions With the exponential growth of global tourism competition, new and established Mediterranean destinations struggle to survive and carve a niche in the tourism market, by overcoming chronic and emerging problems and creating viable new opportunities for growth. Since tourism is a primary, or often the main source of income on many of the Aegean islands of Greece, its further deterioration would be of broader detrimental impact to the islands, with escalating social and economic consequences. This chapter purported to show that in vertical and horizontal networks of connectivity, at various geographical scales, lie both shortcomings and opportunities for tourism growth, leading to relationships of inter- and intra-regional dependency or competition. Herein, then, lie the means of restoring various sorts of inequalities, in terms of access, know-how and resources, in Mediterranean tourism. The findings of this case study point to the significance of bottom-up horizontal and vertical networks and partnerships of mutuality and reciprocity, as most promising venues for the future development of various forms of tourism on the island of Lesvos, provided these initiatives overcome structural and functional barriers and constraints, inhibiting tourism growth (vertical cooperation deficiencies). Ideally, of course, problem-solving and future potential growth and development in the tourism industry, generally speaking, necessitate cooperation among all tourism stakeholders, at all levels, both vertical and horizontal. Our case study outcomes also indicate that, besides fostering tourism, cross-border partnerships in Lesvos contribute to the building of political, cultural, historical and social bridges between Greece and Turkey. Women’s cooperatives mobilize and organize human potential in the service of tourism, agricultural production and trade, crafts industries, etc. in mutually beneficial ways. There is a catch to this scenario, however: these horizontal initiatives must overcome vertical legal, structural or functional barriers and constraints inhibiting tourism growth. Top-down cooperation limitations and national, international or inter-regional

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institutional networks and constraints seem to pose insurmountable obstacles or deliberately antagonize incoming Lesvos tourism, binding it, in unfavorable terms, to networks of dependency or competition—unless met with bottom-up horizontally-linked resistance and rectification. Conclusively, these are just some of the issues regarding the significance of forming associations and entering into alliances in the tourism sector, which call for further research, especially in such times of socio-economic uncertainty. It is suggested that the findings of this study serve as indicative of the trends also encountered in other local cases around the Mediterranean region, suggesting possible similarities in characteristics and consequences of tourism partnership and networking initiatives, in contemporary Mediterranean Geographies.

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Codaccioni-Meistersheim, A. 1988. Insularite, insularisme, illeite: quelques concepts operatoires. Cahier No1, L’Europe des Isles, Institut du Development des Isles Mediterraneennes (IDIM). University de Corse Pascal Paoli: Ajaccio. D’Andrea, A., Ciolfi, L. and Gray B. 2011. Methodological challenges and innovations in mobilities research. Mobilities, Vol. 6, no 2: 149-160. Debarbieux, B. 2008.Linking mountain identities throughout the world: the experience of Swiss communities. Cultural Geographies 15 (4), 497-517. Edensor, T. 2007. Mundane mobilities, performances and spaces of tourism. Social and Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, no 2: 199-215. Edgell, D. L., Allen, M. D., Smith, G. and Swanson, J. R. 2008. Tourism Policy and Planning: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Fyall, A., Garrod, B. and Wang, Y. 2012. Destination Collaboration: A Critical Review of Theoretical Approaches to a Multi-dimensional Phenomenon. Accessed March 7, http:www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212571X12000169 Ghimire, K. 2001. The Native Tourist: mass tourism within developing countries. Earthscan Publications Limited, Guildford. Gillis, J. 2004. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Grenon, M. and Batisse, M. (eds.). 1989. Futures for the Mediterranean Basin: The Blue Plan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrill, R. 2009. Destination management: new challenges, new needs. In Jamal, T. and Robinson (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies, pp. 448-464. London: Sage. Harrison, D. 2001. Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies. Cromwell Press, Trowbridge. Höchtl, F; Terkenli T. S. and Plieninger, T. (eds.) 2007. Editorial: the European Mediterranean region in the focus of landscape research. Die Erde, Vol. 138, No 1, pp. 1-6. Houston, J. M. 1964. The Western Mediterranean World. London: Longmans. Ioannides, D.; Apostolopoulos, Y. and Sonmez, S. (eds.) 2001. Mediterranean Islands and Sustainable Tourism Development: Practices, Management and Policies. London: Continuum Publishers. Ioannides, D. and Debbage, K. G. (eds.). 1998. The Economic Geography of the Tourism Industry: A Supply-Side Analysis. New York: Routledge. Jafari, J. (ed.) 2000. Encyclopedia of Tourism. London: Routledge.

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Jamal. T. and Jamrozy, U. 2006. Collaborative networks and partnerships for integrated destination management. In Buhalis, D. and Costa C. (eds.) Tourism Management Dynamics: Trends, Management and Tools, pp. 164-173. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. King, R.; Proudfoot L., and Smith B. (eds.) 1997. The Mediterranean: Environment and Society. London: Arnold. Kizos, T.; Spilanis, I. and Koulouri, M. 2007. The Aegean islands: a paradise lost? Tourism as a driver for changing landscapes. In Pedroli, B.; van Doorn, A.; de Blust, G.; Paracchini, M. L.; Wascher, D. and Bunce F. (eds.) Europe’s Living Landscapes. Wageningen: KNNV Publishing, Zeist. Koussis, M. 2001. Tourism and the environment in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Crete. In Ioannides, D.; Apostolopoulos, Y. and Sonmez, S. (eds.) 2001. Mediterranean Islands and Sustainable Tourism Development: Practices, Management and Policies, pp. 214-233. London: Continuum Publishers. Koutoulas, D. 2008. The Mediterranean tourism market. In Hazendonk, N.; Hendriks, M. and Venema, H. (eds) Greetings from Europe: Landscape & Leisure. Rotterdam: OIO Publishers. Kyriakidis, A., Hancock, H., Oaten, S. and Bashir, R. 2009. Capturing the Visitor Economy: A Framework for Success. London: Deloitte. Long, P. 1994. Perspectives on partnership organizations as an approach to local tourism development, pp. 442-452. In Tourism: The State of the Art. Chichester: Wiley. Matvejevic, P. 1999. Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Minca, C. 1998. Mediterranean metaphors and tourist space: a theoretical approach. In Conti, S. and Segre, A. (eds.) Mediterranean Geographies, pp. 257-274. Roma: Societa Geographica Italiana and CNR. Morgan, N. 2012. Time for “mindful” destination management and marketing. Accessed 28 January http://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212571X1200008X Mosedale, J. and Albrecht, J. N. 2011. Tourism regulation and relational geography: the global, local and everything in between. In Modedale, J. (ed.) Political Economy of Tourism: a Critical Perspective, pp. 243257. London: Routledge. OECD. 2012. “OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2012”. EU: OECD Publishing. Penrose, J. 2011. Government Tourism Policy. Accessed March 12 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_d ata/file/78416/Government2_Tourism_Policy_2011.pdf

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Raptis, N. and Terkenli, T. S. 2000. The role of elementary education in the construction of cultural geographies: the case of the oblivion of the Aegean. In The Proceedings of International Conference in Rhodes, Apr. 29-May 4, 1998, on Sustainable Development in the Islands and the Roles of Research and Higher Education, pp. 341-348. Namur: Prelude. Sancar, F. H. and Koop, T. T. 1995. Proposing a behavioural definition of the “vernacular” based on a comparative analysis of the behaviour settings in three settlements in Turkey and Greece, Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Vol. 12 (2), pp. 141-165. Sheller, M. and Urry J. (eds.). 2004. Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge. Spilanis, Y. 2000. Tourism and regional development: the case of the Aegean islands. In Tsartas, P. (ed.) Tourism Development: Multidisciplinary Approaches (in Greek), pp. 149-188. Athens: Exantas. Terkenli, T. S. 2001. Towards a theory of the landscape: the Aegean landscape as a cultural image. Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 57, No 3-4, pp. 197-208. —. 2000. Landscapes of tourism: a cultural geographical perspective. In Briassoulis, H. and van der Straaten, J. (eds.) Tourism and the Environment: Regional, Economic, Cultural and Policy Issues, Revised Second Edition, pp. 179-202. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. —. 2012. Landscapes of tourism in Mediterranean small islands. In Conrad, E. and Cassar L. F. (eds.) Landscape Approaches for Ecosystem Management in Mediterranean Islands. Malta: International Environment Institute, University of Malta. Tsartas, P. 2010. Greek Tourism Development: Characteristics, Explorations, Proposals (in Greek). Athens: Kritiki. —. 1989. Social and Economic Impacts of Tourism Development on the Prefecture of Cyclades and Especially on the Islands Ios and Serifos, During the Period 1950-1980 (in Greek). Athens: EKKE United Nations & World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 1994. Recommendations on Tourism Statistics. United Nations, New York. United Nations & World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 2007. A Practical Guide to Tourism Destination Management. Madrid: Centro Espanol de Derechos Reprograficos. Urry, J. 2007. Mobilites. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd edition, SAGE Publications Ltd, London. Vogiatzakis, I. N.; Mannion, A. M. and Pungetti, G. 2008. Introduction to the Mediterranean Island Landscapes. In Vogiatzakis, I. N.; Pungetti,

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PART II ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS: PRESENT TRENDS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

CHAPTER FIVE TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION: PRESENT TRENDS AND FUTURE SCENARIOS ANNICK DOUGUÉDROIT AND PIERO LIONELLO

Abstract The environment of the Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to climate change, because of expected temperature increase and precipitation reduction during the 21st century. This situation is shown by meteorological observations, which evidence an ongoing widespread and intense warming, particularly from the mid-1970s onwards and by the simulations of the expected climate evolution (projections) during the 21st century. These numerical simulations are carried out with global and regional climate models and describe the components of the climate system and their interactions. They agree remarkably on the climate evolution of the Mediterranean region during the 21st century. They show a temperature increase in all seasons, especially high in summer and a decrease of precipitation, in more important percentages in summer than during the rest of the year, though with a strongly model-dependent magnitude. In fact, the capability of model projections for describing the ongoing precipitation changes remains uncertain. The most striking feature in these model projections is the increased intensity and duration of the warm season drought, with possible desertification in the southern Mediterranean areas and in the southern areas of the European Peninsulas. The consequence of these changes is an overall northward shift of the climate types that are present in the Mediterranean region (Arid, Semi-arid and Mediterranean) for the end of the 21st century.

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1. Introduction: General characteristics of the climate in the Mediterranean region The Mediterranean Sea is located in the northern subtropical zone between the tropical zone to the South and the temperate zone to the North. Most of areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea have a mild climate, as most coastal areas at the same latitude and on the western side of continents have. The characteristic feature of the Mediterranean region among other subtropical and temperate regions is the presence of large areas with a warm/hot and dry summer. This has multiple consequences on human activities, because the combination of high temperature with water scarcity and irregular inter-annual availability poses serious problems in these areas and makes them particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially in summer (AR4-WG1 2007, AR5-WG1 2013, Giorgi 2006). Therefore, model simulations on the future evolution of climate are particularly important and necessary for the Mediterranean environment and societies. For the end of this century they suggest a worrying climate evolution, which makes the Mediterranean region a “hot-spot” in climate change scenarios (for comparison with the other regions of the word, see chapter 10 and Annex I of AR5-WG1 2013).

1.1. Short reminder of the space distribution of temperature and precipitation When Köppen (Trewartha 1943) classified the climates of the world among tropical (A), arid (B), temperate (C), cold (D), polar (E) types, he called Mediterranean climate the sub-type of temperate climate with dry summer season (denoted as Cs). It is, however, clear that the Mediterranean region includes a large variety of climate conditions and the Cs classification applies only to a part of the Mediterranean coastline (see for example Kottek et al. 2006; Peel et al. 2007; Gao and Giorgi 2008, Lionello et al. 2012). At its lower latitudes the Mediterranean region is affected by semi-arid and arid climates (BS, semi-desert, and BW, desert on Köppen’s classification). In the so-called “MED” (Mediterranean) subregion (from 30N to 45N and from 10W to 40E in AR5-WG1 2013) the northern coastlines and inland areas have temperate climates and, far from the coast or at high level, cold climates without dry season (Cf and Df of Köppen, respectively). The average seasonal temperature decreases northward with important local features, which are determined by the complicated coastlines and topography of the Mediterranean region, whose influence is visible in

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Figure 5-1. During the 20th century, climate conditions do not pose a risk of frost in winter as in the north of the basin and at high altitudes. Summer is warm or hot in the whole region. The average maximum temperature of the warmest month (July) increases southwards and is cooler at the coasts than in the interior, examples include: 30.9°C in inland Provence, France (Le Luc, 1951-1980, Météo-France), more than 30°C and 36°C in Tunis and Jendouba, Tunisia (1931-1980, Henia 1993), 26.9°C in Agadir, 36.3°C in Taroudant, Morocco, 36.8°C in Gabes and 42.5°C in Kebili, Tunisia (19261950, Dubief, 1959). Temperatures are much higher during heat waves, when the absolute maximum in the north of the basin, exceeds the mean value of the respective month by 7-8°C (Le Luc, 38.7°C on the 1965 07 26) and by a larger value in the south where maxima reach 51.8°C in Agadir and 49°C in Taroudant, when the Chergui wind blows from the Sahara as far as the Moroccan coast, 50.2°C in Gabes and 55°C in Kebili (Dubief 1959).

Fig. 5-1. Mean seasonal temperature (oC) in the Mediterranean region. Each panel represents a different season, right, below: Winter: (Dec-Jan-Feb), left, below: Spring (Mar-Apr-May), right, above: Summer (Jun-Jul-Aug), left, above: Autumn (Sep-Oct-Nov). They are based on the Climate Research Unit (CRU) data for the 1961-1990 period (New et al. 2000)

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Temperature decreases with altitude at about 0.6°C/100 meters with differences related to the slope orientation (Douguédroit 1970). A large fraction of the Mediterranean region has low or moderate rainfall (except over some mountains and coastal areas). Precipitation increases northwards and with altitude from a minimum in the deserts of the southern banks, where values are less than 100mm per year (HMSO 1962) to maxima above 1500mm/year in the Alps and at the Mediterranean coast (Frei and Shär 1998). In a large fraction of the region, climate is classified Cs or B Köppen type, the warm season is "dry" and rain falls during the cold season, with a Winter maximum but in the northwest, an Autumn maximum occurs (Fig. 5-2, same as Fig. 5-1, except that it shows accumulated precipitation (mm)).

Fig. 5-2. Mean seasonal accumulated precipitation (mm) in the Mediterranean region. Each panel represents a different season, right, below: Winter: (Dec-JanFeb), left, below: Spring (Mar-Apr-May), right, above: Summer (Jun-Jul-Aug), left, above: Autumn (Sep-Oct-Nov). They are based on the Climate Research Unit (CRU) data for the 1961-1990 period (New et al. 2000).

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The number of months with very low rainfall decreases from South to North, where at the northernmost coast the rainy season is longer than 10 months, so that large areas in the Nééorth have no dry season and their climate is classified Cf “warm rainy” type (Trewartha 1943). The importance of the “dry” season for the Mediterranean environment has determined the definition by hydrologists, climatologists and biologists of a series of “dryness” indices, based on combinations of monthly values of temperature and rainfall, which produce different results for the duration of the dry warm season and of the area concerned (Heim 2000, Quezel, Medail 2003).

1.2. Main aspects of atmosphere circulation The Mediterranean basin is a contact zone between tropical and temperate air masses separated by the jet stream (Trewartha 1961). Topographic features, such as the complicated coastlines with many subbasins and gulfs, and the topography, particularly the Northern mountainous peninsulas, have important effects on climate and modulate the influence of the hemispheric circulation patterns (Douguédroit and Norrant-Romand 2011, 2014, Norrant-Romand and Douguédroit 2013), which would otherwise have a much more spatially homogeneous effect. These features partially block the westerly advection of moisture arriving from the North Atlantic region and influence a large internal redistribution of moisture, in which the western Mediterranean Sea represents a major source for the surrounding land areas and also for the eastern part of the basin. The Tropical-Subtropical North Atlantic Ocean is a relevant source mainly for the western Mediterranean land areas, while the eastern Mediterranean Sea affects the surrounding land areas (Fernandez et al. 2003, Nieto et al. 2010). Scientific literature presents several examples of large AtlanticEuropean or Atlantic-Mediterranean teleconnection patterns that are linked to the climate of the Mediterranean. Teleconnection patterns describe the spatial distribution of a given variable (often the sea level pressure or the 500hPa geopotential height) over a large scale (continental or global scale) with a coherent time behaviour. They are usually represented using maps where highly correlated (or anti-correlated) areas are evident and are meant to summarize the effect of physical processes exerting influences over a large distance. The most famous Atlantic-European teleconnection pattern is the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) which, in its negative phase, brings rains to over most of the basin (Fig. 5-3, Hurrell 2003).

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In winter its influence in the western Mediterranean is strongly correlated with a regional feature, the MO or Mediterranean Oscillation (Conte et al 1989, Dünkeloh and Jacobeit 2003, Palutikov 2003).

Fig. 5-3. Schematic of the NAO signature on the Sea level pressure field and of its consequences on the precipitation in the Mediterranean and Western European regions depending on its High/low phase (after M. Visbeck, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)

Winter precipitation, especially at the coast of Greece and Turkey, is correlated to a second regional feature, MMC (Mediterranean Meridional Circulation), which is loosely linked to EA (East-Atlantic of Barnston and Livezey 1987, Dünkeloh and Jacobeit 2003, Corte-Real et al. 1995, Xoplaki et al. 2000). The negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and of the East Atlantic/West Russia pattern (EAWR) compete for exerting the largest inuence on the frequency of precipitation events, exerting their largest inuence in the western and central Mediterranean areas, respectively (Reale and Lionello, 2012). Main large Atlantic-European or Atlantic-Mediterranean correlation patterns linked with Mediterranean precipitation during the cold season are shown on Figure 5-4: East Atlantic-Western Russia (EA/WR), Mediterranean-Western Russia or Med/WR (Xoplaki et al. 2000, Dünkeloh and Jacobeit 2003, Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, 2011, Douguédroit and Norrant-Romand 2013), Mediterranean-East Atlantic or

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Med/EA (Norrant and Douguédroit 2010) known also as Eastern Mediterranean Pattern (Hatzaki et al. 2007) and North Sea-Caspian Sea Pattern (NPC, Kutiel et al. 2002).

Fig. 5-4. The 3 main teleconnection patterns originating cold season rainfall in the Mediterranean basin. Lines: scores of each teleconnection pattern (+-0.5 and more 0.10 by 0.10); solid lines: positive pole, dotted lines: negative pole (after Norrant and Douguédroit 2010)

The regional circulation in the Mediterranean is affected by local processes with a large internal variability both in space and time. So precipitation patterns emerging from regional analysis cannot be easily linked to the northern hemisphere circulation, but in general are related to a combination of its large patterns (Xoplaki et al. 2000, Dünkeloh and Jacobeit 2003, Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, Romand-Norrant and Douguedroit 2013). And correlation values between hemispheric patterns and Mediterranean precipitation are not high, mostly in the range between 0.20 and 0.39 (Norrant 2007). In this complicated situation, the wet season in southern Europe requires five (5) circulation patterns for describing 30% of the precipitation variability (Xoplaki et al. 2004). A wet month or the Winter season of a Mediterranean subregion needs from 2 to 4 patterns for explaining from 33% to 54% of the precipitation variability and from five (5) to eight (8) patterns for explaining from 56 and 78% (Norrant 2004). The Mediterranean has been documented to be among the regions with the highest intensity of cyclogenesis (the process by which a cyclone is generated) in the world (Radinovic 1987). Cyclogenesis happens along a branch of the Northern Hemisphere storm track, whose presence is clear also in global analysis (Hoskins and Hodges 2002) and in many areas, as the Gulf of Genoa, the eastern coast of Iberia, Southern Italy and the

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Ionian Sea, Northern Africa, the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea, Cyprus, the Middle East determined by sub-regional features (Alpert et al. 1990a, b, Trigo et al. 1999, 2002; Maheras et al. 2001, see Lionello et al. 2006b for a review). These active regions only account for 40-50% of all the cyclones (Trigo et al. 1999). The overall synoptic activity extends over the whole year (Maheras 2001) but the temporal and spatial distributions of the Mediterranean cyclones present a large inter-monthly variability (Alpert et al. 1990a). Mediterranean lows have less duration, intensity and smaller spatial scales, isolated or within complex systems, than Atlantic synoptic systems (Trigo et al. 1999). Cyclogenesis associated with rain is more intense during the period from November to March according to Xoplaki (2004), Dünkeloh and Jacobeit (2003) and Lionello et al. (2006a), the north-western banks being an exception with important precipitation falling in October, indeed even in September (Rivrain 1997, Trewartha 1961, Trigo et al. 1999). During Winter in a Mediterranean sub-region when pressure is higher than average both, cyclone activity and rainfall, are low (an example are the pressure values associated with EA/Med in January; Norrant and Douguédroit 2010) or mostly nil. When pressure is lower than the average, daily weather types, with zonal flow of cyclones generated in the Atlantic basin, and regenerated over the Mediterranean produce appreciable amount of precipitation (HMSO 1962, Radinovic 1987, Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, Douguedroit and Norrant-Romand 2014). Regional cyclogenesis is linked to the influence of Atlantic-European and AtlanticMediterranean patterns, which are associated to undulations of the jetstream with troughs extending southward from northern Europe or western Siberia (Romand-Norrant and Douguedroit 2013). During the cold season these troughs can be associated with different daily rainfall totals depending on the sub-regional atmospheric conditions. For example, the Med/WR teleconnection patterns include a blocking feature in the eastern Atlantic and, in the 500hpa geopotential field, a wave with a trough over Central Europe, which favors cyclogenesis over the Aegean Sea (Trigo et al. 2002). This cyclogenesis along the eastern side of the wave generates cyclones that cause more rain in Greece than cyclones embedded in a zonal flow (Fig. 5-5, min1, Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, NorrantRomand and Douguédroit 2013, Douguédroit and Norrant-Romand 2014). On the contrary, when a region is under the western side of a wave, with a trough extending from northern Europe or Siberia, the northerly continental air flow is dry and does not favor rain. Thus the association of positive phase of the EA/WR teleconnection pattern with a trough over

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Russia produces less rain over Greece than that with a zonal flow regime (Fig. 5-5, min 2).

Lines show the 5560m contour line: Max 1: Eastern side of a trough regime with important daily rainfall in Greece (Med/WR teleconnection pattern); min 1: Zonal regime with mean Winter daily rainfall in Greece (EA/WR or Med/WR teleconnection patterns); min 2: Western side of a trough regime with little daily rainfall in Greece (Med/WR teleconnection pattern) (after Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, Douguédroit and Romand-Norrant 2013) Fig. 5-5. Schematic representation of cyclone tracks in 3 rainfall Winter daily regimes identified by the analysis of the 500 hPa mean pressure.

Similar teleconnection patterns causing two different daily weather types with high or low precipitation occur above other Mediterranean basins (such as the Gulf of Genoa) and in the Cyprus area (Krichak et al. 2010), depending on the longitude of the wave and on the latitude of its crest (HMSO 1962, Trigo et al. 2000, Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, Douguédroit and Romand-Norrant 2013). The intense precipitation events happening mostly in Western Mediterranean are now rather well observed, but conditions favoring them are not well known. These events can be divided into two types according to their duration and intensity:

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1. Events affecting large areas in small watersheds lasting less than 24 hours and exceeding 200mm that cause flash-floods (Douguédroit 2008) 2. Events lasting two to four days, that may exceed locally up to 600mm (Duband 2003, Ducrocq et al. 2008, Llasat et al. 2005, Rivrain 1997). They are characterized by the presence of very active convection with a deep upper-level trough and with an associated cyclonic centre in around 90% of the observed cases, (Jansa et al 2001). Cyclone depth, circulation strength, surrounding synoptic conditions, and slow speed of the cyclone center are key factors for producing intense precipitation events (Reale and Lionello 2012). It has been suggested that the trough is directly related to specific mesoscale structures, such as a low-level jet associated with the surface cyclone, the location and the intensity of a surface-low, and a not well explained influence of topography and sea temperature (Berne et al. 2009, Ducrocq et al. 2008).

2. Present trend and future evolution of temperature 2.1. Temperature trends in the 20th century Present temperature trends have been summarized in the fourth and fifth IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessment reports (AR4-WG1 2007, AR5-WG1 2013). According to the most recent report the global mean temperature rate of warming over 1951-2012 is 0.72°C (the 90% confidence interval being from 0.49°C to 0.89°C, each of the three last past decades being successively warmer than all previous ones. The different time temperature series of the so-called “MED” (from 30N to 45N and from 10W to 40E in AR5-WG1 2013) show that strong departures from the 1981-2012 average value have irregularly occurred during the past five centuries. Considering Winters, over the period of 1500 to 2002, the warmest decade was the last one, from 1993 to 2002, the coldest was between 1680 and 1689 (Luterbacher et al. 2006). Analogously, the warmest 30 Mediterranean Winters in a row are those in the last part of the record (from 1973 to 2002), while the coldest one occurred at the end of the 19th century (from 1880 to 1909), with 0.16C and -0.85C departures from the 1961-1990 average temperature, respectively. These results hold in spite of the uncertainties affecting past temperatures (Luterbacher et al. 2004). The warm 2006 Autumn and the 2007 Winter conditions, which affected also the Northern Mediterranean,

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were most likely the warmest in more than 500 years (Luterbacher et al. 2007) the decade 2003-2012 being warmer than the last one studied by Luterbacher (AR5-WG1 2013). According to most analyses, this century and particularly its second half, has substantially confirmed the global trends for the Mediterranean sub-region (AR5-WG1 2013), although the warming trend of 0.75C/ century is not uniform, neither in space, nor time. Over most of the Western Mediterranean, for instance, warming has been mainly registered in two phases: from the mid-1920s to the 1950s and from the mid-1970s onwards (e.g. Brunet et al. 2001; Galan et al. 2001; Giorgi 2002, Xoplaki et al. 2003, Mitchell and Jones 2005, 4AR-WG1 2007). There is consensus for a widespread increase during the 20th century of both, minimum and maximum daily temperatures. This is shown among others by Kostopoulou and Jones (2005) for the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, Brunetti et al. (2006) for Italy, Brunet et al. (2007) in Spain, Douguédroit et Bridier (2007) in the Mediterranean part of France with an increase that has been stronger from the early 1970, onwards. Attribution of recent observed temperature trends to anthropogenic climate change has been demonstrated by Barkhordarian et al. (2011).

2.2. Projected increase of temperature in the 21st century and its uncertainties Global climate projections show that the warming trend of the 20th century is almost certain to continue during the 21st century. Following the AR4-WG1 (2007), the multi-model global mean Surface Air Temperature warming (with associated uncertainty ranges between brackets) for 2090 to 2099 relative to 1980 to 1999 are the mostly used scenarios for simulating warming at the end of this century; there are two intermediate emission scenarios: A1B producing an average warming of +2.8°C,(1.7°C to 4.4°C) and A2 producing +3.4°C, (2.0°C to 5.4°C). In the AR5-WG1 (2013) the estimations of the mean global warming in 2081-2100 related to 1986-2005 for the RCP4.5 scenario is over 1.5°C and in between 1.1 and 2.6 but in the MED sub-region the future warming is suggested as larger than the global value (Table 5-1).

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Table 5-1. Temperature increase for A1B scenarios by the end of the 21st century in the SEM region from AR4-WG1 and RCP 4.5 scenarios for 2081-2100 in the MED sub-region from AR5-WG1. Median and 25% and 75% quartile value changes, for land and sea from Giorgi and Lionello 2007 and for Southern Europe from Giorgi and Coppola 2009: mean change and standard deviation. Year SEM 4AR- +3.5°C WG1 (3.0°C to (A1B) 4.0°C) Med 5AR- +2.3°C WG1 (2.0°C to RCP 4.5 2.7°C) Full region Land Full region Sea Southern Europe

Winter (DJF) +2.6°C (2.5°C to 3.3°C) +2.0°C (1.5°C to 2.4°C) +3.1°C +/-0.7°C

Spring (MAM) +3.2°C (3.0°C to 3.5°C)

Autumn (SON) +3.3°C (2.8°C to 4.0°C)

+3.4 +/0.68°C

Summer (JJA) +4.1°C 3.7°C to 5.0°C) +2.8°C 2.3°C to 3.3C) +4.7 +/1.04°C

+2.7°C

+2.8°C

+3.8°C

+3.3°C

+2.7°C +/-0.7°C

+2°9C +/1.7°C

+3.9 +/1.0°C

+3.3°C +/-0.8°C

-

+3.8°C +/0.88°C

The warming is less intense in recent scenarios (AR5-WG1 2013) than in previous ones (AR4-WG1 2007). In all scenarios the warming values vary depending on the season with the maximum increase in Summer and minimum in Winter (Table 5-1). It is a robust signal, consistently present in most simulations carried out with different GCMs (Global Climate Models in Giorgi and Francisco 2000; Giorgi et al. 2001), but with values that depend on the emission scenario and on the model used for producing the estimate. RCMs (Regional climate models) have allowed the extraction of high resolution projections from current GCMs (Giorgi et al. 1992, Gibelin and Déqué 2003, Déqué et al. 2005, Giorgi and Coppola 2009, Van den Linden P and Mitchell 2009). Even though they show some systematic biases, a broad consensus exists among climate simulations (both carried out with RCMs and GCMs) as well as between the recent analysis and previous generations of model projections (Giorgi and Coppola 2009). For the A1B scenario the temperature increase of the 2071-2100 period with respect to the 1961-2100 period reaches +2-3°C in Winter and Spring and +3-4 in Autumn (Fig. 5.6), only higher of a few tens of degrees than more recent projections (AR5-WG1 2013).

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Fig. 5-6. A1B scenario temperature differences between the 2071-2100 and 19611990 periods. Values in 0C. Each panel represents a different season: top-left: Winter (Dec-Jan-Feb), top-right: Spring (Mar-Apr-May), bottom-left: Summer (Jun-Jul-Aug), bottom-right: Autumn (Sep-Oct-Nov). All values in the mapts are positive (warming). Figures based on the ensemble of global simulation analyzed by Giorgi and Lionello 2007.

In Summer (JJA=June, July and August) it grows to 2 to 3°C (AR5WG1 2013) less than the 3 to 4 over the sea and its close surroundings and further to 4 to 5°C in inland areas where it reaches >5°C in Sahara and Middle-East according to AR4-WG1 2007, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Giorgi and Coppola 2009. In the Mediterranean sub-region, the warming signal is expected to steadily increase throughout the 21st century and become clearly detectable in a time range which goes from 15 years (for the annual value, Summer and Autumn) to 20 years for Spring and 25 years for Winter (Christensen et al. 2007). The warming over the Mediterranean Sea is smaller than in the surrounding areas in all seasons (AR5-WG1 2013). The simulated seasonal temperature differences between the Mediterranean Sea and the surrounding lands for scenario

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A1B is for the whole region between -0.4°C and -0.6°C except for Summer when it reaches -0.9°C (Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Table 5-1). Several recent analyses have focused on the downscaling of global projections using both dynamical and statistical methods (Planton et a. 2012, Gualdi et al. 2013, Jacobeit et al.2014). They have shown a general consensus among global models, dynamical (via regional climate models) and statistical downscaling on the overall warming of the Mediterranean region and on the inter-seasonal differences, with lower rates of warming in Winter and Spring, and higher rates in Summer and Autumn.

2.3. Extreme summer temperatures and heat-waves The increase of temperature extremes is reflected on significant trends detected for the frequency of warm days (Xoplaki 2002) and increased intensity and duration of heat waves (e.g. Baldi et al.2006). Since the 1960s, the mean heat wave intensity, heat wave length and heat wave number have significantly increased over the Eastern Mediterranean region, including the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East (Kuglitsch et al. 2009), confirming previous analyses for Greece and Turkey (Türkeú et al. 2002; Founda et al. 2004; respectively). During the exceptional 2003 Summer the mean temperature for the LMR area exceeded the 1961-1990 reference period by around 2.3C, making it by far the hottest summer for more than the last 500 years (Luterbacher et al. 2004). It has been estimated that the risk of heat waves exceeding the intensity of the 2003 event has at least doubled since the start of the instrumental records in 1851 (Stott et al. 2006). The key factor for explaining the increased temperature interannual variability and the doubling of heat waves observed in Summer is likely the influence of large anticyclones, whose duration shows a significant positive change during the 2nd half of the 20th century (Frich et al. 2002, Schär et al. 2004). It could be attributed also, at least partially, to enhanced frequency of drier soil conditions limiting atmosphere moisture in future warmer climates (Giorgi and Coppola 2009; see below Section 3.3). There is agreement among scientists that the heat wave of the 2003 Summer in the region might have anticipated the Summer conditions that will be common in the late 21st century in Europe (Schär et al. 2004) and that the temperature values that have been reached during recent heat waves are consistent with climate change scenarios (e.g. Tolika et al. 2009 for the 2007 Summer heat waves over Greece).

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Fig. 5-7. Normalized distribution of summer temperature anomalies over southern Europe. The A2 scenario in the AR4-WG1 (2007) produces an average warming of +3.4°C, (2.0°C to 5.4°C).(after Giorgi and Coppola 2009)

By the end of the 21st century the relative change in standard deviation of the summer season (June, July and August) mean temperature (the highest change among the 4 seasons, see Section 2.2) could reach 40-60% in the north of the Mediterranean region and 20-40% in the south (Schär et al. 2004, Fig. 5-3). This widening of the temperature distribution is associated with a pronounced increase of positive anomaly temperature (Giorgi and Coppola 2009) so that the statistical distribution of temperatures presents a considerable shift and deformation. Changes of position and shape are

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such that the 1950-1990 and 2070-2100 distributions overlap only very marginally for the A2 scenario of the AR4-WG1 report of 2007 (Fig. 5-7). The agreement on the projections of heat waves increasing in frequency, intensity and duration with the intensity of warm extremes increasing more than the mean value of temperature is general (Beniston et al. 2003, Giorgi and Coppola 2009, AR5-WG1 2013). Recent studies have evidenced that the behaviour of temperature extremes is not homogeneous neither in space nor in time (see GarciaHerrera et al. 2014 for a discussion) with a strong West versus East contrast. Considering the second half of the 20th century, the observed rate of increase of temperature extremes is in line with global trends (with increasing/decreasing hot/cold extremes), in the West Mediterranean but not in the East Mediterranean. In fact, cooling is observed in Winter in the East Mediterranean, with a reversal in the last two decades (Efthymiadis et al. 2011). Hertig et al (2010) have analyzed ongoing trends (1961-1990) of extreme temperatures and confirm this West versus East contrast. For the future (end of 21st century) a warming trend is found, but with considerable uncertainties in the results of the applied statistical downscaling methods.

3. Present trend and future evolution of Precipitation There is general agreement among scientists that the Mediterranean region has experienced important changes of precipitation regimes in the past (Luterbacher et al. 2007) and that it is very sensitive to increased GHG (Green House Gases) concentration in the 21st century (Giorgi and Lionello 2008). Though there is a broad consensus that climate change will be accompanied by reduction in rainfall in the 21st century over most of the region, the spread of individual model projections is much larger for precipitation than for temperature (AR4WG1 2007).

3.1. The second half of the 20th century During the second half of the 20th century, over large areas of the Mediterranean region, precipitation has been decreasing (New et al. 2001, Giorgi 2002, AR4-WG1 2007, AR5-WG1 2013). However, sub-regional variability is high and the statistical significance of negative trends greatly varies with the considered time scale (annual, seasonal or monthly) and time period. A spatially homogeneous and significant negative trend of precipitation is present only in Winter (or in the rainy season) and mostly in areas located in the Central and Western Mediterranean region

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(Luterbacher et al. 2007): in Greece, in parts of Spain and Italy (Xoplaki et al. 2000, Gonzalez-Hidalgo et al. 2001, Piervitali et al. 2003, Dünkeloh Jacobeit and 2003). It has been particularly detected in selected months: in the Atlantic coast from Morocco to Iberia in March, in the Mediterranean Iberia in October, in the Gulf of Genoa in December, in Greece in January and Winter and in the Middle East in Winter (Norrant and Douguédroit 2006). Trends of seasonal precipitation as derived from the observational gridded CRU dataset are summarized in Lionello et al. (2012). The subdivision of the Mediterranean region by peninsulas (see 1.3) modulates sub-regional influences of the large Atlantic-European and Atlantic-Mediterranean teleconnection patterns (see 1.2) which have influenced the evolution of daily precipitation types during the second half of the 20th century. Greece is a case investigated in detail in scientific literature. The decrease in seasonal and annual precipitation in Greece is closely related to the decrease in the frequency of occurrence in terms of number of days of cyclonic circulation types (Maheras et al. 2004). In January the significantly decreasing trend of rainfall from 1950 to 2000 originates from the behaviour of two teleconnection patterns (Med/WR and EA/WR) and it is due to an increasing number of days with small amount of rain (associated with zonal atmospheric circulation regimes, Fig. 5-5, 2min) and a decreasing number of days with large amount of rain (associated with meridional atmospheric circulation regimes, Fig.5-5, max). Note that the cases of the Atlantic coast with Med/EA and of the Mediterranean Iberia with EA/Med are similar (Norrant and Douguédroit 2010, Norrant-Romand and Douguédroit 2013). The attribution of observed precipitation trends to anthropogenic climate change is controversial. Barkhordarian et al. (2013) have shown that, although observed precipitation trends in Winter, late Summer and in Autumn cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability, they are inconsistent with the expected changes as described by climate models. In many areas, observed changes are several times larger than the model projected response to GHG effects. Further, there is a contradiction between the projected drying and the observed precipitation increase in late Summer and Autumn. Consequently, it is doubtful that observed trends could be considered an anticipation of future climate change in the Mediterranean region.

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3.2. Annual and seasonal decrease of precipitation in the 21st century Concerning precipitation, most recent multimodel ensembles downscaled with RCMs succeed to capture differences between coast and inland in Africa and the effect of coastline and topography features in Southern Europe (Giorgi and Lionello 2008, see also the analysis of the PRUDENCE project by Giorgi and Coppola, 2009 and of the ENSEMBLES project by Van den Linden and Mitchell, 2009). Climate models projections for the Mediterranean region during this century agree on a reduction of rainfall, particularly important in Summer and in the continental southern area, and becoming progressively more severe during the 21st century. The Mediterranean, as a whole, is the unique region in the world that is likely to experience a decrease of precipitation in all seasons (AR4-WG1 2007, AR5-WG1 2013). However, although all simulations show a clear robust signal of decreasing rainfall, they disagree in the magnitude and the geographical distribution of the precipitation change. Further, as discussed at the end of the previous subsection, model trends are not consistent with the changes observed in the second half of the 20th century. The regional average precipitation for the simulated SEM (Southern European and Mediterranean region) in the AR4-WG1 (2007) gives, as MED in the AR5-WG1 (2013), a general decrease in rainfall, minimum in Winter (-6%) and maximum in Summer (-24%) but always more important than the 2013 Report. The precipitation decrease is, however, higher for some southern areas. For most model simulations the mean annual precipitation decrease, when averaged over the whole basin, is larger over sea than over land except in Winter (Table 5-2). Model projections of average seasonal rainfall decrease in the late 21st century are important from April to September for AR5-GWI RCP (2013) but half smaller than for AR4-GW1 (2007) when RC4.5 and A1B are compared. But the spread of individual model projections of the MED precipitation for the same scenario is presented as “substantial” in the AR5-GWI (2013) including both model deficiencies and natural variability (AR5-GWI 2013). The A1B projections did not also quantitatively agree (AR4-WG1 2007, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Solomon et al. 2009, Giorgi and Coppola 2009). This contrasting behaviour has been linked to change of cyclone activity (Lionello and Giorgi 2008). The Winter cyclone activity in future climate scenarios over Western Europe is responsible for the precipitation at the northern coast of the basin, though the bulk of the change is located outside the Mediterranean region. This is

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projected to increase in future climate scenario (Lionello et al. 2008). The reduction of cyclone activity inside the Mediterranean region in future scenarios is responsible for the lower precipitation at the southern and eastern Mediterranean coast (Lionello and Giorgi 2008). Table 5-2. Precipitation simulations for the RCP 4.5 for 2081-2100 with respect to 1986-2005 and A1B scenario by the end of the 21st century . Median and 25% and 75% quartile value changes, for land and sea from Giorgi and Lionello 2007 and for Southern Europe from Giorgi and Coppola 2009: mean change and standard deviation. Year

Winter (DJF)

Spring (MAM)

Summer (JJA)

Autumn (SON)

MED AR5-4% -6% -11% WG1 (-10 to -3%) (-7 to -1%) (-17 to -6%) RCP4.5 SEM AR4-12% -6% -16% -24% -12% WG1 A1B (-6 to -9%) (-10 to -1%) (-17 to -8%) (-35 to -14%) (-16 to -9%) -8% -14% -28% -15% +/Full region +/-6.5% +/-7.5% +/-13.5% 8% land Full region -18% -20.5% -31% -16% sea Southern -17% -23% -29% -18% Europe +/-17% +/-17% +/-26% +/-20% Figure 5-8 shows the change of precipitation resulting from an ensemble of global model simulations for the 2071-2100 period with respect to the 1961-2100 period and the A1B scenario. The percent reduction is smallest in Winter, where it varies from no change in the Northern Mediterranean to a 40% reduction in same areas in the South. During the intermediate seasons the reduction of precipitation varies between 10 and 40% and could be more limited in Autumn (September, October and November) and particularly on the sea than in Spring (March, April and May). The large summer reduction is in the range 25-30%, but larger than 50% in areas of the North-East and the South Mediterranean.

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Fig. 5-8. A1B scenario percentage change (%) of total seasonal precipitation between the 2071-2100 and 1961-1990 periods. Each panel represents a different season: top-left: Winter (Dec-Jan-Feb), top-right: Spring (Mar-Apr-May), bottomleft: Summer (Jun-Jul-Aug), bottom-right: Autumn (Sep-Oct-Nov). The thick white contour denotes the transition between negative (reduction) and positive (increase) future changes of precipitation. Figures based on the ensemble of global simulation analyzed by Giorgi and Lionello 2007.

Precipitation integrated over the whole Mediterranean region is projected to decrease steadily along the 21st century in all seasons and periods. It reaches for the A2 scenario in the intermediate seasons -2030%, up to -30-40% in Summer, and above -40% in the Central Mediterranean (AR4-WG1 2007, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Solomon et al. 2009, Giorgi and Coppola 2009). The variability of the precipitation is supposed to increase with a frequency distribution broader in the scenario than in the reference period, especially in Summer when, for the A2 scenario, most of the events would carry negative anomalies and a fraction of them would be greater than 50% when compared to the reference period (Fig.5-9, Giorgi and Coppola 2009).

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3.3. Extreme precipitation events and droughts Two main types of extreme events related to rainfall characterize the Mediterranean region: droughts related to low or absent rainfall during the warm period and heavy rainfall during the wet season. During the 20th century longer dry day sequences, but significant only locally, and a significant anticipation, from July to June, at the beginning of the long dry sequences (more than 30 days without precipitation) have been observed in France (Douguédroit 1987, Frich et al. 2002,). In all Western Europe the duration of heat waves has doubled between 1880 and 2005 in connection with the decrease in Summer rainfall associated with the persistence of subtropical anticyclones and the increase of both SLP (Sea Level Pressure) over Continental Europe and SST (Sea Surface Temperature) in the North Atlantic (Della-Marta et al 2007). Recent decades have been characterized by a Summer drying trend and the last ten years by the occurrence of devastating drought events, such as in the Summers of 2003 in Western Mediterranean and 2007 in Central Mediterranean with climatic conditions that were not unlike those simulated for the period 2071-2100 (Pal et al. 2004, Giorgi 2002, Tolika et al. 2007). In general, when also increase of temperature is considered and the spatial and temporal evolution of drought conditions is analyzed using the Self Calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index, a clear trend towards drier conditions in most western and central Mediterranean regions (with the exception of the opposite trend in Northwestern Iberia and most of Turkey) is found (Sousal et al. 2011). However, a precise evaluation of the future evolution of droughts on a Mediterranean scale is not available, yet, and there are problems involved with a robust assessment of future trends (Orlowsky and Seneviratne 2013), which need to be overcome. Simulations of precipitation for the end of the 21st century agree in identifying the Summer (June, July, August) season as one for which changes in precipitation are most pronounced and the decrease in seasonal regional totals will be much stronger than during the other three seasons (see 3.2). Inter-annual variability generally increases for precipitation in all seasons (more in Summer than during the rest of the year) so that the rainfall distribution is broader than in the reference period and with a pronounced asymmetry (Fig. 5-9).

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Fig. 5-9. Normalized distribution of summer precipitation anomalies over Southern Europe. The A2 scenario in the AR4-WG1 (2007). (After Giogi and Coppola 2009)

The decrease of precipitation, associated with the Summer temperature increase (see 2.3), is expected to produce longer droughts than nowadays, beginning in Spring and extending after September even in the North of the region. (Beniston et al. 2004, Giorgi 2002, Giorgi and Bi 2005, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Giorgi and Coppola 2009, AR5-WG1 2013). Comparisons between results from regional climate model simulations for the end of the 21st century suggest an intense future drying of the Mediterrranean in Summer (Pal et al. 2004, Giorgi 2002, Giorgi and Coppola 2009). Warming and Spring soil moisture decreases are the main drivers of Summer drying. According to this mechanism, a decrease of

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precipitation and enhanced evaporation in Spring lead to reduced soil moisture in Summer, which, in turn, reduces evapostranspiration. Evapotranspiration is not then capable of an effective cooling, so that during a drought the net balance of solar and infrared radiation strongly increases the soil temperature. This process may be further amplified by positive feedback between soil moisture and temperature which are increased by drought conditions, whose magnitude is however, not well known. All these factors imply that the Mediterranean region is especially vulnerable to Summer drought in future climate conditions (Schär et al. 2004, Rowell and Jones 2006, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Giorgi and Coppola 2009, AR5-WG1 2013). Extreme precipitation is a critical hazard for the Mediterranean region (Ulbrich et al., 2012), which currently, is largely investigated in the scientific literature. Intense precipitation events are frequent in the NorthWestern Mediterranean in Autumn and Winter (expecially along the coast, Toreti et al., 2010, Reale and Lionello 2013) and rare in the Eastern Mediterranean. Although in past centuries, their history has been carefully analysed in Spain, the best known are the most recent events, especially in Spain and France. It is considered that the most intense measured episode occurred in October 1940 in the high Vallespir valley, French Pyrenées, where between 1200 and 1840 mm of rain have fallen during four days, including 840 and 1000 mm within 24 hours (Llasat et al. 2005, Rivrain 1997, Sanchez-Gomez 2008). The only observed significant trend of heavy rainfall beyond the 95th percentile for all seasons is negative and has occurred in the North and the South of the Iberian Peninsula during the second half of the 20th century (Rodrigo 2009). In general, there is no consolidated consensus on whether the number of intense rainfall events will increase or decrease during this century in the Mediterranean region (Lionello et al. 2006b, Pinto et al. 2006), but there are some indications that extreme precipitations are becoming more intense (Ulbricht et al. 2012 for a review) and this tendency would continue in the future (Planton et al. 2012, Gualdi et al., 2013), in spite of the progressively drier Mediterranean environment.

4. Conclusions According to the results of climate simulations (AR4-WG1 2007, Giorgi and Lionello 2008, Solomon et al. 2009, Giorgi and Coppola 2009, AR5-WG1 2013), by the end of the 21st century the climate of all areas in the Mediterranean region will be different from the present condition. The

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warm season will be the most affected one, becoming hotter and drier. The intensity of drought episodes and the size of areas affected by them will increase with respect to the present climate with, possibly, desertification in the Southern part of the region. However, to a lower degree, Winter as well will be warmer and equally or a little less rainy over most of the “Mediterranean”. Warming along this century will superimpose to the present average temperatures distribution, which in the Northern hemisphere decreases from the Tropic of Cancer towards the North Pole, and determine a general shift to the north of each of the current climate types occupying the region. With the simulations of the A1B and A2 scenarios arid spaces (Köppen BS) should stretch at the expense of the semi-arid ones (Köppen BW), which, in turn, will replace the Mediterranean climate areas (Köppen Cs) particularly in Africa and southern European peninsulas (Gao and Giorgi 2007; de Castro et al. 2008). But according to the RCP4.5 scenario the northward expense would be more limited because the associated temperature increase and rainfall decrease would be smaller (AR5-WG1 2013). Projected climate change, however, will not consist of a simple replacement between two climate types of the Köppen classification, because in each climate type the mean amplitude of the temperature and precipitation annual cycles and the duration and intensity of the warm season drought will increase, since temperatures and precipitation changes will be smaller in the cold season than in the warm. The warming and the increase of the warm season drought around the Mediterranean would have an important influence on many economic sectors (agriculture, tourism) and natural landscapes with more drought and heat resistant plants in each vegetation level, shrub landscapes spreading instead of forests, and possibly desertification in the southern areas of the region. Agriculture productions and all the activities based on water availability or needing water supply will have to adapt to new climate conditions (AR4-WG1 2007, AR5-WG1 2013).

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CHAPTER SIX PLACE DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN EXPOSURE TO ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS IN EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN CITIES: THE CASE OF TEL-AVIV-JAFFA IZHAK SCHNELL, ODED POTCHTER AND YARON YAAKOV

Acknowledgments We thank the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) for financing the study on which this article is based.

Abstract The paper investigates human exposure to a set of environmental factors—noise, CO, thermal load and social stress—on human sense of discomfort in Mediterranean cities based on the case study of Tel Aviv. A special focus is devoted to differences in human exposure to environmental factors among types of places in the city like streets, parks, shopping and leisure, activity centers and accommodations. The study is based on measurements extracted from sensors located on subjects' bodies and short questionnaires while they had performed their daily routines in the city. The study shows that social stress and noise are the main environmental factors that strain young healthy people in Tel Aviv. Thermal load strains subjects mainly in winter time during which the subjects were more sensitive to both cold and hot weather in relation to summer time to which they adapted easier due to low variability in weather conditions.

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The study also shows that crowded places like indoor and outdoor shopping centers etc. were the more straining types of places while parks and coffee shops were the more relaxing types of places in the city.

1. Introduction Cities are increasingly exposed to critical conditions of thermal stress, air pollution and various other stressors like noise and crowding (Evance 1983). Research has focused in particular on stresses associated with extreme weather conditions of either cold or heat loads, as those are often experienced in the Mediterranean. Cities in the East Mediterranean Basin are particularly sensitive to effects of atmospheric events due to the crossing of three main pollution sources: natural emission from Saharan dust, air pollutants from Europe and the Balkans and air pollutants from the local set of megacities like Istanbul (Kanakidou et al. 2011). Understanding the impact of environmental factors on a generalized sense of discomfort is important given these factors affect morbidity, mortality, health and stress (Ulrich 1991, Nastos and Matzarakis 2012). The literature widely recognizes the impact of thermal stress on sense of discomfort (Fouillet et al. 2006, Vouterakos et al. 2012). Thermal stresses are influenced by climatic factors like radiation, temperature, humidity and wind, with different thermal stress indices combining part or all of them with some secondary factors (Fanger et al. 1977, Sohar 1980, Clausen et al. 1993, Hoppe 1999, Epstein et al. 2000, Toftum 2002, Pellerin and Candas 2003, Candas and Dufour 2005, Nastos and Matzarakis 2012). The impact of air pollutants on health and stress has also been widely recorded (Vouterakos et al. 2012), leading to the articulation of several alternative air quality indices that include five main pollutants: CO; NOx; O3; SO2; PM10,2.5 (See details in Poupkou et al. 2011). In addition, noise is known to increase human strains and stresses (Topf 2000, Blomkvist et al. 2005, Hweddi, 2007). Foraster et al. (2011) examined the correlation between road noise, NO2 and cardiovascular disease and found that the substantial correlation between the long-term average of traffic-related 24h noise levels and the annual average of NO2 concentrations, suggests that noise could confound the long-term effects of traffic air pollution on cardiovascular health and vice-versa. However, such studies are based either on controlled indoor situations (Clausen et al. 1993, Federspiel 2001, 2002, Toftum 2002, Fang et al. 2004) or on few static monitoring stations distributed in fixed places in the city. In addition, in most of these cases, the impact of only one or two environmental factors on the sense of discomfort has been calculated

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(Hanckok 1985, Pellerin and Candas 2003). Recently, several studies have revealed that such monitoring stations tend to underestimate the actual levels of environmental factors in particular places in the city and that they are not sensitive to indoor environmental conditions (Adamms et al. 2001; Duci et al. 2003, Gullver and Briggs 2004, Kauer et al. 2005). Other studies stressed the differences in the concentrations of environmental pollution in different areas of the city, depending on the urban morphology and land uses (Adamms et al. 2001, Kaur et al. 2005, 2007). Cohen and Potchter (2010, 2012) show significant differences in exposure to noise, selected air pollutants and thermal stress between streets and urban parks as well as among parks with different vegetation. A sensitivity to differences among types of places and particular sites in the city can be deduced from models that consider the impact of urban morphology and distribution of sources of stressors (Mensink 2008, Ho and Clappier 2011, Matins 2012) or be extracted from direct measurements on the subjects' bodies while they perform their daily activities (Schnell et. al. 2011). This study deals with the human exposure to environmental factors in the case of the city of Tel Aviv, as a case study for cities located in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin. The synoptic/regional circulation during summer favored long-range transport of anthropogenic air pollutants released from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Central Mediterranean region towards the Eastern Mediterranean, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. Saharan dust transport follows the path towards the Eastern and Central Mediterranean Region mostly during the transient seasons (Astitha et al. 2008). The climatic weather conditions of the Mediterranean cause life routines that encourage outdoor activities. The goal of this article is to characterize the environmental conditions to which, residents of an Eastern Mediterranean city like Tel-Aviv-Jaffa are exposed to in the course of their daily lives. We analyse the association between sets of thermal and air pollutants, noise and social load, and subjects' sense of discomfort in different places in the city. We differentiate between varying degrees of sense of discomfort defined as human subjective response to immediate environmental conditions and recorded in different types of places in the city, hypothesizing that the sense of discomfort increases with rising levels of major thermal load, air pollution, noise and social stressors. We also hypothesize that places that are highly crowded and exposed to hot and cold weather and to sources of air pollution are perceived to demonstrate higher levels of discomfort.

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2. Data and Methods The study was conducted in the Mediterranean city of Tel Aviv, Israel, located at 32°06'N and 34°47'E. The city is situated on a plain along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Tel Aviv has a population of 404,400 and is the core of the largest metropolitan area in Israel, comprising a population of 3.1 million (Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010). The climate of Tel Aviv is subtropical Mediterranean, with a rainy winter and dry summer, defined as Csa according to the Köppen classification (Potchter and Saaroni 1998). Tel Aviv’s climate is characterized by two main seasons: a hot, humid, stable Summer (average temperature 23-30°C, average relative humidity 72-83%) and a mild wet Winter (average temperature 8-23°C, average relative humidity 55-60%) with stable weather episodes (Bitan and Rubin 1994). The study analyses the impact of the environmental factors of thermal stress, air pollution, noise and social stress on human sense of discomfort. A breakthrough in monitoring methods became possible with the introduction of micro-sensors that are mobile and accurate enough to be carried by subjects who are monitored while they perform their routine daily life in the city. Schnell et al. (2011) offered a methodology for an urban ecological study that examines the impacts of a wide range of environmental factors on sense of discomfort. The researchers measured subjects' direct exposure to six environmental factors on participants' bodies—noise, CO, temperature, humidity, temperature radiation and wind—while the participants performed their daily routine activities. The measurements were accompanied by questionnaires, which recorded the subjects’ thermal perception and social stress. Participants followed a pre-determined route that crossed the inner city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa from the north-eastern side to the south-western side of the inner city back and forth. They started at the Tel Aviv University campus at the north of the city crossing the inner city up to Jaffa in the south and back to the campus. They visited at least two different sites of each type of place (Fig. 6-1). Participants were fitted with micromeasuring instruments to measure degrees of CO, noise, air temperature and relative humidity. In addition we describe the distribution of other pollutants and thermal factors in the preliminary analysis of the data.

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Fig. 6-1. The study route in Tel Aviv Metropolis

We include in that analysis data for global radiation, wind speed, SO2, dust PM10, Ozon and NOx that were taken from the closest of the four monitoring stations of the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection: one positioned in the north of the city, another in the city center the third in the south and the forth at the east. The mean radiant temperature (Tmrt) was calculated using the RayMan model (Matzarakis et al. 2007). In total, 36 healthy non-smoking participants at the ages of 20-40 who did not take drugs took part in the research. Each of the six experiments included a group of six participants. Two groups were tested in the Winter, two in the Summer and one in each intermediate season. All groups and all members in each group followed the same route, selected to represent a typical daily course of young, healthy people who perform their daily routine in the inner city (Schnell et al. 2011). The members of each group performed the experiment for two sequential days, producing 20 measurements each day for each person in different sites around the city. In total, we produced a file of 1150 valid cases of measurement, in which

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we collected data regarding the environmental conditions in these sites and the participants' sense of discomfort (290 measurements were excluded due to missing values in at least one of the data). In analyzing the differences among the various types of places, they were classified into eleven types according to their expected tendency to produce environmental risks: main streets, side streets, outdoor markets, shopping malls, restaurants and coffee shops, beaches, parks, University campuses, dormitories, home apartments and pubs. The number of visits to each type of place is summarized in Table 6-1 showing that at least 50 visits were performed to each type of place except for coffee shops and the beaches, which were less frequently visited. Table 6-1. Number of visits by type of place Type of place Main streets Side streets Open markets Shopping malls Coffee shops Campus Seaside Urban Parks Dormitories Apartments Pubs

Number of visits 102 50 52 187 12 222 19 76 54 177 50

The sense of environmental discomfort defined as human subjective response to immediate environmental conditions was rated by asking the participants to what extent they felt comfort or discomfort in response to their immediate surroundings. Subjects were asked to grade their feeling on a one hundred-point scale with 1 representing highly comfortable feeling and 100 highly uncomfortable feeling. In the same way, the participants were asked to grade their sense of social stress due to the presence of other people in their immediate surroundings. Other environmental factors were measured by attaching to their bodies microsensors that did not limit free movement (for further details and verification of the sensors’ accuracy, see Schnell et al. 2011). In studying the impact of air pollutants on sense of discomfort, we were able to include only CO. Concentrations of carbon monoxide were measured by a

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Drager Pac 3 with a CO sensor. Accurate portable sensors were not available for the other pollutants. The analysis was based on the description of the distribution of the main environmental factors and sense of discomfort. We classified the 1150 measurement points into 11 types of places and we analyzed the error bars and ANOVA (SPSS 19) for the distribution of sense of discomfort and the environmental factors among the types of places. At a second level we analyzed the multiple regressions between the average levels of each environmental factor in each type of place and the distribution of sense of discomfort in these places.

3. Results The distribution of the sense of discomfort ranged around a mean of 30 and a median of 20. In more than half of the events (55%), the participants experienced low levels of sense of discomfort (1%), 52.000 in Greece (>1%), and 89.000 in Portugal (>2%). For the first decade of the 21st century, burnt surfaces were smaller in the southern and eastern part of the basin than on the northern shore. Their proportions for EC countries were generally lower than in the 20th century, except for some years (see below), and sometimes decreased since the 90's (France, Italy). A detailed analysis of the recent evolution in Mediterranean France is displayed in Fig. 7-5 (http://www.promethee.com (see 2.4). In France, after 1990 a 60% drop of annual burnt surfaces was observed, except for year 2003. Good results for the last period come from the improvement on prevention policies, and the efforts to reduce the time lag between ignition and firemen's arrival, to less than 20 minutes. The static and mobile alert network have been made denser, and the active watch of Firemen Companies reinforced. Such a fall between the two following periods proves the importance of prevention to control fire. It is all the more significant since the Fire Danger Level1 has sharply increased between 1958 and 2006 in Southern France, as well as in some parts of Spain and Italy, and even more in North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Tunisia (Camia et al., 2008).

3.3. Recent wildfires In the Mediterranean area, three recent years were exceptional for burnt surfaces and fire patterns: 2003 in France and Spain, 2003 and 2005 in Portugal where nearly 1 million hectares burnt, about one fourth of the country's total forest and matorral area, and 2007 in Greece (EC 2009, FAO 2006). In 2003 in South-Eastern France, fires burnt the largest surfaces in the last 30 years (60.000 ha), despite prevention policies which had proved to be effective since 1990 (Fig 7-5). Special climate conditions included the absence of rainfall from May to August combined with temperatures from 2 to 4°C over normal values and associated with a very dry air coming from Africa. Record levels of soil dryness were registered in July and August (Fischer et al. 2007). The new point was the development of large wildfires without strong winds (Promethée 2009).

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Fig. 7-5. Annual number of fires and burnt surfaces in Mediterranean France (1973-2013) Source: http://www.promethee.com

Three heat waves hit successively the Balkan Peninsula in 2007. The last one (August 24-27) caused the very spectacular fires in the Peloponnese, where 177.000 ha of forest vanished (Fig.7-6). As in 2003, a severe drought occurred in July and August due to several months of rainfall deficit and very high temperatures (Tolika et al. 2009). Accordingly, large and uncontrolled wildfires hit Australia in 2009 and Russia in 2010, each time during a heat wave, considered as among the worst ever, demonstrating that extreme temperatures were among the important causes of dramatic fires, at least at the same level as severe droughts.

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Fig. 7-6. Forest fires in Peloponnese, Greece (24-27 August 2007) according to MODIS satellite

3.4. Drought-fire interaction Mediterranean forests may be balanced with an average fire regime in a given landscape when this regime is stable. Fire regimes are the complex blending of an irregular fire frequency combined with fire severity2 varying in time, between fires and spatially within a given fire (Faivre et al. 2011), the balance being considered only at large scales (landscape, region). When fire frequency or severity are increasing, forest vegetation changes for smaller and lighter-canopied stands, and may even shift towards matorrals or steppes according to regressive successional dynamics.

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Besides visible above ground phenomenon, many key components of the overall ecosystem sustainability occur below ground (Neary et al. 1999). Although adapted to drought in Mediterranean countries, functional groups playing a prominent role in soil quality (fungi, bacteria, micro and macro-fauna) are severely impacted by repeated water stress, as demonstrated in South-Eastern France during 2003-2007 drought (Vennetier et al., 2008b). In forests and matorrals dominated by cork oak, repeated drought stopped or reversed the positive evolution of forest and soil observed after the fires preceding it. The decline was faster and stronger than in unburnt places, showing a significant interaction between drought and fire impacts. Fauna population size and species diversity were cut by ten and five respectively during this severe drought episode. About no activity of most of these species could be observed for two years, while usually a few months only are necessary to recover at least a small activity after fire. Consequently, soil surface physical quality remained poor for years as no restructuration or enrichment by bioturbation occurred. The diversity and potential activity of bacteria processing the nitrogen cycle, vital for plant growth and catabolic functions showed a sharp fall (Guénon 2011). Large proportions of the new shoots from branches and stumps dried. Cork oak resprouting rate from main branches was reduced to 10-30% of the normal, jeopardizing the future canopy, and soil cover was not completed before 3 years instead of one or two. Pine seedlings, born just after the fire, disappeared nearly completely. The biodiversity peak normally observed 3-5 years after fire, due to the boom of light demanding species, was far lower than usual (Vennetier et al. 2008b). Reciprocally, drought had an all the more significant impact as the number of fires in the previous decades was high: higher tree mortality rates, faster and more severe depletion of soil fauna populations and diversity, deeper impact on nitrogen processing bacteria. Although both, stress tolerant, species resistant to drought are not always the same with those adapted to fire. At the same time, the number of species per functional group is reduced by each disturbance. In such a way that, when both disturbances are combined, some functional groups may completely disappear because of the lack of redundancies, or their population may be at very low levels to be effective. Practically, four successive years of drought proved to be a critical threshold for the resilience of the forest ecosystem to fire, as well as four fires in 50 years, a limit for the resilience to droughts.

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4. Which prospects for the end of the 21st century? Present Global Climate Models simulate for the end of this century a global warming (see Douguédroit et Lionello, 2012) leading to a modification of the potential distribution area for all plant species. As temperatures generally decrease from the tropic of Cancer to the North Pole, their temporal increase induces a progressive northward shift of isotherms, changing the spatial limits of species defined in the 20th century (Douguédroit 2008).

4.1. On the scale of the Mediterranean Basin The criterion used to set the limits of Mediterranean vegetation levels is the minimum temperature of the coldest month (Quezel and Médail, 2003). In all scenarios proposed by the IPCC AR5-WG1 to project climate temperature in the end of the 21st century, the surface temperature in the Mediterranean Basin increases significantly (0.6 to 4°C, mean scenario 2.3°C) and faster (25%) than the average global warming (Christensen et al. 2013). As minimum temperatures rise faster than the mean (Moisselin et al., 2002), projected changes fit with the temperature range of one vegetation level. This should result in a general northward or upward shift of climate conditions of one vegetation level magnitude, and the replacement of each level by the lower one. The infra-Mediterranean one would widely spread in countries of the southern shore. The thermoMediterranean one would gain ground on the European shore, excepted in the south of the peninsulas, invaded by the hyper-thermo-Mediterranean conditions as most of the African coast. Rainfall projections are consistent in projecting precipitation reduction by the end of this century. At the Basin scale, the projected reduction for each additional degree centigrade is among the strongest in the world (Christensen et al. 2013). The main concern is about a more intense and longer warm season water stress and a northward extension in aridity. Warming added to rainfall decrease in Spring and Summer makes the conditions of present warm season shift northward. This coheres with the analysis of potential migration of climate zones and the increase simulated for various aridity indices in the Mediterranean by the end of the 21st century (Gao and Giorgi, 2008), even if they can be considered as too pessimist according to the fifth IPCC Report (Christensen et al. 2013). Climate change is clearly causing temperature and aridity to pass critical thresholds for many species, even for the most resistant ones at their southern limit (El Khorchani et al.

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2007) particularly during scorching heat waves (Tolika et al. 2009) ; the frequency of occurrence may become critical for vegetation.

4.2. An example on local scale

1: thermo-Mediterranean bio-climate, 2 and 3: lower and upper parts of the mesoMediterranean bioclimate, 4: supra-Mediterranean bioclimate. 5 potential distribution area of Scots pine and its associated relic al-pine flora Fig. 7-7. Provence with the bioclimatic index of Vennetier et al. (2008): end of the 20th century.

The bioclimatic index designed by Vennetier et al. (2008) for Provence (South-Eastern France) was computed from climatic, geographic and topographic variables, and mapped after being split into four classes, matching limits between thermo, meso and supra-mediterranean bio climates (Fig. 7-7) and projected using an average +2°C warming in mean annual temperature, -30% summer rainfall, -20% spring rainfall (Fig. 7-8), corresponding for temperature to the RCP4.5 scenario of IPCC 2013, and to the reduction in rainfall observed during the period 1998-2007 in this region compared to the previous 30-year mean (1968-1997).

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1: thermo-Mediterranean bio-climate, 2 and 3: lower and upper parts of the mesoMediterranean bioclimate, 4: supra-Mediterranean bioclimate. 5 potential distribution area of Scots pine and its associated relic al-pine flora Fig. 7-8. Maps of Western Provence with the bioclimatic index of Vennetier et al. (2008): +2°C mean annual temperature, -30% of summer rainfall and -20% of spring rainfall

Pinus silvestris potential area, limited to the top of the supra Mediterranean class with related alpine and meso-European relict species in the 20th century, disappears from the map, confirming collapsing growth trends measured in this region at the end of the 20th century (Vila et al. 2008).

4.3. Forests at risk in the 21st century 4.3.1. Climatic issues One of the risks of climate change in the 21st century is that plants could not adapt to the fast changes of their environment. On both sides of the Mediterranean basin, forest resistance and resilience depends on the ability of trees and other key components of forest ecosystems to adapt to the shift of one temperature level and to a far longer warm season drought.

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The measured impacts of 2003 heat wave and of the following severe droughts allow assessing the consequences on forests of equivalent or even worse episodes in the future. The evidence of a breakdown in their health status and growth, as well as observed locally massive diebacks, let us be doubtful of the possible local adaptation of forest trees and vegetation as a whole in the Mediterranean basin. For vegetation the benefits of earlier budburst and later growth stop (Gordo 2010) are compensated by adverse consequences of longer and hotter warm seasons. Even warmer winters may be bad news: when temperatures are too high, evergreen species must maintain respiration and a significant physiological activity at high energy costs. Such a depletion of their reserves in winter time when photosynthesis in not effective enough is detrimental to their resistance to frost (Morin et al. 2007) parasites and diseases, as well as to spring growth. A lack of cold in Winter (successions of warm and cold periods) may lead to reversible cavitation in the vessels, decreasing their conductivity at bud break (Cruiziat et al. 2002), and may delay budburst (Falusi and Calamassi 1990). According to the bioclimatic model calibrated for Mediterranean vegetation by Vennetier et al. (2008), a 20% reduction of Spring or Summer rainfall would correspond to a 4 to 5% turnover in flora composition at local scale. An increase of 1°C would be more disturbing (7% turnover), and combined with a 10% loss of Spring or Summer rainfall could change 10% of plant composition. With the conditions observed in South-Eastern France in the exceptionally hot and dry decade 1998-2007, 25% of the flora should have change at a given place, having thus, a very deep impact on biodiversity. This is consistent with previous studies: Bakkenes et al (2002) for 2050 in Europe and Malcolm et al. (2006) forecasted for the whole Mediterranean basin that by 2100 local extinction rates would range from 11 to 43%. However, plant composition changed less in the last decade (12% cf. 1.2.2) than forecasted by the model (25%), proving a partial resistance to climate variations. This resistance may be better in complex landscape structures, showing a patchwork of bioclimatic classes and site conditions. Mesophilous species may survive in the most favourable sites like valleys, north aspects and on deep soils, although they are more severely impacted than drier sites (Vennetier et al. 2010), and come back in good years. Moreover, the Mediterranean flora is particularly adapted to stress. Many species, and particularly those selected by fire, possess large amounts of underground reserves to resprout or long lifespan soil seed-banks. Their

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total elimination from large areas needs time. On the other hand, xerothermophilous plants are already scattered in the hinterland and at high elevation, taking advantage of steep south aspects, shallow and rocky soils, or simply remaining from former degrading land uses and fires. They can easily spread from these spots when mesophilous species become less competing around because of climate change, accelerating locally the flora turnover. Forest trees, and more generally woody species with long reproduction cycles, should not either follow the shift of their potential niche envelops. Most of them have short dissemination distances (Clark et al., 1998). Even the fastest northward progressions assessed for the end of the last ice ages (Delacourt et al., 1987) are five to ten times slower than the northward shift expected for the bioclimatic limits in the 21st century. For species with light wind-spread seeds, competition between young seedlings and existing vegetation may slower the potential long distance progression. Moreover, many obstacles as urban or cultivated areas, degraded ecosystems and large communication networks (highways, canals, regulated rivers), stand in the way of migrating species in present landscapes. In mountains, where bioclimatic envelops are compressed by fast elevational gradients and strong orientation contrasts, biological distances are far shorter. Upward migrations may be easier, and accordingly seem more successful, as already observed in many regions (Walther et al., 2005; Lenoir, 2008). In Southern France, young Aleppo pines were recently recorded close to 1000m in elevation on southern slopes near the sea, 200m over its limit in previous censuses. 4.3.2. Fire issues One other main issue is the multiplication of wildfires with recurrent scorching heats in summer and long droughts starting in Spring, as experienced at the beginning of the 21st century (cf. 2.3). At the end of this century, the temperature of recent heat waves could become the standard conditions (4-5°C for the mean value and 9°C for the 90th percentile over the summer mean temperature of the 20th century last decades (see Douguédroit and Lionello 2014). In 2007 extensive fires occurred in Greece when the mean daily temperature passed the 50th and 75th percentile of A1B scenario (period 2070-2100) during respectively 9 and 5 days (Tolika et al., 2009). Southern shores are particularly concerned as drought, already severe, should reach critical levels.

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Climatic conditions projected over the Mediterranean basin by the end of this century would lead very likely to a risk of increasing large fire frequencies. Then, forest canopy may not recover at many places, particularly when it is dominated by obligate seeders (as conifers) which will not be able to reach maturity between two successive burnings. The landscapes would then be dominated by a mosaic of matorrals and herbaceous vegetation types.

5. Conclusion With climate change, the high probability of longer and repeated droughts is, by itself, a threat for present Mediterranean forests. Scattered to generalized forest dieback is one of the most serious emerging consequence (Allen et al. 2010). Increasing duration and severity of water stresses should also lead to more frequent fires in already fire prone environments, and to the apparition of fire in usually fire-free regions located in altitude. This harmful evolution of fire regimes seriously jeopardizes Mediterranean ecosystems. But the interaction between fire and repeated drought may degrade forests far faster than expected from a separate assessment of the impact of each disturbance. Scenic Mediterranean landscapes, one of the main stays of tourism development, a key issue for the economy in some countries, are at risk by the end of the 21st century. Other critical ecosystems services may vanish with forest surface shrinking.

Notes 1 The fire danger level is a daily fire risk index calculated from past and present weather, vegetation and soil water content and vegetation type. It is used in many countries in the world and at European level to adapt continuously in time and space fire suppression means and population information to the level of risk. 2 The fire danger level is a daily fire risk index calculated from past and present weather, vegetation and soil water content and vegetation type. It is used in many countries in the world and at European level to adapt continuously in time and space fire suppression means and population information to the level of risk.

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impact-on-tree-architectural-development-and-leaf-area (accessed May 25, 2014) Vicente-Serrano, S.M., Lasanta, T., Gracia, C., 2010. Aridification determines changes in forest growth in Pinus halepensis forests under semiarid Mediterranean climate conditions, Agric. For. Meteorol., (150) 4: 614-628. Vila B, Vennetier M, Ripert C, Chandioux O, Liang E.Y, Guibal F, Torre F (2008) Has global change induced divergent trends in radial growth of Pinus sylvestris and Pinus halepensis at their bioclimatic limit? The example of the Sainte-Baume forest (south-east France). Ann For Sci 65 709 Walther .R, Beissner S, Burga CA (2005). Trends in the upward shift of alpine plants. J Veg Sci 5 16: 541-548 Zaitchik B.F. ; Macalady A.K. ; Bonneau L.R. ; Smith R.B. (2006) Europe's 2003 heat wave: A satellite view of impacts and landatmosphere feedbacks. International Journal of Climato-logy, vol. 26, n° 6, p. 743-769

CHAPTER EIGHT MEDITERRANEAN EXTREME FLOODS AND FLOOD RISK: THE HYDROGEOMORPHOLOGICAL METHOD JEAN-LOUIS BALLAIS

Abstract Nowadays, in the valleys surrounding rivers, the problematic of flood hazard leads to observe familiar functional floodplain objects from a point of view slightly different from those generally admitted in fluvial dynamics. Interest in microtopography and its variations thus allows us to distinguish up to four beds in a Mediterranean watercourse valley. Currently under development, the hydrogeomorphological method already has produced new results with the description of exceptional high waterbeds in some watercourses in Mediterranean France and Tunisia. Building up of numerous Mediterranean functional flood plains began during Classical Antiquity. The high water bed finegrained formations which have accumulated during the Middle Ages and the Modern and Contemporary periods. Using isotopic dating, we were able to show that this trend goes on during the second part of the 20th century and should continue in the future. Those formations are mainly produced by soil erosion due to cultural practices.

1. Introduction Inside the watercourses’ functional alluvial plain, two forms of fluvial beds have been precociously recognized in temperate environments (Leopold et al., 1964; Derruau, 1962): the channel and the floodplain. The channel concept has rapidly appeared very fruitful due to the modelling possibilities it allowed (Birot, 1981) and in this way it has given a basis for several hundreds of fluvial activity researches (Bravard, Petit, 1997)

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But the floodplain has remained, for a long time, a neglected one because of the complexity to have it modelized; this has been shown in 1978 by Lewin, then by Gupta (1983) and then by Nanson and Croke (1992). In France, a new interest for fluvial valleys forms prone to be flooded has been provoked by the natural hazards problematic introduced by the Tazieff law (1982, July 13th) (Masson et al., 1996; Garry et al., 2002; Ballais et al., 2005b). The needed precision of the request studies (scales from 1/20,000 to 1/5,000) has shown two new forms of geomorphologic objects: the intermediate flow channel (Masson et al., 1996; Ballais et al., 2009), then the exceptional high water bed (Chave, 2003; Chave, Ballais, 2006). Those beds present more or less important risks for people and goods, varying from maximum risk in the intermediate flow bed, up to the weaker risk in the exceptional high water bed. Historical low flow bed and high water bed evolution allows foreseeing those risks evolution in future decades. The hydrogeomorphological method and mapping have been invented in Mediterranean France (Masson, 1983; Masson et al., 1996; Garry et al., 2002; Ballais et al., 2005b; Ballais, 2006; Ballais et al., 2011a) probably because of the very precise relations between the different beds which are due to the much contrasted regime of the rivers. This new method has become necessary because the traditional statistics hydrological-hydraulic methods, used worldwide have shown their limits in the case of catastrophic floods in Nîmes (1988) and Vaison-la-Romaine (1992). Indeed, the result of models and the accuracy of calculated water lines were not always satisfactory, because of the lack of measuring on some watersheds and also sometimes the insufficient quality and number of data (rainfall, heights of water) with the exception of well known big rivers. As soon as in the 1930s, those same limits have made the United States decide to abandon the probability method and to define a flood hierarchy: Intermediate Regional Flood, Standard Project Flood and Maximum Probable Flood (Ward, 1978), without reference to the morphology of the functional alluvial plain.

2. Hydrogeomorphology and inundability Only watercourses of an order greater than 2 (according to Strahler, 1952) will be generally examined here because the smaller ones present specific problems (Ballais et al., 2009; Mascareñas, 2012). On this type of watercourses, the main dynamic is the longitudinal one because it allows setting up the functional alluvial plain different units. In

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the transfer zones (Schumm, 1977), the logical series of different beds is observed: low flow bed, intermediate flow channel, ordinary high water bed and exceptional high water bed. They constitute the functional alluvial plain or the prone to be flooded zone. Several alluvial terraces (glacial or post-glacial) are as well observed (Fig. 8-1).

1: flood silts, 2: sandy-gravelly alluviums of the functional alluvial plain, 3: sandygravelly alluviums of the alluvial terrace, 4: slope L1: low flow bed, L2: intermediate flow bed, L3: high water bed T1: limit of the non flooding swellings, T2: limit of the frequent floods, T3: limit of the rare to exceptional floods Fig. 8-1. Topographic relations between the different beds (Ballais et al., 2005b, modified)

2.1. Low flow bed or low flow channel The low flow bed must be distinguished from the “bande active” (braided rivers) (Bravard, Petit, 2000), mainly characterized by the lack of vegetation, and from the “channel” that more often gathers at once low flow bed and intermediate flow bed. In much contrasted fluvial regime zones as in the Mediterranean basin, it can include a low water channel during dry season. Numerous river work arrangements (reprofiling, corrections) modify the low flow bed and, when it exists, a part or all of the intermediate flow bed. They have been employed since a long time to protect cultivated high water beds from the more frequent floods. Then, they have been progressively generalized to a great part of the fluvial network. So, the low flow bed morphology has been radically modified from reprofiling with cleaning out or earthworks without changing the course up to this line complete correction on some kilometres or more. More localized works have been also frequently performed to protect threatened towns such as at

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Arles (France) (Allard, 1992), Sidi Bel Abbès (Algerie) (Hallouche et al., 2010) or Sfax (Tunisia) (A. Daoud, 2013).

2.2. Intermediate flow channel In studying intermediate flow channel, the main difficulties are that it has a discontinuous form along the fluvial continuum and it does not exist along all the watercourses. Indeed, it has been proved that the intermediate flow channel is present along numerous Mediterranean zone watercourses (Masson et al., 1996). Intermediate flow channel (Delorme-Laurent, 2007; Delorme et al., 2013) is a horizontal or sub-horizontal surface whose detailed topography is very irregular. This irregularity is due to the presence of flood channels shaped by currents coming from the low flow bed. Those channels sometimes have either, active downcutting erosion forms or forms that are in the process of being built up. Thus, possible alluvial dynamics on this surface are numerous. Intermediate flow channels can equally have a more or less wide bench form so that they then look very similar to the high water bed. This is the case of the Nile River (Middle Egypt) or of the Asse River (Provence, France) (own observations). The riverine forest that grows on those surface conditions flows as well because it increases roughness: bushes and herbaceous comb out and considerably slow down those flows. It sometimes influences the intermediate flow channel topography because the flow is abruptly slowed down and part of its load is deposited when clearing the banks. This process allows the formation and the development of alluvial levees or bank rolls, mainly in concave bank (Schumm, 1968; Nanson, Beach, 1977). The different dynamics that allow the formation of this unit act upon its grain size distribution. Generally, the channels’ base is formed by very coarse material deposited at the flood maximum. Those coarse deposits are sometimes covered by end of flood deposits (silts and clays). On the Argent-Double River at Peyriac-Minervois (France), for example, the range of coarse elements (coarser than 2 mm) at the surface of the intermediate flow channel, can be higher than 72 %, something that proves a very strong hydrodynamism (Delorme-Laurent, 2007). Nevertheless, it must be noted that this unit size grading is mainly controlled by the substratum. Next to flooding, the slope that separates the intermediate flow channel from the high water bed is particularly significant. It is the result of recently spaced out floods and is very little evolutive at human life scale.

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When low flow channel bursts its banks, successive downcuttings of the high water bed sediments, alluviums deposits and channels evolution shape the slope. Its linear is often constituted by secant arcs of a circle succession. At the beginning, those arcs of a circle have a steep slope; this form often softens with times, in particular because of ploughings when the intermediate flow channel is partly cultivated (Masson et al., 1996). In the Mediterranean basin, intermediate flow channels can be eroded during the more important floods (that occur generally in Autumn or in Winter) and building up can occur during less important floods that more often occur in Autumn or in Winter but as well in Spring. The frequency of swellings that flood the intermediate flow channel is still poorly known because it requires long and homogeneous series of hydrologic data and topographic studies. For information only, the Ouvèze River intermediate flow channel has been flooded 12 times in 70 years at Vaison-la-Romaine and the Orbieu River some 52 times in 45 years at Luc-sur-Orbieu (France) (Delorme-Laurent, 2007). Generally, the downstream extremity of a water course is in relation with the oceanic base level. It is mainly controlled by the longitudinal slope decrease due to the rising of this level during the last millenaries. So, the decrease of the current velocity provokes the sedimentation of the clayey-silty suspended load. This load covers first the high water bed, then the intermediate flow channel and sometimes it can be accumulated even in the low flow channel. In this way, the functional alluvial plain is only made of the low flow channel and the high water bed. The geomorphological evolution can as well continue up to the change of the intermediate flow channel into a bank roll or an alluvial levee. Then, the so-called “lit en toit” (levees) is realized. It is characteristic of some coastal alluvial plains such as the Roussillon plains and the lower Aude Valley in France and the Pô Valley in Italy, for example. This situation is eminently dangerous, as far as flooding over the roll can provoke an avulsion (Ballais et al., 2011a). Otherwise, intermediate flow channels have been very often modified by material extractions, hydraulic work buildings as well as clearings. The result of those human interventions is a very diversified morphological transformation that can affect the whole surface of this unit as well as its external erosion slope. Survey and delimitation of the intermediate flow channel are thus, sometimes, difficult (Ballais et al., 2011a). In this way, the intermediate flow channel of a Mediterranean torrential regime watercourse must be considered as exposed to the maximal risk because it is a priori affected by all the flooding swellings, from the more frequent to the more exceptional, with the highest water

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heights and flow velocities of the functional alluvial plain (Ballais et al., 2011a).

2.3. High water bed and super floodplain The high water bed is a horizontal or sub horizontal surface that is separated from the intermediate flow channel by a slope. Its morphology is generally a great deal simple as this of an intermediate flow channel (Fig. 8-2). It is only submerged by the less frequent floods and the currents that go through this surface are generally slow.

Fig. 8-2. Section of the Orbieu River alluvial plain at « La Mourède », Ferrals-lesCorbières, France (Delorme-Laurent, 2007, modified)

The water strip is thus much thinner than the one on the low flow bed and the intermediate flow channel, in a way that coarse elements cannot be transported. Generally speaking, the high water bed is made of fine elements coming from the deposit of suspended load at the end of the flood. Due to those deposits, this surface is a very fertile unit. In natural conditions, it is colonized by riverine forest. Nevertheless, due to this fertility, the high water bed has been systematically cultivated since a long time so that the spontaneous vegetation has been nearly almost cleared (Ballais et al., 2011a). Some small depressions can be found in the high water bed; they correspond to channels. In those channels dynamic is stronger and can be proved by accumulation of coarser deposits. The high water bed external limit allows the definition of the most important past floods envelope curve which is the floods maximal

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extension limit we have defined as the liable to flooding zone limit. The high water bed external limit is then the limit that must be known with the maximal precision. Thus, the high water bed is the geomorphologic high water bed (Nanson, Croke, 1992; Beltrando, 2004; Cosandey, 2003) that must be clearly distinguished from the hydrologic high water bed (Bravard, Petit, 2000) which is only the surface covered by the centennial flood. As for the intermediate flow channel, frequency of high water beds flooding in the Mediterranean basin is poorly known. It seems as well very variable: the Ouvèze River high water bed has been flooded 4 times in 70 years at Vaison-la-Romaine and the Orbieu River high water bed has been flooded 9 times in 45 years at Luc-sur-Orbieu (Delorme-Laurent, 2007). About flood hazard, particular geomorphological situations are often present in the Mediterranean basin. They must prompt to be extra careful and consequently to qualify the high water bed with a high risk, even to classify it as a potential intermediate flow channel (Montagné, 2003).

2.4. Distinction between ordinary high water bed and exceptional high water bed In some cases, an exceptional high water bed intervened between the ordinary high water bed and the lower Upper Pleistocene or Holocene alluvial terrace. They have been described in France on the Gardon d’Anduze River (Aimon, 2003), on the Orbieu River (Chave, 2003), on the Tech River (Mussot, 1992), on the Cèze River (Delorme-Laurent, 2007), on the Cavu River (Lavigne, Lecoeur, in press) and probably on the Bayon River (Touabi, 2004). An exceptional high water bed has been recently observed on the Wadi Mekera (Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria; Direction de l’Hydraulique, 2006, Hallouche, 2008, Hallouche et al., 2010). But the widest and most continuous exceptional high water beds have been observed in Tunisia where they have been well dated mainly from the 1969 exceptional floods (Ballais, 1973; Fehri, 2003) and partly from the 1973 floods. The two types of high water beds have very similar localisation and characteristics (Fig. 8-2), but at the same time, are very distinct because they are separated by a 1 to 2 m marked sub vertical slope. When the high water bed is flooded, the whole floodplain is submerged, therefore it would be possible to establish an equivalence between those two terms. Nevertheless, the Nanson and Croke (1992) “genetic floodplain” seems to include the intermediate flow channel as well as the high water bed and Beltrando (2004) includes those two beds

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in the flood plain. Consequently, it is necessary to prefer “high water bed”. Otherwise, the exceptional high water bed could correspond to the Gupta (1983) “super floodplain”. Moreover it has been confirmed that, contrarily to some hasty generalizations (Bravard, Petit, 2000), the wadis can have a low flow bed, an intermediate flow channel, an ordinary high water bed and an exceptional high water bed. The presence of perennial flow is not a necessary criterion.

2.5. Alluvial terraces Alluvial terraces are topographic levels, more or less ancient, that are the testimony of passed hydrodynamism (Figs. 8-1 and 8-2). Therefore, those surfaces are no more liable to flooding (Coque, 1993; Campy, Macaire, 1989). In the Mediterranean basin, the younger generalized alluvial terraces have been accumulating during the last glacial period (Upper Pleistocene). Nevertheless, later alluvial terraces have accumulated along some watercourses, all around the Mediterranean Sea (Vita-Finzi, 1969). In Tunisia, in Algeria, in Libya (Ballais, 1995), in Morocco (Gartet et al., 2001), in France (Delorme-Laurent, 2007), along some Spanish watercourses (Uribelarrea, Benito, 2005) for example, an important historical downcutting has occurred in soft rocks and superficial formations and has produced one or two alluvial terraces (Ballais, 1991). Nevertheless, submersion of Pleistocene alluvial terraces has been seldom observed (Chave, 2003; Esposito et al., 2009). It has been proved this submersion was due to very specific situations. The first one is when the Pleistocene alluvial terrace went under the functional alluvial plain (Cèze River at Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Gardon River at Remoulins) (Ballais et al., 2009)). The second one is when downstream river work arrangements provoked a raising of the water line (Aude River at Villedaigne) (Esposito et al., 2009). The third one was due to floods deposits that have built up in the high water bed (cf. below) like on the Gardon River at Remoulins (Esposito et al. 2009) or on the Ouvèze River at Roaix downstream of Vaison-la-Romaine (Delorme, 2004).

2.6. Functional alluvial plain inundability Following floods that have harshly affected the Aude department (France) and the border departments (35 dead, damages: 500 million Euros) in November 1999 then those that took place in the Gard

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department (France) (28 dead, damages: 1.1 milliard Euros) in September 2002, the limits reached by the swellings have been compared to those first ones determined by hydrogeomorphological mapping. The goal was to test the aptness of this field methodology method (Chave, 2003; Esposito et al., 2009). Analyses revealed a good correspondence for those two limits for each of those two events. The comparison has been carried out on about 500 km long watercourses linear in French Languedoc, in watersheds the surface of which varies from some ten square kilometres to some hundred square kilometres. Limits are superposed on more than 80 % of this studied linear (Fig. 8-3). Consequently, those studies once more show the importance of knowing the functional alluvial plain external limit that corresponds to the limit of a November 1999 or September 2002 type flood. Therefore, when planning or setting up statutory documents it’s necessary to take this fact into account.

1: river floodplain 2: observed flooded areas beyond the flood plain Fig. 8-3. Superimposition of limits of river floodplain and flooded areas

2.7. Functional alluvial plain mapping in the Mediterranean basin Hydrogeomorphological mapping has been invented in Mediterranean France (Masson, 1983; Masson et al., 1996; Garry et al., 2002; Ballais et

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al., 2005b; Ballais, 2006) (Fig. 8-4). Since, the Mediterranean basin remained at the tip of the prone to flooding areas (hydro) geomorphological mapping. Although both, stress tolerant, species resistant to drought are not always the same with those adapted to fire. At the same time, the number of species per functional group is reduced by each disturbance. In such a way that, when both disturbances are combined, some functional groups may completely disappear because of the lack of redundancies, or their population may be at very low levels to be effective. Practically, four successive years of drought proved to be a critical threshold for the resilience of the forest ecosystem to fire, as well as four fires in 50 years a limit for the resilience to droughts.

Fig. 8-4. Hydrogeomorphological map of the Orbieu valley (Ferrals-les-Corbières, France) (Delorme-Laurent, Ballais, 2006, modified).

In Northern Italy, Luino had proposed a first black and white map (1998) that was limited to the delimitation of the alluvial plain that experiences strong floods. Then, with two colleagues (2002), it has carried out a geomorphological analysis to mapping the Oglio River prone to flooding areas by reconstructing the river evolution since 50 years with thorough study of different aerial photography missions coupled together with field work along the river which defines the prone to the flooding area and compares it to the September 1960 flooded area.

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In Algeria, a systematic mapping has been carried out at a 1/10 000 scale along the wadi Mekeraa by a French research consultancy and published by the Sidi Bel Abbès Wilaya (Direction de l’Hydraulique, 2006; Hallouche, 2007; Hallouche et al., 2010). This mapping legend follows very closely the French one (MEDD, 2002). In Spain, a group of geomorphologists (Lastra et al., 2008) has realized an unpublished map integrated in a “geomorphological method”. It distinguishes four “prone to flood terraces”: low, middle, high and very high. The Geological Survey of Spain has published a handbook of flood hazard mapping methodologies (Díez-Herrero et al., 2009). Finally, the first hydrogeomorphological map realized in Tunisia has just been presented in a recent thesis (Chouari, 2009). This general presentation of the Mediterranean watercourses functional alluvial plain must be now replaced in the context of the two main beds (low flow bed and high water bed) historical evolution in order to allow the inundability evolution prediction for the next decades.

3. Low flow bed and high water bed recent evolution 3.1. Low flow bed evolution 3.1.1. Recent low flow bed downcutting On some more or less important Mediterranean hydrographical network reaches, a longitudinal profile change is observed in soft rocks: generally, a pulling down of the low flow bed bottom occurs. It is well brought to the fore by the bridges observation. This tendency is particularly marked in Algeria and in Tunisia (Ballais, 1984, 1991, 1995), on the Rhône tributaries and sub tributaries in France (Ballais et al., 2004) and on several Spanish watercourses such as the Guadalquivir River (Uribelarrea, Benito, 2005). Downcutting is more important during floods as the great 1969 Southern Tunisia floods example has shown: scours have then varied from 20 cm up to 3 m, according to wadis and watersheds characteristics (Ballais, 1973). Nevertheless, some exceptions can be observed on some Lana River tributaries in Tirana (Albania), on the Maritsa River at Erdine (Turkey) and the Pivka River at Postojna (Slovenia) where stability has been predominant, and on others, more rare, like Wadi Himmer, close to Fès (Morocco), where the low flow bed bottom has been recently raised up 40 to 60 cm (Gartet, 2007). In the case of calcareous watersheds, this stability

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can be due to travertine building up dams, frequent in the Mediterranean basin, and spectacularly developed on the Krona River at Plivitce (Croatia). Similarly to low flow beds cut down, they sometimes widen due to banks undermining, for example in Tunisia (Ballais, 1973), in Algeria (Ballais, 1984) and in Morocco (wadi Fès, wadi Sebou (up to 1.50 m/year from 1997 to 2007) (Gartet, 2007)). 3.1.2. Causes of low flow bed downcutting Natural causes When low flow bed downcutting occurs in the ablation or transfer zones, geomorphologists (Bravard, Petit, 2000) explain it as a consequence of an alluvial material supply deficit. This deficit is due to decreasing ablation on the slopes. Anthropogenic causes Two anthropogenic causes can, at least, be pointed out. The first one is the silting compartments that are being built on braided rivers. Even if, at the beginning, the accumulation of coarse then fine alluviums was natural, the silting compartments have amplified this accumulation. Therefore, low flow beds have heavily shrunken and high water beds have been consequently extended. This metamorphosis has accelerated a very slower natural process that concerns a lot of Mediterranean watercourses in France like the Gardon River, the Var River, the Groseau River or the Buech River (Gautier, 1992), as well as in Northern Italy (Luino et al., 2002). The second cause of anthropogenic low flow bed downcutting on numerous watercourses is due to material extraction either in gravel and sand quarries or in reprofiling works. On numerous French Mediterranean rivers (Gardon River, Ouvèze River, Durance River) this deepening can locally reach 1 m (Branka, 2002; Durin, 2001). Systematic studies carried out on the Orb River watershed have allowed appraising the extractions impact on this river low flow bed (Malavoi, 2003): in the Thézan les Béziers area, the deepening can reach up to 3 to 4 m since the 1930-1940 years. 3.1.3 Downcutting consequences Because of its obvious and even spectacular character, downcutting is currently integrated in hydraulic studies. Its consequences are course

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changes. Those changes are fast in the watercourses ablation or transfer zones and more progressive downstream. In each case, the recent historic evolution can be at least partially reconstituted using aerial photographs and topographic maps. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the evolution part due to own river morphodynamism from the anthropogenic one. Low flow bed downcutting frequently matches well with narrowing as shown by numerous bridges : Roman bridges on the Caudarhisar River (Turkey), Guadiana River at Mérida and Douro River at Salamanca (Spain), medieval bridges on the Arga River at Puente la Reina (Spain) and at Allos (Turkey), modern bridges on the Lana River in Tirana (Albania), and at several cases, in France: the Arre River at Le Vigan, the Hérault River at Saint-Julien-de-la-Nef, the Orb River at Béziers, the Durance River at Pertuis, the Luech River at Chamborigaud, the Recordier River and the Rieutord River at Sumène, the Lay River at Mane (own observations). Under those conditions, the ancient low flow bed can become the new high water bed and its often lenticular coarse deposits are covered by finely bedded sands, silts and even clays, like for the Rio Cuadros at Bedmar, Andalucia, Spain (Ballais et al., 2012). If low flow bed downcutting is very important, it can potentially contain all the floods, even the most important. So, the high water bed is hunging out above the low flow bed and becomes an alluvial terrace. This situation is observed in two cases. The first one is represented by small rivers where reprofilings have been very important compared to the discharges, as on a lot of 1 to 2 order watercourses in France (Gardon and Arc Rivers subtributaries) and in Morocco, for example. The second one is due to regressive downcutting on 2 to 4 order watercourses combined with present day cultivated land extension (Andalucia (Spain), Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia (Ballais, 1991; Ballais et al., 2003; Ballais et al., 2012)). This evolution can favour dangerous works like in Amman (Jordan) where the Roman forum restoration in 1947 has removed the bridge and totally covered the river in such a way that flood risk has increased.

3.2. High water bed evolution 3.2.1. Historical building up A historical silt building up tendency has been indicated in many Mediterranean watercourses. It often began during Classical Antiquity or even before on wadis in Libya (Vita-Finzi, 1969), Tunisia (wadi

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Medjerda), Algeria (wadi Biskra), Jordan (wadi Mussa in Petra (Besançon, 2010)) and on rivers in France (Ouvèze River (Ballais, 2009), Rhône, Aigues, Gardon, Durance, Hérault, Buèges, Laye, Eze, Riaille and Escoutay Rivers) and in Turkey (Turca River at Edirne). It went on during the XXth century, at least on some of them (Bonté et al., 2001). At Vaison-la-Romaine, Pomerol and Baye brooks, tributaries of the Ouvèze River, have accumulated about 3 m of clayey-silty deposits with small pebbles after the 1st century AD; the Merovingian chapel paving is 1.5 m under the Ouvèze River high water bed topographic surface, an indication which shows that the mean aggradation rate is about 10 cm/century (Ballais, 2009). At Petra (Jordan), the Wadi Moussa high water bed was accumulated after the Roman city building. At Toledo (Spain), the Tajo River was accumulated 9 m of alluviums above an old medieval gate, the “Puerta del Vado” (Diez-Herrero et al., 2005). During more recent periods, the best example is the Argent-Double River one. At La Redorte, this Aude River tributary was accumulated more than 3 m of alluviums upstream the Canal du Midi built in 1681 (Chave, 2003; Delorme et al., 2009). This tendency partially coincides with a major colluvial phase on the slopes due to maximal extension of cultivated soils during the modern period and the beginning of the contemporary period (17h-19th centuries). Regarding the contemporary period, Benito et al. (2005) have shown the Guadalentin River (Spain) has experienced nine swellings over 205 years; each of them has accumulated some alluviums above the previous ones. The more recent swelling, probably the 1973 one, was the strongest. The use of artificial (137Cs and 134Cs) or natural (210Pb) radioisotopes has allowed to show that this tendency persists during the 20th century, at least on the Gardon d’Anduze River (1958 flood), the Ouvèze River (1992 flood) (Bonté et al., 2001; Ballais et al. 2004) and the Argent-Double River (Delorme, 2004; Delorme et al., 2009) (Fig. 8-5). Those radioisotopes measures (Bonté et al., 2001) have allowed to evaluate the alluvium thickness deposited in one flood: about 30 cm by the Gardon d’Anduze River at Attuech in 1958 and at least as much by the Ouvèze River at Vaison-la-Romaine in 1992. The tendency can be as well observed in other Mediterranean countries. For example, in the North of Morocco, 1.5 m of fine deposits have been accumulated in the wadi Ouerrah high water bed above an oil plastic bottle (Ballais et al., 2005a).

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Radioactivity is measured on horizontal axis Fig. 8-5. Building up of the Argent-Double River high water bed at La Redorte (France) during the 20th century (Delorme, 2004, modified).

Here as well, as was the case for the low flow bed, some exceptions can be noticed: building up in the high water bed was not always systematic. For example, at Qusayr Amra (Jordan), bathes that have been built in 705-710 in a prone to flood area, have not been covered by later alluviums (own observations). 3.2.2. Causes It is a quite common that in the rivers, bed load is diminishing for two reasons. The first one is the slope vegetal recolonization and the second one is material extraction (cf. above). Nevertheless, building up of high water beds is going on because some colluviums are still conveyed to the rivers. Colluviums are particularly plentiful in the Mediterranean basin when a sporadic overland flow can take away the soils during intense rains when vegetal cover is open. In fact, in natural condition, this is seldom the case: it seems colluviums appeared with the first impacts of farmers occupation on slopes. In Provence (France), in particular, the first colluviums generation could be protohistorical and the second one historical (Ballais, Crambes, 1992). Thus, in the Mediterranean basin, the very important anthropization (pasture, massive clearings and ploughings) has favoured or even created the conditions for a massive colluviation. It is the case, for example, in the Aurès Mountains in Algeria (Ballais, 1984) or at Jerash in

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Jordan where the Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine-Omayyad site is still partly buried under an enormous mass of colluviums (Sartre, 2001). Indeed, present day rock weathering processes efficacy remains very weak or even nil in hard rocks (Gabert et al., 1981). Nevertheless, wetting and drying, thermoclasty and salt weathering, either individually or combined, can be efficient: they produce numerous clasts according to observations in France (Southern Alps, Provence (Abdel Moeti, 2002) and in Spain. Forest fires are one of the main colluvium sources (Sala, Rubio, 1994) all the more so since the affected surfaces increase in the Mediterranean basin. In the Maures massif (France), after the 1990 August forest fire, Martin et al. (1997) have shown that the ablation range has multiplied by 100 during the year following the fire. Another cause of the continuation of colluviums production is the stability or even the increasing of surfaces occupied by cultivations that poorly protect the soils. It is in particular the case of traditional Mediterranean cultivations such as vine and olive tree. In Mediterranean France even if vineyards surfaces tend to diminish they have been often concentrated closer to rivers, in a way that soil erosion products transport has been facilitated (Léonard, 2003). In Andalucia (Spain), olive groves surface has locally considerably increased during the 20th century (Araque Jimenez, 2007). European Union tries to promote a sustainable development but, in those two countries, several factors favour production of still plentiful alluviums: steep slopes characteristics of the Mediterranean basin, abundance of soft rocks and superficial formations and farming methods (in particular, mechanized ploughing) (Ballais et al., 2012). 3.2.3. Consequences For rivers constant flood discharges, the continuation of the building up tendency in high water beds will produce an increase of the surface covered by floods followed by an increase in hazard. In this context, thus the high water bed external limit must be regarded as a minimum limit of the prone to flooding area (Ballais et al., 2004). Consequences for planning: Statistical analyses re-examination Those first results have a great interest for planning, especially for flood risk prevention. Indeed, studies of flood hazard that are generally based on historical floods knowledge (see above) suppose that the genesis formation conditions of those floods has remained invariable since 100 to

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200 years and even more. Usually, this stability principle is implicit and never stated. According to this principle, when ancient swellings have not been levelled, probability calculations are carried out to determine the height of water for different return periods, with the hypothesis that the supposed constant topographic surface is the present day functional alluvial plain topographic level. Actually, the former floods have spread on an alluvial topographic level that lies lower than the present day, obliges us to re-examine all the calculations that enable us to determine those floods water lines. The potential drift is important if the above results are taken into account. So, it is possible to understand why the hydrologic studies recording those water lines heights have increased over the course of 100 or 200 years (Masson et al., 1996). In those cases, it is necessary to revalue hydraulic calculations, especially for low frequencies (centennial to exceptional flood) in the sense of a potentially increasing risk hazard over time. Then, this revision must lean on a sedimentation rhythm analysis during the reference period and on this future tendency projection (Ballais et al., 2011a). A secondary consequence of this statement is to observe with care the precision of hydraulic calculations results given the fact that it is necessary to estimate the error margin. This error can be very important when the high water bed evolution is poorly known (Ballais et al., 2011a). It must be reminded that the high water bed evolvability is highly variable from upslope to downslope and from one valley to the other. Without a doubt, it is limited in the upslope and middle sections and is maximal in the downslope part. It also varies according to watershed geology, climate and vegetation cover. Some variables, such as vegetal cover, could have been highly modified during the recent historical period. All those elements must be henceforth integrated in flood hazard forwardlooking studies (Ballais et al., 2011a). Consequences for planning: Evolution of fluvial sites inundability In risk and planning terms, the high water bed evolution gives a new light to inundability situations to which fluvial sites and cities are subject. Then it is possible to explain why old city nucleuses (Vaison-la-Romaine and Remoulins (France), Petra (Jordan)) are prone to flooding at the present day. This situation is in all likelihood generalized to the whole cities established in the watersheds downstream part, where fine sedimentation is more active. Upstream is also foreseeable in two particular geomorphological situations. The first one is upstream gorges

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that set a water line rising and the second one is sectors affected by neotectonic activity (Masson et al., 1996). This situation noted, it creates the necessity to finalize new protection strategies for ancient urbanized zones on those sites where geomorphological evolution has spread up and where major security problems arise because of the massive invasion of high water beds by multitude of buildings, in the whole Mediterranean basin, a situation that started in recent decades

4. Conclusion Building up of Mediterranean high water beds generally began during Classical Antiquity. Fine grained formations have accumulated during the Middle Ages and the Modern and Contemporary periods. Using isotopic dating, we were able to show that this trend goes on during the second part of the twentieth century. Land planning must take into account this evolution. For the future decades and in the perspective of global warming (IPCC, 2013) geomorphologic researches must be concentrated on flood hazards. In particular, understanding the exceptional high water bed genesis is essential: incipient exceptional high water beds provide evidence of the functional alluvial plain widening and thus allows us to assume there is an increasingly greater risk. According to several climatic models, global warming could be the cause of increasingly frequent and intense rare rains (IPCC, 2013) which produced great catastrophic floods in Mediterranean (IPCC, 2012) France such as in Nîmes (1988), Vaison-la-Romaine (1992), Aude River and tributaries (1999), Vidourle, Gardon and Cèze Rivers and tributaries (2002). Now, the hydrogeomorphological method, a field method (Masson et al, 1996, Garry et al., 2002; Ballais et al., 2005b), allows us to determine liable to flood areas. Its great reliability has been proved in the 1999 and 2002 floods. Thus, it is necessary to apply this method and to refine it by using sedimentological and isotopic methods to determine the risk for hundreds of thousands of people living or working in the Mediterranean high water beds.

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DIEZ-HERRERO A., LAIN-HUERTA L., LLORENTE-ISIDRO M. (2009). A Handbook on Flood Hazard Mapping Methodologies, Geological Survey of Spain, Madrid, 190 p. DERRUAU M. (1974). Les formes du relief terrestre, Paris, Masson, 120 p. Direction de l’hydraulique de la Wilaya (DHW) de Sidi Bel AbbÈs (2006) - Plan d’aménagement de la plaine de Sidi Bel Abbés contre les inondations, 60p. DURIN V. (2001). Recherches géomorphologiques et historiques sur la plaine alluviale de l’Ouvèze (84) entre Entrechaux et Bédarrides. Impact de la sédimentation sur l’évolution de l’inondabilité, Mémoire de DEA, Université de Provence, 124 p. ESPOSITO C., CHAVE S., BALLAIS J.-L., DELORME-LAURENT V. (2009). Hydrological Mapping and Recent Floods in France, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Mediterranean Coastal Environment, Sochi, Russia, 1053-1064. FEHRI N. (2003) Les rapports entre les processus morphogéniques et les pratiques agro-pastorales dans la plaine oléicole de Sfax : exemple du bassin versant de l'oued Chaâl-Tarfaoui, Thèse, Université de Provence, 338 p. GABERT P., MARRE A., RISER J. (1981). – Processus d’érosion avec l’intervention du gel sur des versants témoins de Basse Provence intérieure (France), Méditerranée, 1, 13-20. GARTET A. (2007). – Risques naturels, anthropiques et technologiques dans l’agglomération de Fès et son arrière pays, Thèse de doctorat d’Etat, Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fès. GARTET J., BALLAIS J.-L., GARTET A., FONTUGNE M. (2001). Polémique autour de la datation de la terrasse rharbienne. Apport de la très basse terrasse de l’Ouerrha, Rif (Maroc), in BARRANDON J.-N., GUIBERT P., MICHEL V. éds Datation, XXIe Rencontres internationales d’archéologie et d’histoire d’Antibes, APDCA, Antibes, 361-369. GAUTIER E. (1992). Recherches sur la morphologie et la dynamique fluviales dans le bassin du Buëch (Alpes du Sud), Thèse, Université Paris X-Nanterre, 439 p. HALLOUCHE B. (2007) Cartographie des zones inondables de la plaine de Sidi Bel Abbès par l’approche hydrogéomorphologique. Mémoire Magister, Univ. Sidi Bel Abbés, 119 p. + Annexes. HALLOUCHE B., BENYAHIA M., MOUEDDENE K., MAROK A. (2010) - Apport de l’hydrogéomorphologie dans la cartographie des

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zones inondables. Exemple de la plaine de Sidi Bel Abbès (Algérie nord occidentale). Sécheresse, 21, 3, 219-24. IPCC (2012). Managing the Risks of extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 582 p. —. (2013). - Climate Change 2013. The Physical Science Basis. WG1. Cambridge University Press, 1535 p. LASTRA J., E. FERNANDEZ, A. DIEZ-HERRERO, J. MARQUINEZ (2008). Flood hazard delineation combining geomorphological and hydrological methods: an example in the Northern Iberian Peninsula, Natural Hazards, 45, 2, 277-293. Laurent V. (2003). Détermination des niveaux intermédiaires de l’ArgentDouble (Aude) : inondabilité et morphogenèse, mémoire de DEA, Université de Provence. LÉONARD M. (2003). L’érosion hydrique des sols cultivés : analyses systémique et propositions de gestion, Thèse, Université de Grenoble I, 2 vol. LUINO F. (1998). Study on some villages damaged by natural processes in NW Italy, in D. MOORE, O. HUNGR eds Proceedings Eight International Congress International Association for Engineering Geology and Environment, A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam, 1065-1070. LUINO F., BELLONI A., PADOVAN N. (2002). Historical and geomorphological analysis as a research tool for the identification of flood-prone zones and its role in the revision of town planning: the Oglio basin (Valcamonica-Northern Italy), in J.L. VAN ROOY, C.A. JERMY eds Engineering Geology for Developing Countries, Durban, 602-611. MALAVOI J.R. (2004). Délimitation des espaces de mobilité de l’Orb au sens du SDAGE RMC et de l’arrêté 2001 « Gravières » (juillet 2004), Maître d'ouvrage SMVO. MARTIN C., ALLÉE P., BÉGUIN E., KUZUCUOGLU C., LEVANT M. (1997). Mesure de l’érosion mécanique après un incendie de forêt dans le massif des Maures, Géomorphologie, 2, 133-142. MASCARENAS P. (2012). Caracteristiques i inundabilitat per rierades sobtades (flash flood) ans torrents costaners del nord del cap de Creus (Catalunya), Tesi doctoral, Universitat de Barcelona, 2 vol., 362 + 143 p. MASSON M., GARRY G., BALLAIS J.-L. (1996). – Cartographie des zones inondables. Approche hydrogéomorphologique, Paris, Villes et Territoires, 100 p. MEDD (2002). Termes de référence d’un CCTP des Atlas des Zones Inondables, Annexe A.

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MONTAGNÉ A. (2003) Analyse des processus morphodynamiques dans le lit majeur des cours d’eau méditerranéens en vue de leur intégration dans une cartographie simplifiée de l’aléa inondation : exemples du Gardon et de l’Ouvèze, mémoire de DEA, Université de Provence. MUSSOT R. (1992) Crue d’octobre 1940 et lits fluviaux : observations et remarques complémentaires. in J. BECAT, G. SOUTADÉ eds L’Aiguat del 40, 103-114. NANSON G.C., BEACH H.F. (1977). Forest succession and sedimentation on a meandering river floodplain, northeast British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Biogeography, 4: 229-251. NANSON G.C., CROKE J.C. (1992). A genetic classification of floodplains, Geomorphology, 4, 459-486. SALA M., RUBIO J.L. eds (1994). Soil Erosion as a consequence of Forest Fires, Logrono, Geoforma Ediciones, 275 p. SARTRE M. (2001). D’Alexandre à Zénobie. Histoire du Levant antique, IVe siècle av. J-C. - IIIe siècle ap. J-C., Fayard, Paris, 1194 p. SCHUMM S.A. (1968). River adjustment to altered hydrological regimen – Murrumbidgee River and palaeochannels, Australia. USGS Professional Paper 598, 62 p. SCHUMM S.A. (1977). The fluvial system, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 338 p. STRAHLER N. (1952). Quantitative analyses of watershed geomorphology, American Geophysical Union Transaction, 38, 913920. TOUABI O. (2004) Étude des formes et des formations à la confluence du Bayon et du Ruisseau de Roques-Hautes sur le piémont sud de la montagne Sainte Victoire (Bouches-du-Rhône). Mémoire de DEA, Université de Provence, 64 p. + annexes. URIBELARREA D., BENITO G. (2005). – Fluvial changes of the Guadalquivir River during the Holocene (Cordoba, S. Spain), Sixth Conference on Geomorphology, Zaragoza, p. 101. VITA-FINZI C, (1969). The Mediterranean Valleys : Geological Changes in Historical Times. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge. WARD R. (1978) Floods. A Geographical Perspective. MacMillan, London, 244 p.

PART III GEOSPATIAL TOOLS AND INFOCOMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

CHAPTER NINE CHANGING PERCEPTIONS IN MEDITERRANEAN GEOGRAPHY: THE ROLE OF GEOSPATIAL TOOLS IOANNIS N. VOGIATZAKIS AND MARIA TERESA MELIS

Abstract Geography and Cartography have both their foundation in the Mediterranean. The advances in geospatial tools such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) have radically changed the way we look at Mediterranean geographies. The shift from mapping to map analysis marks a turning point in geography as a discipline. This chapter is a review of the role of geospatial tools in changing perceptions and geographies in the Mediterranean. The first section deals with the nature of GIS and remote sensing and their basic principles. The second part focuses on mapping environmental perception, as confined to three main aspects: reconstructing the past, documenting the present and predicting the future. Reconstruction of the past includes the use of visualization techniques which simulate past landscapes or the direct identification of palaeo-features through remote sensing techniques. On documenting the present we discuss the ways that GIS-based cartography creates new spatial representations. Predicting the future includes a range of applications from modelling species and vegetation distribution under environmental change to simulating future landscapes under different land-use scenarios. The chapter provides examples in the Mediterranean where the above techniques have been applied and discusses some of the challenges that the application of geospatial analysis in the Mediterranean might face in the future.

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1. Introduction Making observations and recording information about the Earth for purposes of visual representation has been a major human activity since the appearance of the first civilizations (Holt-Jensen 2010). Geography and Cartography have their roots in the Mediterranean Basin. Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.) was the first person to use the term "Geography", while Anaximander was the first to create maps in the 6th century BC. The tradition of Ancient Greeks was subsequently followed by the Romans and the Arabs. The resulting maps have been instrumental first for navigating through unfamiliar terrain and seas within and beyond the Mediterranean and later in the general development of geographical thought. Traditionally, spatial information on the Earth’s surface has been presented on paper maps which inevitably are abstractions of the reality they represent. Until recently this traditional tool used for storing spatial information, i.e. the paper map, had to deal with storage limitations and restricted capabilities for updating and analyzing spatial data. Those limitations have only recently been overcome with the evolution of computer-aided cartography. Computers have provided the capacity and the speed for the analysis of large and complex databases. Moreover, parallel developments in spatial data processing disciplines, such as topography, photogrammetry, remote sensing and geography, have provided the opportunity for different sets of spatial data as well as techniques to be linked together leading to the final “shaping” of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (De Smith et al. 2006). The first GIS was developed in Canada, in 1960, in order to solve problems related to data handling and storing. However, during the seventies and eighties, the use of GIS expanded due to increased governmental involvement in natural resource development and increased pressure on those resources. The opening of a large international market for this technology benefited by developments in the IT industry (e.g. low cost, high-speed processors), resulting in the adoption of these systems by a broader range of users. Nowadays GIS are widely used for applications in cadastral mapping and resource analysis (De Smith et al. 2006). The history of modern remote sensing for Earth resources started with the first Landsat mission in July 1972. Since then, there have been many missions and different sensors (Fig. 9-1) providing a range of temporal and spatial resolution information for the Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere (Lillesand et al. 2008, Desena and Melis 2006).

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Fig. 9-1. MODIS image, acquired in July 2004, showing dust plumes blowing off the coast of Algeria and Tunisia and over the Mediterranean Sea

This chapter reviews the role of geospatial tools (GIS & RS) in changing perceptions / geographies in the Mediterranean. The first section deals with the nature of GIS & RS and their basic principles. The second part focuses on mapping environmental perception, specifically, three main aspects: reconstructing the past, documenting the present and predicting the future. The chapter provides examples in the Mediterranean where the above techniques have been applied and discusses some of the challenges that the application of geospatial analysis might face in the future.

2. The Nature of GIS and Remote Sensing: Spatial and Temporal Dimensions Although a detailed description of the components and functions of a GIS and Remote Sensing is beyond the scope of this chapter, some introductory concepts are necessary. Perhaps the most frequently used definition when it comes to GIS is the one by Burrough (1986:6): “A powerful set of tools for collecting, storing, retrieving at will, transforming and displaying spatial data from the real world for a particular set of purposes”.

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A GIS comprises three major components: computer hardware, computer software and organisational context (Burrough and McDonnell 1998). The set of software operating within the computer environment allows for a wide range of analyses to be performed, covering three main functions: the input of spatial data, the transformation of that data and the output of spatial and associated statistical data. GIS enables the integration of spatial, non-spatial and recently temporal information from different sources (Longley et al. 2005). For more information on GIS and Remote Sensing there is an abundance of good introductory and advanced books to which the reader can refer to (Longley et al. 2005, De Smith et al. 2006). GIS changed the perception of geographical representation although at the same time, it has led to a number of debates regarding its use (Fitzjohn 2007). The shift from mapping to map analysis marks a turning point in the collection and processing of geographic data. The elements of a basic map (i.e. points, lines and area) provide “spatially-aggregated” descriptions. Modern GIS-based cartographic analysis enables a transition towards mapping surfaces and quantitative treatment data. This changes our perspective about the relationships of mapped objects and challenges the established conceptual differences between spatial and non-spatial data (Fig. 9-2). In traditional cartography, maps are static, compared to GIS-based cartography. In a GIS, the dynamic link between the spatial data (i.e. lines, points and areas) and the database enables the user to produce from a single/ initial geography as many maps as the attributes supported by the database. Remote Sensing is “the acquisition of information about the Earth's surface and its environment without being in direct contact with it” (Lillesand et al. 2008). Remote Sensing is based on the detection of electromagnetic energy. Remote Sensing with the use of satellites employs techniques based on the spatial and temporal spectral properties of a given study area. Every image comprises two-dimensional arrays of pixels where every pixel is ascribed a Digital Number that represents the radiance or reflectance of the selected waveband (Lillesand et al. 2008). Remote sensing is an important source of GIS data, where mapped information is lacking.

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Fig. 9-2. Thee Total Populaation in the Meediterranean. Th The size of each territory shows the reelative proportion of the worrld's populationn living there. Copyright SASI Group ((University of Sheffield) S and Mark M Newman (University of Michigan)

The interrpretation of satellite s imagees from a variiety of sensorss is based on the analyysis of spectral signatures of different ssurface features on the Earth’s surface and has a wealth of applicatioons at variou us scales (Donoghue 22000). The baasic features and a suitabilityy of satellite im magery as a source of data for mappping have beeen extensiveely discussed (Franklin 2010). New w developmennts in the field d have, substtantially, imprroved the capability foor informationn extraction an nd provide new w insights forr mapping and monitorring (Boyd 2009). Paper m maps are singgle snapshotss in time. H However, geo ographical processes cannot be fullly unravelled without connsidering the temporal dimension. D Despite beingg the predomin nant, so far, sppatial represeentation is not the onlyy type of reprresentation in a GIS. The ssimplest appliication of temporal m mapping can be b mapping change c for a process/phen nomenon. Remote Sennsing provides the repeated d viewing of a phenomeno on which can then be mapped and analysed a within a GIS. Mappping can be static s (i.e.

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a map showing change) or more dynamic (a series of maps, map animation), while some of the more recent advances in the field include the full integration of the temporal component in real time and in an interactive manner (Christakos et al. 2001, Ott and Swiaczny 2001).

3. Mapping Environmental Perception 3.1. Reconstructing the past Llobera (2003) coined the term “visualscape” to refer to “the spatial representation of any visual property generated by, or associated with, a spatial configuration”. The creation of new visualscapes as defined by Llobera is perhaps one of the most challenging ways that GIS is changing geographical perception. In particular, novel visualization approaches for the identification, evaluation and communication of changes in landscape are now supported by GIS and can be used to provide insights into the evolution of landscapes in the past and options for change in the future (Pettit et al. 2011). By simulating the visual appearance of a landscape, visualisation techniques use a combination of Digital elevation models (DEMs) and satellite imagery or air photos to allow for realistic perspective views of the landform from different elevations and directions (De Smith et al. 2006). In Mediterranean Archaeology, GIS are increasingly used to reconstruct and visualize space, using approaches such as visibility and cost surface studies (Lock 2000, Wheatley and Gillings 2002). These attempts aim at reconstructing visibility patterns and exploring their possible roles in past landscapes (Llobera 2007). The majority of those applications focus on GIS visualisation of physical attributes. There have been calls though from archaeologists and human geographers alike for a more humanistic form of GIS which would take into account, the way in which individuals have created their sense of place through dwelling, in past landscapes (Fitzjohn 2007). At the same time, remote sensing data are also increasingly employed within the context of geo-archaeological studies. The synoptic view of remote sensing data is one of its main advantages, providing information on the position, distribution, and spatial relationships of features in the landscape (De Waele and Melis 2009). Coupled with information on topography, geology, geomorphology and fieldwork, satellite imagery has been used to develop a chronology for the development of Lake Megafazzan, a gigantic lake that has periodically existed in the Fazzan Basin of Libya, since the late Miocene (Drake et al. 2008). In another

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study, Paillou used satellite imagery in Eastern Libya, to map a major paleodrainage system, by providing evidence of the physical linkage, that dates back to the Miocene, between the Kufrah Basin in South east Libya to the Mediterranean Coast (Paillou et al. 2009). De Waele and Melis (2009) employed satellite imagery to map geomorphosites i.e. “landforms with attributes that qualify them as components of cultural heritage” (Panizza and Piacente 2003). Apart from their scientific value (reconstruction of some paleogeographic elements) geomorphosites have also additional cultural, historical, ecological and aesthetic values (Reynard 2005). Their identification and mapping has evolved over time together with advances in Remote Sensing. Satellite imagery enables the identification of landscape contexts in which individual geomorphological monuments are placed, and the interaction between environmental dynamics, geomorphological phenomena, and human settlement. The linking of all these places of geological and geomorphologic interest in networks of geosites provides a physical narration of the Earth’s history, which has the potential of enhancing awareness and, thus, promoting geology and geomorphology to local people and visitors alike. Examples from the area of Tozeur, South-West Tunisia include the "Living Desert" network with Nebkha and Barchan dunes, Yardangs and Aeolian sculptures, the "Rocks and Water" network (with waterfalls, mountains and canyons) the "Earth’s Memory" network (across the canyons of Jbel Morra-Sidi Bou Helal), the “Phosphate Route” with active and abandoned phosphate mines and the “Changing Environment and Climate” network with salt pans, fossil shorelines and abandoned oases in Morocco (De Waele and Melis 2009).

3.2. Documenting the present Since spatial data on digital thematic maps and pixels in a satellite image are both associated with figures, mathematical operations are used to develop algorithms and techniques in order to extract information about the Earth’s surface that is not visible to the naked eye. GIS and remote sensing together provide new ways of documenting the present through their ability to identify and map features–a process that would not be feasible through manual interpretation, which sometimes tends to be intuitive and subjective (Fig. 9-3). In that way, new spatial representations and new geographies are created which would not have been possible to be dealt with by traditional cartography. Some examples of these possibilities are included below.

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Fig. 9-3. SPOT image, acquired in September 2009, in an area of Western Sardinia, Italy. The image, acquired in the near infrared, allows detection of areas affected by fire (dark tones of grey). Land use change, mapping and monitoring with remote sensing instruments, allows improved spatial planning.

3.2.1 Data Representation The presentation of geographical phenomena on maps follows the Boolean logic dictating that the membership of the object in the set, is absolute. In other words, every location on the map is assigned a unique membership to a geographical unit (e.g. a vegetation or soil class). However, most of these phenomena in the real world are not clear-cut entities. For example, boundaries between vegetation communities are gradual rather than definite, unless there is an abrupt change of an underlying physical parameter (e.g. geology) (Kent et al. 2006). These gradual changes cannot be displayed on a conventional map based on Boolean logic and they are forced to be defined in an absolute way (Aspinall and

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Pearson 1995). By employing fuzzy sets, the transition between membership and non-membership of a location in a set is gradual, since these sets have no sharp boundaries. Moreover, fuzzy set theory accepts that multiple classes or sets can be present at one location. Currently fuzzy methodology has become an invaluable tool when dealing with spatial uncertainty. Examples of its application in the Mediterranean include vegetation mapping in Tuscany (Maselli et al. 2001) and soil erosion modelling in Israel (Cohen et al. 2008) “Cost surface analysis” is a generic term for a number of GIS techniques based on the costs of movement through space. By “cost” we refer to any impediment that might arise due to money, time or effort, which needs to be taken into account when computing paths and distances for movement (De Smith et al. 2006). For example, in least cost path analysis the goal is to evaluate the least-cost path between two locations. This is commonly employed in animal movement analysis, examples of which in the Mediterranean include the Iberian lynx (Pallomares 2000) and the brown bear in the Apennines of Italy (Falcucci 2008). In this type of analysis, the landscape matrix is perceived to a terrestrial mammal as presenting differing degrees of ‘friction’ to movement, according to its constituent elements. The ease of traversal experienced can range from near-insurmountable barriers, for example water bodies, to the species’ most preferred habitat. Different landscape elements positioned between the two extremes incur a variable movement cost to the individual that can be calculated in terms of stress, injury, energy expenditure, or a combination of those (Adriaensen et al. 2003). Spatial distribution data of natural phenomena are often collected from point sources. Despite the importance of continuous spatial data for environmental management, they are usually difficult and expensive to acquire. On average, points that are close together in space tend to have similar values compared to points further apart (spatial dependence principle). Therefore, spatial interpolation techniques are employed for estimating biophysical variables for the unsampled locations. There is a plethora of techniques and users are always advised to apply them with caution (De Smith et al. 2005). Perhaps the most commonly performed interpolation example in the context of GIS is the creation of a Digital Elevation Model, a continuous surface representing changes in elevation, from a simple topographic contour map. However, spatial interpolation can be used for a range of other properties for which point data have been collected. Some examples from the Mediterranean where these techniques have been employed either locally or for the whole basin include soil, climate

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and species mapping (Diodato and Ceccarelli, 2004; Moral, 2010; Hernández et al. 2014). 3.2.2. Digital Image Processing Digital Image Processing is the generic term used to refer to the range of techniques employed to extract information from satellite imagery in an automated manner. In particular, band rationing has been extensively used to map ecosystem properties such as vegetation health and soil moisture (Lillesand et al. 2008). The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), for example, is one of the most commonly used indices for monitoring vegetation in the Mediterranean (Shoshany 2000). Other applications for setting band ratios in the Mediterranean include soil properties but also geological mapping to provide a better identification of the lithological units and lineaments, using techniques such as high-pass filtering, band ratios and principal component analysis (De Waele et al. 2005). Pattern recognition uses spectral, spatial and contextual inputs to extract specific information from visual datasets. The most frequent uses in the Mediterranean Basin include vegetation mapping as for example in Languedoc France (Garaux-Garson and Lacaze 2003) and Tuscany Italy (Maselli et al. 2000), fire fuel mapping in Halkidiki, Greece (Koutsias and Karteris 2003), but also post fire dynamics in Catalonia, Spain (Diaz-Delgado et al. 2002) and environmental protection applications in Lebanon (Kwalie et al. 2002). 3.2.3 Creating New Geographies Before the appearance of Geospatial tools, thematic maps used to display one type of information at a time e.g. the extent of a road network or land cover types. Usually, this information was either, the product of detailed survey work or, in the best case scenario, extracted with the help of aerial photographs. The advance of GIS and remote sensing provided the technical infrastructure in order to handle and communicate more complex spatial representations. Landscape mapping is one of these representations. The idea behind landscape mapping is that particular combinations of physical and cultural factors result in areas with similar landscapes. The approach is based on a series of natural (i.e. landform, geology, soils) and cultural factors (i.e. land use, settlement pattern) that are used to describe variability in the landscape, at various spatial scales (Warnock and Griffiths in press). Prior to GIS-based cartography, most of these factors

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would be m mapped and presented p separately. Oftenn the description of a landscape w would be bassed on geom morphology oor a land cov ver map. However, w with the advannce of GIS, more m than one thematic layer can be combined pproducing a true landscaape map whiich, with thee use of visualisationn techniques, can then be presented as seen in realiity. Some areas (Fig. 99-4), in which landscape mapping m has been employ yed in the Mediterraneean region, innclude Italy, Slovenia, M Malta and Cyp prus (see review in Voogiatzakis 20111).

Fig. 9-4. Lanndscape types in i Sicily, excerpt from the Ittalian national landscape map (Ciancioo et al. 2004)

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Since itss inception, satellite s remo ote sensing haas already prrovided a range of infformation regarding ecosysstem functionns that can be mapped. The rapid aadvancement of remote-seensing methoods has increeased the spatial andd temporal resolution r off observationns and, thereefore, of ecological pprocesses, inclluding field-q quality estimattes of canopy y nutrient, moisture coontent, crow wn area and leaf-level rresponses to drought conditions (C Chambers et al. a 2007). Followinng the publiccation of the Millenium E Ecosystem Asssessment (MEA 20055), there is now n increased d interest in the mapping of these services (Eiggenbrod et al .2010). Perhaps,, the most important i fun nction of GIIS in the co ontext of ecosystem ggoods and servvices is the ability to analysse and display y different indicators inn the same geeography and d, conversely, the same ind dicator at different geoographies (Figg. 9-5).

Fig. 9-5. Maapping Pressure in the Mediiterranean. Bassed on the 1stt Principal Component fo for pressure indicators of the 2005 2 Environmeental Sustainability Index –ESI. The daarker representss the most unsu ustainable and thhe clearest reprresents the most sustainaable cases. The other colours arre intermediatees.

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Although there are no applications of this type of mapping currently in the Mediterranean, it is expected that this will certainly become much more important in the near future. 3.3.3 Predicting into the future Environmental Modelling is a well-established group of techniques used in environmental studies (Wainwright and Mulligan 2004) which, in the past, have focused on changes in time at single sites or in small geographical areas. Only recently environmental modelling has started to incorporate spatial pattern and applications over large geographic areas (Maguire et al. 2005). Most GIS lack the predictive capabilities to examine complex problems, whereas numerically oriented models lack flexible spatial analytic components to respond to the spatial character of ecological problems. The fact that both methods shared a common goal, i.e. addressing environmental problems, but at the same time exhibit limitations when employed separately for that purpose, has led to their integration. Modelling species and vegetation distribution The lack of time and resources for detailed inventorying, coupled with the abilities of GIS has given rise to predictive vegetation and species mapping. This is a collective term for a range of techniques whereby mapped environmental variables are used to predict the distribution of a species or a vegetation type across an area (Franklin 2010). For example, Vogiatzakis and Griffiths (2006) used a GIS-based empirical model to predict and map the distribution of vegetation communities in Lefka Ori massif in Crete. Following the debate on climate change effects on ecosystems, one particular type of modelling becoming increasingly popular is climatic envelope modelling (see review in Heikkinen et al. 2006). Climate envelope models are based on describing the climate or environment encompassing the current distribution of a species or ecosystem (the environmental envelope or climatic envelope) and then on mapping the location of this same envelope under a specific climate change scenario. These modelling attempts (Fig. 9-6, with copyright Araujo et al. 2006) highlight many interesting aspects of the Mediterranean biodiversity in the future perspective (Araújo et al. 2006).

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Fig. 9-6. Projjected amphibiian species lossses (with no diispersal) and gains g (with unlimited disppersal) by 20500 in 10DZ grid-ceell resolution accross Europe. Projections P are made witth classificationn tree analysis. Increasing inteensities of grey y represent increasing lossses or gains. Source: Araujjo et al. 2006; reproduced r by permission p

ndscapes Future Lan Future laand-use changges may be ev valuated througgh scenario an nalysis; it is a useful toool for exploriing the future, using plausibble, sometimees slightly extreme and challengingg, hypotheticcal scenarios or projectio ons. It is neither a forrecast nor a prrediction. Lan nd-use changess projections (Fig. ( 9-7) following diifferent scenaarios for the whole w Europe,, including paarts of the Mediterraneean which haave been developed underr the ALARM M project (Spangenberrg 2007). Markov chain modeels are one of o the most frequently employed e techniques tto predict chaanges in vegettation and lannd cover, baseed on the probability that a certaain piece off land, charaacterised by a given attribute/statte, will changge from one mutually m excllusive state to o another (Baltzer 20000, Falcucci ett al. 2008).

Changing Peerceptions in Mediterranean M G Geography

Fig. 9-7. Landd use in Europee in 2080 accord ding to GRAS sscenario Source: Atlass of Biodiversityy Risk 2010: reeproduced by peermission

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GIS has also been used with ecosystem and landscape simulation models to derive input variables, spatially extrapolate, and display results (see review in Franklin 2010). Such examples include the LPJ-GUESS and its successors which have been applied to simulate the distribution of potential natural vegetation in Mediterranean (Hickler et al. 2010) and FATELAND which was developed in the Mediterranean (Pausas 2006).

4. Conclusion The Mediterranean Basin is a hotspot of natural and cultural heritage at a global level, which currently undergoes significant pressure. The efficient assessment of the region’s needs requires a variety of biological, ecological and cultural information and the appropriate tools to manage them. The changes during the last 30 years in the geographical discipline and associated geospatial tools have resulted in changes in our ability to manage and analyze geographic information and, along with those changes, our perception of Mediterranean geographies itself. Many of the topics dealt with in this chapter (Table 9-1) require specialized knowledge and expertise. However, the recent growth of web-based GIS reduces the need for highly developed skills. The public has now gained access to tools for geographical exploration, mainly through commercial ventures like Google. Increasingly, it is the user who is composing maps based on the type of options offered by commercial software and other geospatial information providers. Therefore, mapping is no longer the realm, solely, of cartographers, while there is no guarantee on the final cartographic product. As a result, professional geographers and cartographers voice their concerns for the “popularization” of these tools, which sometimes provide different answers even for the specialist (depending on the software used), let alone the inexperienced user (Kraak and Ormeling 2003). In the words of Monmonier (2005): “Watch out for the well-intended mapmaker who doesn’t understand cartographic principles yet blindly trusts the equally naive software developer determined to give the buyer an immediate success experience”

In addition to spatial data acquisition, access to advanced mapping and spatial analysis over the Internet is also becoming more common. Existing software products offer the ability to deliver dynamic GIS applications, as well as share data and work together with other users towards a common goal, over the web.

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Table 9-1. Examples of mapping in the Mediterranean as discussed in the chapter Technique Application Locations Reconstructing the Past Geomorphological Middle Atlas Heritage (Morocco) Palaeodrainage Fazzan Basin patterns (Libya) Documenting the Present Soil erosion, Forest Israel, Tuscany Fuzzy Logic mapping (Italy) Spatial Soils, Fire, Species, Spain Interpolation Climate Mapping Vegetation Mapping, Halkidiki Digital Image Fire fuel Mapping, Soil (Greece), Processing Erosion Lebanon Predicting the Future Landscape & Mediterranean Vegetation Pattern Potential Natural Mediterranean Vegetation Land Use Mapping Mediterranean

Example Sources De Waele and Melis 2009 Drake et al 2008 Cohen et al., 2008; Maselli et al. 2001 Moral 2010 Koutsias and Karteris 2003, Kwalie et al. 2002 Pausas 2006 Hickler et al 2010 Spangenberg 2007

At the same time, geospatial tools are becoming an important part of participatory decision making (Jankowski 2009) and education (Liu and Zhu 2008) where geospatial tools enhance geographical learning by promoting spatial understanding, enquiry-based learning and the link between space and its attributes. The latter is in general true for the non-expert GIS user, since new visual representations challenge our perception to-date about everyday questions, while, at the same time, they demonstrate their link to Geography, a trend that until the appearance and wide use of geospatial tools had not been that obvious. Although the importance of geospatial information for planning, management and education is becoming self-evident over the years, the full potential of associated tools has not yet been realised in the Mediterranean region (Vogiatzakis et al. 2006). In particular, the extent to which this is reflected in practice outside academia, in the Mediterranean, is questioned. Clearly, there is a gap between the importance of geospatial tools amongst academics and their level of usage for decision-taking, although this varies from North to South Mediterranean. The GIS applications still require a huge amount of information to be used as tools

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for operational decision support. For example the European Landscape Convention gives geospatial tools a central role in landscape planning since it requires local administrators to deal with the physical, environmental and cultural aspects of the landscape. In this context, these tools cannot be treated as mere containers of digital datasets but as tools for the creation of perceptual models proposed by planners which frequently represent complex spatial dynamics. However, it is unclear how these concepts, which in continental Europe are already well established technologically and culturally, can be applied in the Mediterranean area, not only due to the time lag associated with the adoption of these practices but also due to a different cultural perception.

References Adriaensen, F., Chardon, G.P., De Blust, G., Swinnen,E., Villalba, S., Gulinck, H. Matthysen, E. (2003) The application of “least-cost” modelling as a functional landscape model. Landscape and Urban Planning, 64, 233-247. Araújo, M.B., Thuiller, W., Pearson, R.G. (2006) Climate warming and the decline of amphibians and reptiles in Europe. Journal of Biogeography, 33, 1712-1728. Balzter, H. (2000) Markov chain models for vegetation dynamics: Ecological Modelling, 126, 139-154. Boyd D.S. (2009). Remote sensing in physical geography: a twenty-firstcentury perspective Progress in Physical Geography, 33, 451-456. Burrough, P. A. (1986) Principles of Geographical Information Systems for Land Resources Assessment. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Ciancio, O., Corona, P., Marchetti, M., Chirici, G., Barbati, A. and Travaglini, D. 2004 Carta degli aspetti paesistici d’Italia. Relazione Tecnica Finale. Università degli Studi di Firenze. Christakos, G., Bogaert, P., Serre, M.L. (2001) Temporal GIS: advanced functions for field-based applications. Springer-Verlag Cohen, S., Svoray, T., Laronne, J. B., and Alexandrov, Y. (2008). Fuzzybased dynamic soil erosion model (FuDSEM): Modelling approach and preliminary evaluation. Journal of Hydrology, 356, 185-198. De Smith M.J., Goodchild, M.F., Longley, P. (2006) Geospatial Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide to Principles, Techniques and Software Tools. De Waele J., Di Gregorio F., Gasmi N., Melis M.T., Talbi M. (2005) Geomorphosites of Tozeur Region (South-West Tunisia). Il Quaternario (Italian Journal of Quaternary Research), 18, 223-232.

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De Waele, J., and Melis, M. T. (2009). Geomorphology and geomorphological heritage of the Ifrane–Azrou region (Middle Atlas, Morocco). Environmental Geology, 58, 587-599. Desena M.A. and Melis, M.T. (eds) (2006) Telerilevamento Applicato. Mako Edizioni, Cagliari, Italy. Drake, N.A., El-Hawat, A.S., Turner, P., Armitage, S.J. Salem, M.J., White K.H., and McLaren, S. (2008). Palaeohydrology of the Fazzan Basin and surrounding regions: The last 7 million years. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 263, 131-145. Donoghue, D.N.M. (2000) Remote sensing: sensors and applications. Progress in Physical Geography 24, 407-414. Eigenbrod, F., Armsworth, P.R., Anderson, B.J., Heinemeyer, A., Gillings, S., Roy, D.B., Thomas, C.D., Gaston. K.J. (2010). The impact of proxyǦbased methods on mapping the distribution of ecosystem services. Journal of Applied Ecology 47, 377-385. Falcucci, A., Maioranoa, L., Ciuccia, P., Garton E.O. and Boitania L. (2008) Land-cover change and the future of the Apennine brown bear: a perspective from the past. Journal of Mammalogy 89, 1502-1511. Fitzjohn M. (2007). Viewing places: GIS applications for examining the perception of space in the mountains of Sicily. World Archaeology 39, 36-50. Franklin, J. (2010) Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction. CUP, Cambridge. Garaux-Garson, D.C. and Lacaze, B. (2003) Monitoring leaf area index of Mediterranean oak woodlands: comparison of remotely-sensed estimates with simulations from an ecological process based model. International Journal of Remote Sensing 24, 3441-56. Heikkinen R.K. Luoto M., Araújo M.B. Virkkala R., Thuiller W., Sykes M.T. (2006) Methods and uncertainties in bioclimatic envelope modelling under climate change. Progress in Physical Geography, 30, 751-777. Hernández, L., Cañellas, I., Alberdi, I., Torres, I., and Montes, F. (2014). Assessing changes in species distribution from sequential large-scale forest inventories. Annals of Forest Science, 1-11. Hickler, T., Vohland, K., Feehan, J., Miller, P. A., Smith, B., Costa, L., Giesecke, T., Fronzek, S., Carter, T.R., Cramer, W., Kühn, I. and Sykes, M. T. (2012). Projecting the future distribution of European potential natural vegetation zones with a generalized, tree speciesbased dynamic vegetation model. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 21, 50-63.

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Holt-Jensen, A. (2010) Geography: History and Concepts, 4rd edn. Sage Publications Ltd, London. Jankowski, P. (2009) Towards participatory geographic information systems for community-based environmental decision making, Journal of Environmental Management, 6, 1966-1971. Jeffrey Q. Chambers, Gregory P. Asner, Douglas C. Morton, Liana O. Anderson, Sassan S. Saatchi, Fernando D.B. Espírito-Santo, Michael Palace and Carlos Souza Jr (2007). Regional ecosystem structure and function: ecological insights from remote sensing of tropical forests Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 22, 414-423. Kent, M. Moyeed, R. A., Reid, C. L., Pakeman, R., and Weaver, R. (2006) Geostatistics, spatial rate of change analysis and boundary detection in plant ecology and biogeography. Progress in Physical Geography 30, 201-231. Liu, S., and Zhu, X. (2008). Designing a structured and interactive learning environment based on GIS for secondary geography education. Journal of Geography, 107, 12-19. Koutsias N. and Karteris M. (2003) Classification analyses of vegetation for delineating forest fire fuel complexes in a Mediterranean test site using satellite remote sensing and GIS. International Journal of Remote Sensing 24, 3093-3104. Kraak M-J. and Ormeling F. (2003) Cartography: Visualization of Geospatial Data. 2nd edition. Prentice Hall. Kwalie, M., Awad, M., Shaban, A., Kheir, R.B., Abdallah, C. (2002). Remote Sensing for environmental protection of the Eastern Mediterranean rugged mountainous areas, Lebanon. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 57, 13-23. Lacaze J.-F. (2000). Forest management for recreation and conservation: New challenges. Forestry, 73, 137-141. Lillesand T.M. Kiefer, R.W., and Chipman, J. (2008). Remote Sensing and Image Analysis: 6th Edition. T. John Wiley and Sons, New York. Llobera M. (2003). Extending GIS-based visual analysis: the concept of visualscapes. International Journal of Geographic Information Science, 17, 25-48. Llobera M. (2007) Reconstructing visual landscapes. World Archaeology, 39, 51-69. Lock G. (ed.) (2000). Beyond the Map: Archaeology and Spatial Technologies. Amsterdam, IOS Press. Longley P.A., Goodchild M.F., Maguire, D.J., Rhind, D.W. (2005). Geographical Information Systems and Science. Wiley

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Lovett A. and Appleton K. (eds) (2007) GIS for Environmental DecisionMaking. CRC Press. Maguire, D.J., Batty, M., Goodchild, M.F. (2005) GIS, spatial analysis and modeling. ESRI Press. Maselli, F., Bonora, L. and Battista, P. (2001) Integration of spatial analysis and fuzzy classification for the estimation of forest parameters in Mediterranean areas. Remote Sensing Reviews, 20, 71-88. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Wellbeing: Biodiversity Synthesis. World Resources Institute, Washington. Monmonier M. (2005) How to lie with maps. Statistical Science, 20, 215222. Moral, F. J. (2010). Comparison of different geostatistical approaches to map climate variables: application to precipitation. International Journal of Climatology, 30, 620-631. Ott, T., and Swiaczny F. (2001) Time-integrative Geographic Information Systems - Management and Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Data. Springer. Panizza, M., Piacente, S. (2008). Geomorphosites and geotourism. Rev. Geogr. Acadêmica, 2, 5-9. Paillou, P., Schuster, M., Tooth, S., Farr, T., Rosenqvist, A., Lopez S. and Malezieux J-M. (2009) Mapping of a major paleodrainage system in Eastern Libya using orbital imaging radar: The Kufrah River Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 277, 327-333. Pausas J.G. (2006) Simulating Mediterranean landscape pattern and vegetation dynamics under different fire regimes. Plant Ecology, 187, 249-259. Palomares, F. (2000) Vegetation structure and prey abundance requirements of the Iberian lynx: implications for the design of reserves and corridors. Journal of Applied Ecology, 38, 9-18. Pettit,C.J., Raymond, C.M., Bryan, B.A., Lewis, H. (2011) Identifying strengths and weaknesses of landscape visualisation for effective communication of future alternatives. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100, 231-241. Reynard, E. (2005), Géomorphosites et paysages, Géomorphologie: relief, processus, environnement, 3, 181-188. Shoshany M. (2000) Satellite remote sensing of natural Mediterranean vegetation: a review within an ecological context. Progress in Physical Geography, 24, 153-178. Spangenberg, J.H. (2007). Integrated scenarios for assessing biodiversity risks. Sustainable Development, 15, 343-35.

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Vogiatzakis, I.N., Mannion, A.M., Griffiths, G.H. (2006) Mediterranean ecosystems: problems and tools for conservation. Progress in Physical Geography, 30, 1-26. Vogiatzakis I.N., Griffiths G.H. (2006) A GIS-based empirical model for vegetation prediction in Lefka Ori, Crete. Plant Ecology, 84, 311-323. Vogiatzakis, I.N. (2011) Mediterranean experience and practice in Landscape Character Assessment. Ecologia Mediterranea.37, 17-31. Wainwright, J. and M. Mulligan (eds) (2004) Environmental Modelling: Finding Simplicity in Complexity. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. Warnock S. and Griffiths G.H. (in press) The Living Landscape Approach to LCA in the UK. Landscape Research. Wheatley, D. and Gillings M. (2002) Spatial technology and archaeology: the archaeological applications of GIS. London, Taylor & Francis.

CHAPTER TEN PERSPECTIVES ON INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN AHARON KELLERMAN

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Telegeography for supplying the data and permission to use them. I am grateful to Maria Paradiso for her comments on an early version of this chapter, but responsibility for the final version lies with me.

Abstract This chapter will be devoted to 1996 and 2006 measurements of international telephone ties of Mediterranean countries via telephone calls, and it will address the following questions: First, what is the geographical pattern of international telecommunications in the Mediterranean basin? And second, and following the portrayal of geographical pattern of international telephone calls, can the Mediterranean basin be considered a single, well-integrated, information space, in the sense that Mediterranean countries are well connected with each other? Data for 1996 show, for most Mediterranean countries, the domination of the global economic cores, whereas for 2006 the data present more complex preferences, differentiating between European and non-European countries.

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1. Introduction The contemporary context for the discussion of international telecommunications is the emergence of information society, or the information age. Castells (1998:67) noted that the information society: “…is based on the historical tension between the material power of abstract information processing and society's search for meaningful cultural identity”

Castells (2000:21) further differentiated between information society and informational society. Whereas the first relates to the role of information in society, which has always been of some importance, the second relates to: “A specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions".

Since Castells’ writing, a decade ago, what he termed as “informational society” is what has come to be coined and commonly referred to as information society. National information societies are increasingly based on the adoption and use of information technologies in all spheres of life, leading to enhanced interpersonal communications, extended uses of information, as well as to an increasing production of knowledge. Obviously, these growing trends also apply to all parts of the Mediterranean basin, European as well as non-European ones, and they deserve some attention when focusing on contemporary issues in Mediterranean geographies. A basic dimension in the study of national information societies is the measurement of levels of information technology (IT) adoption and use among populations. Such measurements may be performed at three geographical scales: – National: National measures compared among nations (e.g. mobile telephones per population per country). – Intra-national: Interregional digital divide or digital gap within a given country (e.g. Internet penetration levels in households by region). – International: International information interaction (e.g. telephone calls from one country to all or several other ones).

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This chapter will be devoted to the latter scale of measurement of international ties of Mediterranean countries through time via telephone calls, and it will address the following questions: First, what is the geographical pattern of international telecommunications in the Mediterranean basin? In other words, which countries are most frequently called from Mediterranean countries and why? Second, and following the portrayal of the geographical pattern of international telephone calls, can the Mediterranean basin be considered a single, well-integrated, information space, in the sense that Mediterranean countries are well connected with each other, as compared to their connections with other countries worldwide? The very use of international telephone contacts assumes four preconditions: commonality of language by speakers; access to the international telephone system; conversation contents fitting for a telephone call (rather than face-to-face conversation or a written correspondence); and, finally, callers' ability to pay for call charges (Palm 2002). Two of these preconditions are related to levels of economic development, which can be assumed to grow over time: access to the international telephone system, and callers' ability to pay for call charges. Thus, it can be assumed that, over time, more people gain access to international telecommunications and can make use of it more frequently and for longer conversations. We will first discuss in general the potential geographical patterns for international telephone calls and their causes, and then we will point to the derived potential patterns for countries in the Mediterranean basin. This rather conceptual discussion will be followed by an empirical study of data for the mid- 1990s (mostly 1996) and for the mid-2000s (mainly 2006) for selected Mediterranean countries for which data could be secured. The use of these two points in time will also permit a discussion of changes through time. Interpretations of the trends of frequently called countries in the Mediterranean basin will be partially based on data (e.g. on migration), and partially on the well known economic and international status of the various countries selected for this study.

2. Geographical classes and patterns of International telecommunications Contemporary international telecommunications at large seem to express the globalization of economic and social ties, side by side with more traditional ones reflecting geographical adjacency and historical, cultural and political ties. The essence of globalization lies in the various

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transitions among location and nature of production, distribution and consumption of products, services, money and information, from locally and domestically based systems and social networks to highly integrated global ones (Dicken 2007:8-9). From a social perspective, “globalization involves the intensification of social exchanges of various sorts on a global scale” (Drori 2007:303). This is not to say that cities, regions, and states have lost their locational significance. It rather means that more than one country is normally involved in the three major phases of the economic process (i.e. production, distribution, and consumption), as well as in social networking. Investors and owners of a firm might be globally distributed, and this may also be the case for the customers of products and services. A product may be assembled in one particular place whereas its components may be produced in various other countries. Thus, globalization implies "growing interdependence and interpenetration of human relations" (Webster 2006:69), as well as higher locational flexibility of financing, production and consumption. It has further implied the emergence of transnational corporations (TNCs) or multinational corporations (MNCs), with multinational ownership, management and operation. By the same token, globalization has implied the emergence of massive waves of international migration, side by side with growing overseas tourism, both of which produce international social ties which are in part expressed through international telecommunications. To a large degree, the massive adoption of new communication technologies (notably the Internet and mobile devices), as well as the upgrading of older ones (notably through digital telephony and the provision of telephone and Internet services via cable TV) have implied an ability for individuals to be directly involved in globalization processes via virtual mobility and contacts (Kellerman 2006). This direct involvement in globalization processes refers to the very geographical expansion of destinations for frequent contacts with other countries. This applies to both international telephone calls, the tariffs for which have been drastically reduced, even to the levels of local rates in many countries, and to Internet contacts, whether through e-mails or web searches, sent to out-of-country electronic addresses. The Internet further permits free voice-contacts from computer to computer via VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services. It has long been recognized that geographical patterns of preferred countries for intensive telephone contacts may reflect one or more of these four factors: the domination of the global economic cores; colonial imprints; linguistic similarities; and geographical adjacency (Kellerman 1990, 1993). The domination of global economic cores may be expressed

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by placing many calls to several or all of the G8 countries (US, UK, Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Canada and Russia). Colonial imprints may bring about a high percentage of outgoing calls directed to the previous colonial power in countries which were governed by such Powers in the past. Needless to say that such a pattern overlaps partially with the previous factor of core domination, notably regarding ties with France and the UK. In some other cases, countries would prefer to contact widely other countries, the populations of which speak their own language, thus reflecting strong cultural ties. Once again, such cultural ties may reflect past colonial domination in many cases. And finally, countries may develop strong communication ties with neighboring countries, expressing long standing commercial or other ties. Here again, such preferred ties with adjacent countries may also involve linguistic similarities. Thus, the separation among these four patterns seems practical, but it does not necessarily present mutually exclusive classes. Several empirical studies have attempted to uncover the interrelationships between the movement of information, on one hand, and those of people (mainly tourists) and commodities (exports and imports), on the other, using large numbers of countries and variables along various time spans (Kellerman 1990, Barnett 1999, Palm 2002). All these studies proved that international communications is not a standalone process, but that it is tied to other mutually reinforced international movements. The four factors of international telecommunications may yield four geographical patterns of international communications ties in the contemporary globalizing world: traditional, global, contemporary, and mixed (Fig. 10-1). Specific Mediterranean patterns may emerge in two out of these four classes, namely the traditional and the contemporary, whereas the global class giving priority to ties with G8 countries and the mixed one presenting mixed ties with G8 and neighboring countries don’t seem to present any special patterns in the Mediterranean basin. The traditional class has special Mediterranean geographical expressions in one-way ties by southern (North African) countries and their previous European colonial rulers (France and Italy). By the same token, there can potentially be present one-way ties from East to West, between Middle Eastern countries and previous South European colonial Powers (UK and France). Similarly, the contemporary patterns may present potentially more balanced ties between North and South and East and West, around the Mediterranean basin. For example, in earlier times, Morocco could prefer to talk with France, the leading destination of international telephone calls,

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but not vice versa, whereas later on, Morocco would be placed high also on the French list of the most frequently called countries. We will examine this trend later again using data for these two countries.

Fig. 10-1. Potential geographical patterns for international telecommunications within the Mediterranean basin

From a strict regional (Mediterranean) perspective, referring to ties only within the Mediterranean basin and excluding ties with G8 or other countries located outside the Mediterranean basin, four geographical

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patterns for international telecommunications seem to be possible (Table 10-1): - first, adjacency, or preference for neighboring countries, pointing frequently to language similarity; - second, two-way cross-sea ties, namely equal preference of South European countries to contacts with North African and/or Middle Eastern countries and vice versa, presenting strong two-way ties of any kind; - third, one-way cross-sea South-North and East-West communications with South European countries, whereas the latter tend to call more frequently other countries, thus illustrating ties which continue since the colonial age; and finally, fourth, one-way cross-sea North-South or West-East communications, whereby South European countries would have preferred to call North African and Middle Eastern countries, whereas these latter countries would) call most frequently, other countries. This final pattern, if existing, would have presented economic strength of the non-European countries of the Mediterranean basin, as compared to the European ones. Table 10-1. Geographical classes and patterns of International telecommunications Call pattern

Call destinations 1. Neighboring countries 2. Past colonial powers

Traditional

Global Contemporary Mixed

3. Same language countries G8 countries Wide regional selection of countries Neighboring and G8 countries

Corresponding Mediterranean pattern for call destinations Adjacent countries One-way cross-sea South to North and East to West, Mostly adjacent countries G8 countries Two-way cross-sea Neighboring and G8 countries

Obviously, more complex patterns may be involved through combinations of several others of these four patterns. In the following sections we will attempt to examine the four proposed classes/types of potential international telecommunications. We will wish to see which of the potential classes/types and geographical patterns prevailed, for which countries and at which of the two studied points in time, 1996 and 2006. However, before delving into this, some attention has to be given to the data which we will use for this purpose.

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3. Data sources The data for the following analysis were collected by Telegeography (1996/7; 1997/8, 2008), and they include only international information interaction through telephone calls to other countries, using commoncarrier fixed-line communications. These data were, in most cases, reported annually to Telegeography by national governmental agencies, and are usually considered reliable. The contemporary scene of international telecommunications, notably in the 2000s, is, however, much more complex, as it includes also e-mail written correspondence, as well as mobile telephony through the still expensive voice communications and through the cheaper, written SMS. The contemporary international communications scene includes also VoIP, or voice communications via the Internet, which is free when calling other computers or much cheaper when calling fixed or mobile telephones as compared to regular telephone calling. Thus, the use of common-carrier data may only be considered a good estimate of the much wider arena of international telecommunications. Albeit restricted by the availability of data to exclusively a selected group of countries, the data will present the most frequently called countries for several calling Mediterranean countries, European and nonEuropean alike, for the mid-1990s, mainly 1996, as well as for the mid2000s, mainly 2006. The comparison between these two years, representing the two most recent mid-decade points, shall show a geographical broadening of international communications which mainly reflects growing tourism and international migration.

4. 1996 patterns The data for the mid-1990s are presented in Table 10-2. Whereas the major South European Mediterranean countries are all there (Spain, France, Italy and Greece), North Africa is represented only by Morocco, due to lack of available data for other Maghreb countries. The same applies also to the selection of the rest of the countries (Turkey, Syria, Israel and Cyprus), which is partial and restricted by data availability. We will discuss the data for the South European countries separately from the other selected countries, both European and non- European ones. All four South European countries called Germany more than any other country. Germany, being the leading economic power in Europe, and located north of all the four leading South European Mediterranean countries, generated more telephone calls to it than any other large South European countries (e.g. Italy for France) neighboring the four South

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European countries. Needless to say that no country located south of Europe (North Africa) or east of it (the Middle East) has led the European lists of most frequently called countries. Interestingly enough, though, Germany called the most its small neighboring - but close to Germans in terms of linguistic and cultural aspects- country, Austria (Telegeography 1997/98; see also Kellerman 1990). The dominance of Germany in the South European lists was not high, ranging between 11.0% of the total minute calls in France to 17.4% in Greece, and it was followed by other leading European countries, whether in the Mediterranean (France and Italy) or not (UK). The US came in only 3rd in rank (in Italy) to 6th in rank (in France), representing also historical immigration ties with Italy and Greece. Smaller central European countries appeared next, placed higher in rank when sharing a joint border or language ties with the Mediterranean countries under study (e.g. Belgium was 4th in France and Switzerland was 4th in Italy). Table 10-2 Most frequently called countries for selected Mediterranean countries 1994-1996 (In % of total outgoing international call minutes) Data source: Telegeography 1996/7, 1997/8 Rank Spain 1996 Germany 1 5.7 2 France 15.4 3 UK 14.3 4 Italy 6.7 5 US 4.7 6 Portugal 4.0 7 Switzer. 3.5 8 Belgium 3.5 9 Netherl. 3.4 10 Morocco 2.2

France 1996

Italy 1996

Germany Germany

1.0 UK 10.9 Italy 8.6 Belgium 7.9 Spain 6.4 US 5.7 Switzer. 5.2 Portugal 4.5 Netherl. 3.4

16.8 France 11.8 US 9.1 Switzer. 9.0 UK 8.1 Spain 3.6 Belgium 2.9 Austria 2.5 Netherl. 2.2 Morocco Greece 3.2 1.8

Greece 1996

Turkey 1996

Syria 1994 Lebanon 11.7 Jordan 11.6 Kuwait 10.3 US 6.3 Russia 5.7 France 5.7 Egypt 5.6

Israel Morocco Cyprus 1995 1996 1996 Germany Germany US France UK 17.4 33.5 32.4 44.5 25.3 UK UK UK Spain Greece 13.8 8.5 9.1 8.8 23.9 Italy US Canada Italy Russia 8.9 5.9 7.4 5.5 5.0 US France France Belgium Germany 4.2 6.2 5.3 5.8 4.6 France Russia Jordan Germany US 4.4 4.7 4.7 5.5 4.1 Germany Netherl. Romania Cyprus Netherl. 5.2 2.4 4.0 4.2 4.0 Bulgaria Italy Italy US Lebanon 3.1 3.1 3.7 3.5 2.4 Canada Switzer. Germany Russia S. Arabia Italy 4.6 3.2 3.0 2.8 3.5 2.1 Romania Austria S. Arabia Ukraine UK Bulgaria 2.6 4.4 2.6 2.2 2.2 1.9 Albania Romania UK Netherl. Switzer. Syria 2.2 2.5 3.8 2.0 1.8 1.8

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Countries with weaker economies and thus, affording less access to international telephone systems ranked low, regardless of geographical or cultural proximity, as well as growing immigrant ties with Greece. For instance, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Albania ranked 6th, 7th and 10th respectively in Greece and Portugal as 6th in Spain. Only one non-European Mediterranean country appeared on the calling lists of only two countries, namely Morocco, the largest North African country, which is ranked 10th in the calls from both France and Spain. Both countries represented for Morocco past colonial ties and cultural-linguistic ones, notably with France. Altogether, then, the major Euro-Mediterranean countries adhered to model number one regarding the type of the most frequently called countries, namely the domination of the global economic core (Germany, UK, US, France and Italy). Geographically, these countries corresponded to model number three, namely a one-way South to North preference towards Germany and the UK. The appearance of any non-European Mediterranean communications partners was minimal. The pattern of most frequently called countries by non South European Mediterranean countries in the mid-1990s seems to be much more complex. One common pattern for five countries was the dominance of a leading country, in terms of calls, ranging from 25.3% for the UK in Cyprus, to 44.5% for France in Morocco. Syria was the exception for neighboring Lebanon, leading the list with 11.7%. In all other countries it was a G8 country that led the list, but not necessarily one representing purely economic ties. For Cyprus and Morocco, the UK and France respectively, represented the previous colonial Power. For Turkey, Germany was the destination for many Turkish immigrants, while, for Israel, the US includes the largest Jewish community worldwide. The rest of the lists of most frequently called countries is no less complex. Thus, Syria followed the adjacency model with Arab countries in ranks 1-3 and 7 and 9 with the rest of the countries on its calling list being G8 ones. In Turkey, ranks 1-4 and 6 were G8 countries, though the first Mediterranean one among these, France, was only 4th. The dominance of Germany reflected also, or maybe foremost, the extensive immigration from Turkey to Germany, one of the first massive immigration waves from Mediterranean to European countries. Turkish immigrants have, for many years, been the largest immigrant group in Germany. Thus, Turkey ranked 5th on the 1996 German list of most frequently called countries with 7.3% of the calls going to Turkey, more than to the UK (6th rank) and to the US (9th rank)! (Telegeography 1997/98).

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Israel, like Turkey, followed the global core model, with ranks 1-4 and 6-8 occupied by G8 countries. Russia and the Ukraine were on the list, as countries of origin for the massive immigration wave of the 1980s-1990s. Jordan ranked 5th on the Israeli list, due to its large Palestinian population. The lists of Morocco and Cyprus presented the post-colonial model, coupled with cultural similarities and adjacency, represented by France and Spain leading the Moroccan list, and the UK and Greece leading that of Cyprus. The difference in population size and economic development between Cyprus and Greece and Morocco and France, respectively, made for the differences in the rankings of these countries by each other: Cyprus was ranked 6th in Greece and Greece was ranked 2nd in Cyprus, whereas France was ranked 1st in Morocco and Morocco 10th in France. The two countries presented the one-way cross-sea South to North and East to West model. Interestingly enough, neither Algeria nor Tunisia appeared on the list of Morocco, which presents strong contacts with European countries and the US, plus Saudi Arabia. The Cypriot list, though, included more regional (ties) calling partners. The general pattern for the mid-1990s, therefore, presented a dominance of global core countries, mainly non-Mediterranean ones, in most frequently called countries. Only one country, Syria, presented a dominance of adjacency ties. Communications between South European and other Mediterranean countries were not symmetrical, with ties to Europe being more important than the other way around. The data for the mid-2000s are presented in Table 3. Once again, the major South European Mediterranean countries were all there (Spain, France, Italy and Greece), but North Africa was represented this time only by Egypt, rather than by Morocco, due to the lack of data for Morocco and for other Maghreb countries. The other European and non-European countries remained the same as those for which data were presented for the mid-1990s (Turkey, Syria, Israel and Cyprus). We will discuss once again the data for the South European countries separately from those of the rest of the Mediterranean countries. The highest ranks on the South European lists of most frequently called countries present three new trends. First, a decline in the percentages of calls made to the leading countries, attesting to a much more dispersed list of most frequently called countries, stemming from the decline in the prices of international calls and the growing globalization of international contacts. Second, Germany remained as the most frequently called country only in Italy, replaced by the UK in France and by Spain and by Albania in Greece. Germany was ranked 2nd or 3rd. The growing importance of the UK may be explained by the closer contacts between

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France and the UK, given the tunnel connecting the two countries and the growing British tourism to Spain. France and Spain used to constitute the major destinations for British tourists, for years, with 36% of the British tourists in 2008 travelling to these two countries (Office for National Statistics 2009). Both in France and Spain, British tourists comprised the largest group of incoming tourists by nationality, reaching 18% in France in 2007 (Tourisme Infos Stat 2008) and 28% in Spain in 2006 (Instituto de Estudios Turísticos 2007). Thus, G8 countries still led the lists, but not necessarily for economic reasons. Third, a growing role was played in the frequently called countries by migration into South European countries. Most interesting is the case of Albania as the most frequently called country from Greece. This represents the massive Albanian immigration to neighbouring Greece, in the early 2000s. In the 2004 Greek population census, some 55.6% of the 1.1 million immigrants were Albanians (Mediterranean Migration Observatory 2004). By the same token, Morocco was 2nd in 2006 France and 5th in Spain as compared to the 10th rank occupied by Morocco in both countries back in 1996, just a decade earlier. Similar impacts of immigration were shown by the position of Ecuador on the Spanish list (9th) and Algeria (6th) on the French list. In France, there are no official data on the nationalities of immigrants, but in Spain, a 2005 campaign for the regularization of immigrants was led by applications of Ecuadorans (21%) and Moroccans (13%) (Source Migration Information 2005). Morocco is also a popular destination for French and Spanish tourists presenting a pattern of North-South temporary mobility, as compared to the immigrant Moroccan South-North mobility pattern to France and Spain. Romania (4th), Albania (7th), Morocco (9th), and Ukraine (10th) presented on the Italian list the four largest groups of immigrants, in Italy. In 2006, 15.1% of the immigrants came from Romania, 10.5% were from Morocco, 10.3% were Albanians, and some 5.3% came from the Ukraine (Corriere dela Sera 2007). As far as cultural ties were concerned, and despite the economic and political transitions, Cyprus still ranked low on the Greek calling list (7th), even lower than in 1996 (6th).

5. 2006 patterns Thus, one can observe the emergence of a contemporary geographical pattern representing not just economic ties of international trade, but also or maybe even more so, human mobility patterns, whether on the permanent basis of immigration or on a temporary one, that of tourism.

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Geographically, one could see the potential emergence of the two-way cross-sea communication relationships, assuming that South European countries would still dominate the North African (Maghreb) calling lists. In the non-Southern European Mediterranean countries, trends were more idiosyncratic, or country-specific. The Turkish pattern remained stable as a global-core oriented one. Germany led Turkey’s calling partners at the still high percentage of 30.4, representing also communications with the 1.7 million Turks living in Germany (Haupt and Kane 2005); the list and order of the rest of the countries remained almost the same as in 1996, with the exception of Azerbaijan replacing Romania and attesting to the economic growth of the Asian post-Soviet era nation. Syria, too, still presented the adjacency pattern with much stronger calling ties with the, still leading, Lebanon. Thus, the percentage of minute calls to Lebanon increased from 11.7% in 1994 to 39.5% in 2005. The growing economic strength of the Gulf nations brought Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar also into the higher ranks of its list. The Israeli pattern still kept the communications ties with the US topping the list, albeit at a lower percentage (26.3% as compared to 32.4% in 1996), attesting to a geographical widening of the Israeli international communications ties, similarly to the case of South European countries. Interestingly enough, Russia and the Ukraine climbed from the 8th and 9th positions in 1996 to the 3rd and 4th positions in 2006, respectively, attesting to improved economic conditions and decreasing calling prices in these countries. Egypt, for which there was no data for 1996, had Saudi Arabia leading its list at the impressive percentage of 25.6. This represents not only the economic power of Saudi Arabia but also the presence of Egyptians, mainly as teachers, in Saudi Arabia. In the 1980s, the US led the Egyptian list, followed by Saudi Arabia, with this order reversed now. Generally, the Egyptian leading communications’ ties were split between adjacent countries and G8 ones. Finally, the Cypriot pattern placed Greece, due to its cultural-linguistic ties, first, with the previous Colonial Power (the UK) at the second position: the reverse order as compared to 1996, albeit at similar percentages, so that this change was not revolutionary.

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Table 10-3. Most frequently called countries for selected Mediterranean countries 2005-2006 (in % of total outgoing international call minutes) Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Spain 2006 UK 11.3

France Italy Greece Turkey Syria 2006 2006 2006 2006 2005 Germany Albania Germany Lebanon UK 9.0 30.4 14.9 39.5 7.4 Germany Morroco France Germany UK S. Arabia 10.5 12.6 21.0 7.2 7.9 9.7 UK UK US UAE France Germany 6.8 12.3 12.3 5.7 10.2 9.4 France Jordan Italy Italy Romania Italy 5.0 7.4 5.0 6.3 5.4 6.1 Morocco Belgium US Bulgaria Netherl. Qatar 4.4 5.0 6.0 4.6 5.6 44.3 Portugal Algeria Switzer. US Bulgaria Egypt 4.4 5.5 4.4 5.2 3.4 2.9 US Albania Cyprus Russia Turkey Spain 5.5 3.2 4.0 4.5 2.7 2.2 Romania Austria Kuwait Netherl. US Spain 3.7 2.1 4.5 2.6 2.3 4.6 Switzer. Germany Ecuador Switzer. Morocco France 4.1 1.6 3.1 2.3 2.1 4.3 Switzer. Portugal Ukraine Ukraine Azerbaij. France 2.3 1.5 2.0 3.6 2.8 2.3

Egypt Israel Cyprus 2006 2006 2006 S. Arabia Greece US 25.6 26.3 25.0 UK US UK 7.6 11.0 23.5 Russia Russia UAE 9.0 6.0 5.2 Ukraine Kuwait Si Lanka 3.5 5.3 7.8 US France UK 6.8 3.4 5.0 Germany Italy Ukraine 3.9 2.9 5.6 Canada Germany Syria 2.7 4.3 2.7 Philipp. Italy France 4.0 2.7 2.2 Netherl. Jordan Romania 2.4 1.7 2.7 Bulgaria NA Qatar 2.4 2.4

As in 1996, Cyprus maintained close ties with both neighboring countries and G8 ones, with the Philippines joining the list, perhaps representing immigration into the island. Generally speaking, the calling trends for the non-South European countries remained varied and more complex than those of the South European ones, but no striking change emerged here, as compared to the case of Southern Europe. The growing economic importance of the oilproducing countries seems to have prevailed in the Arab Middle Eastern countries as presented by their high positions as the most frequently called countries.

6. Conclusion At the outset of this chapter, we set forward two research questions: first, what is the geographical pattern of international telecommunications in the Mediterranean basin? In other words which countries are most frequently called from Mediterranean countries and why? Second, on the basis of the portrayal of geographical patterns of international telephone

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calls, can the Mediterranean basin be considered a single, well-integrated, information space, in the sense that Mediterranean countries are well connected with each other, as compared to their connections with other countries worldwide? As the data for 1996 clearly showed, the major Euro-Mediterranean countries presented an adherence to model number one regarding the type of the most frequently called countries, namely the domination of the global economic core in their calling patterns through the high rankings of Germany, UK, US, France and Italy. Geographically, this preference implied model number three, namely a one-way South to North preference towards Germany and the UK. The appearance of non-European Mediterranean communications partners in the calling lists (attributed to the impact of immigration), was minimal. For the non-Southern European Mediterranean nations, the general pattern for the mid-1990s also presented a dominance of global core countries, mainly non-Mediterranean ones, and not always Germany. Only one country, Syria, presented a dominance of adjacency ties. Communications between South European and other Mediterranean countries were asymmetrical, with ties of the latter countries to Southern Europe more important than the other way around. In 2006, just one decade later, the highest ranks on the South European lists of most frequently called countries presented three new trends. First, a decline in the percentages of the calls made to the countries which led the lists, attesting to a much more dispersed list of most frequently called countries, stemming from the decline in the prices of international calling and the growing globalization of international contacts. Second, Germany remained the most frequently called country only in Italy, replaced by the UK in France and by Spain and Albania in Greece. Germany was now ranked 2nd or 3rd, in these latter countries. Thus, G8 countries still led the lists in most South European countries but not necessarily for economic reasons, with tourism still playing a growing role, as mobility of humans rather than that of commodities. Third, the growing role played by migration into the South European countries, notably from Mediterranean countries, but also from Eastern Europe, mainly Romania and the Ukraine, was evident in the trends of the period under study. We, thus, see the emergence of a contemporary geographical pattern of international calls that represents not just economic ties of international trade, but also or maybe even more, human mobility ties, whether on the permanent basis of immigration or on a temporary one of tourism. Geographically, we see the emergence of two-way cross-sea communications

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relationships, assuming that South European countries will still dominate the North African (Maghreb) calling lists. In the non-Southern European countries, in 2006, the trends remained varied and more complex than in the case of the South European ones, with no striking general changes emerging since the mid-1990s, as compared to the case of South Europe. The growing economic importance of the oil producing countries prevailed in the Arab Middle Eastern countries, making them frequently called countries there. We have identified growing communications ties among Mediterranean countries mainly due to immigration to South Europe, on the one hand, and tourism from South Europe, on the other. However, it is difficult to view already the Mediterranean Basin at large as a single information space with communication ties crisscrossing it in all directions. The South European countries, or the major Northern Mediterranean countries, presented similar patterns and transitions stemming from their superior economic development as a bloc, compared to the rest of the Mediterranean countries, which presented more complex trends and patterns, mostly because of their specific economic and cultural conditions. It might well be, though, that data for all the Maghreb countries, if they would have been available, might have revealed regional bloc trends also among the Southern Mediterranean countries, as well as among the Northern ones. This double lack of data seems to constitute the major obstacle for broader and more in-depth studies of international communication patterns. Reliable and comparable data are needed for more countries, as are data on international telecommunications via channels other than the telephone, for instance VoIP.

References Barnett, GA (1999) The social structure of international telecommunications. Progress in Communication Sciences: Advances in Telecommunications Research 15: 151-186 Castells, M (1998) End of Millennium. Blackwell, Oxford —. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Blackwell, Oxford Corriere dela Sera (2007) Italian Life. http://www.corriere.it/english/articoli/2007/10_Ottobre/30/migrants.sht ml Dicken, P (2007) Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. 5th ed. Guilford, New York

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Drori, GS (2007) Information society as a global policy agenda: What does it tell us about the age of globalization? International Journal of Comparative Sociology 48: 297-316 Haupt, A, Kane, TT (2005) Population Handbook. 5th edition. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/pdf/PopHandbook_Eng.pdf Instituto de Estudios Turísticos (2007) Spanish Tourism in Figures2006. http://www.iet.tourspain.es/informes/Documentacion/SpanTurFigures2 006.pdf Kellerman, A (1990) International telecommunications around the world: A flow analysis. Telecommunications Policy 14: 461-475 —. (1993) Telecommunications and Geography. Belhaven Pinter, London; Halsted (John Wiley), New York —. (2006) Personal Mobilities. Routledge, London and New York Mediterranean Migration Observatory (2004) Statistical Data on Immigrants in Greece. http://www.mmo.gr Migration Information Source (2005) Regularizing immigrants in Spain: A new approach. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=331 Office for National Statistics (UK) (2009) International travel; http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=178 Palm, R (2002) International telephone calls: Global and regional patterns. Urban Geography 23: 750-770 Telegeography: Global Telecommunications Traffic Statistics and Commentary (1996/7; 1997/8; 2008) Telegeography, Washington, DC Tourisme Infos Stat (France) (2008) Le Tourisme international en France en 2007. http://www.tourisme.gouv.fr/fr/z2/stat/tis/att00018288/TIS_EVE2007_ 2008-5.pdf Webster, F (2006) Theories of the Information Society. 3rd ed. Routledge, Routledge

CHAPTER ELEVEN MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATION SOCIETIES: PERSPECTIVES ON POLICIES FROM ITALY MARIA PARADISO

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Aharon Kellerman for his comments, but responsibility still lies with me. The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Program (Marie Curie Actions) of the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union FP/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement No [612639].

Abstract With the development of information and communication, society may turn into a significant force of potential change and opportunity or a threat for the Mediterranean Basin. This chapter attempts to assess perspectives from Italian national policies for growing and sustaining Mediterranean information societies. The paper starts with an initial portrait of Mediterranean informational patterns. Analysing and adapting previous work in Mediterranean countries, specifically Italy and some literature on policies, the chapter also raises a range of crucial items and a list of recommendations for policies in the Mediterranean Basin.

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1. Introduction This chapter attempts to assess perspectives for growth and to sustain Mediterranean information societies in light of the policies of Italy, a great European Mediterranean country, at historical crossroads between various Mediterranean places. The chapter is based on a previous study in Italy (Paradiso 2008) developed on the basis of in-depth interviews with internationally and nationally recognised experts within the field of Information Society policies. In light of this previous study in Italy, this chapter will introduce some policies and ideas, issues of potential significance for other Mediterranean countries, exhibiting digital divides and wishing to invest in inclusive paths for the development of their own Information Societies. The main reasons and common Mediterranean features for such converging policies are: the role of the national incumbent operator; the penetration of mobile phones but the still unachieved universal access to broadband; the rural-urban digital divides; the structural weakness of industrial foundations in peripheral regions, and to some degree also, infrastructure; and the only modest attention to well focused policies for R&D. The word of mouth culture even within the digital age can be another common Mediterranean feature. The introduction will portray the emergence of Information Society at large, and the chapter will consist of five parts. Part I shall present a conceptual assessment frame based on a previous study of Italian policies: supply-demand of infrastructures, productionconsumption of R&D, digital contents, products, services, and useinfrastructures. The Italian case had been developed as a list of indicators, SWOT matrix (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) and guidelines have been discussed with the Head of OECD ICT Policy Unit in Paris, the Head of Staff of the first Minister of Innovation inaugurating policies in the field, with the following Minister, Head of ICT policy unit and the Minister Principal Diplomatic Counsellor (Paradiso 2008). For this chapter, the ‘Italian’ methodology will be adopted. Part II shall present some hypotheses on socio-political regulation, competition and universal access tested previously by comparing the Italian Information Society to other States (Paradiso 2008). Part III shall individuate some emerging ICT Mediterranean patterns. Part IV shall elaborate on a set of recommendations for information society policies for Mediterranean countries, taking into account Mediterranean portraits of information society, based on the Italian case for both successes and failures. These recommendations are grouped similarly to the policy aspects of Part I.

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Part V shall outline conclusions with some lines for future research.

2. The emergence of the Information Society Globalisation processes have been strongly structured, propelled and accelerated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), and vice versa. The significance of changes, challenges, threats, and opportunities has been addressed first by Manuel Castells (1989) and again under the terms of “Information Society” and the “rise of Network Society” (Castells 1996). Geography at large, and in particular its specialty–“Geography of the Information Society”–have played a special role in highlighting the various geographical dimensions of the information society, including cyberspace and its impacts. The field of geography of the information society established a well recognised theoretical background outside geography (Brunn and Leinbach 1991, Bakis, Abler and Roche 1993, Graham and Marvin 1996, Batty 1997, Graham 1998, Dodge 1999 Dodge and Kitchin 2001, Roche and Bakis 1997, Corey and Wilson 2000, Kellerman 1997, 2002, Zook 2001, 2005). First, it focused on telecommunications as information pipelines shifting its focus later on to information per se. Examining the main information-societal trends, the first phase can be identified in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the information society entered a phase connoted by the information itself as the main product of a globalised society with the information media blended together. So far, in the late 1990s, information became a culture and represented the raw material for globalisation, local organisations and networks (Bakis et al. 1993, Offner and Pumain 1996, Kellerman 1997). This global trend pertained essentially to what is denoted as “the information/knowledge economy”. Geography literature has revealed the relations existing between information production, consumption and transmission, and the relative content and specific areas of the Internet (Kellerman 2002) and mapped cyberspace as a new geographic dimension (Zook 1998, Dodge 1999, Dodge and Kitchin 2001, Roche and Bakis 1997). This includes the apparently paradoxical creation of opportunities and constraints due to physical geographical barriers for the creation and use of digital environments (Wilson 2001, Paradiso and D’Aponte 2003). Detailed case studies and theoretical developments also account for the local economic organisation (such as retail, logistics, tourism, inter-firms collaboration) stemming from the adoption of new technologies (for instance, the works of Arai and Sugizaki 2003, Lorentzon 2003,

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Hashimoto 2003) and explore new directions for urban and regional planning in the Information Age (Paradiso 2003b, Corey and Wilson 2006). Mapping information at the regional scale provides many thoughtful regional, city, country, and sector studies (Eineman 2006, Paradiso 2003b, Arai and Sugizaki 2003, Arai et al. 2002, Graef 1998, Lorentzon 1998, 2000, 2003, 2007, Huh 2007). Since the mid 2000s, as the Web was revolutionised by Google and Web 2 and followers, the massive adoption of personal access to cyberspace spanned across the Globe with portable and mobile media and communications. The Internet is increasingly embedded and mediates many dimensions of everyday life; this observed evolution may account for a second phase which characterizes our current trend: a mobile and potentially ubiquitous information society, highly interactive and “communicative”. One can now claim to have entered a new phase possibly entitled “the ubiquitous/communicative society”. However digital networks are still highly concentrated and distributed more unevenly than the main infrastructural networks in towns; this is partially due to the privatisation and deregulation of the telecommunication sector. In contrast to the prevailing argument, however, a small group of cities currently controls the development of communications, playing the role of important “hubs” and surprisingly enough, global cities are importing new technologies created elsewhere (Townsend 2003). Analysing the social geography of the Internet, Warf (2001) showed that as far as the US is concerned, access to the Internet correlates with power and income category repeated also in cyberspace. According to Graham and Marvin (1996), the inequalities that emerge in traditional and digital spaces reinforce each other. Moreover, the interrelation of knowledge and information production as well as the production of both spatially coincide. From the point of view of representing geographical space, Graham (1998) conceptualises the dynamics between cyberspace and places from three basic angles of reciprocal influence; geographical studies perceive cyberspace as a sort of added “layer” that interferes with traditional geographical spaces in a way that often leads to a joint reinforcement (Batty 1993, 1997). For Batty (2001), the idea of a “small world” is exemplified in a network of clusters and nodes deeply rooted in the local area and densely connected, which are able to connect rapidly over long distances or interact with other places due to their local density. The result is an increased density of local contacts, individual actions and global connections, a sort of augmented space (Aurigi 2005). Graham and Marvin (1996) saw cyberspace as basically metropolitan, having

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developed from the traditional city but perpetually reshaping, rather than annulling, the local area. The recent Internet development and its main rider Google, which revolutionised the Internet and possibly our civilisation, leads to further implications. The Internet itself can no longer be considered the most comprehensive information system (as defined by Kellerman 2002) but rather a “mega project” on Earth thanks to the “meganess” of Google over the Globe, becoming thus, the most comprehensive information and communication system on Earth (Paradiso 2010). Cyberspace could possibly become not only a metropolitan phenomenon but a universal one, should there be opportunities for access. The more spaces are linked to Internet navigation and interaction, the more everyday life is loaded up with software and codes (Thrift and French 2002) with more personal use and more exposure to cyberspace as a novel human communicative and cognitive experience (Kellerman 2007). As Batty and Miller (2000) noted, we live at the intersection of two worlds: one is cyberspace. If information and communication technologies are attenuating the force of destiny towards opportunities for individuals and places (Kellerman and Paradiso 2007), some applications, developers, and market operations are concerned with how codes and practices in cyberspace negatively shape our world. In terms of positive impacts of ICTs, a new concept of location opportunities shift locational meaning from “destiny to opportunity” (Kellerman and Paradiso 2007) implying flexible locational opportunities for individuals and some general policy guidelines: the dialectic between individuals and locations should be taken into account by policy makers. On the other side of discussions on threats, research by Graham and Zook (2006) and Zook and Graham (2007), Dodge and Kitchin (2005a) pivotally explore interactions between codes, information and place constructs mostly by means of the case study of geo-coded services and mapping: DigiPlace or Google Earth. They can constitute an example of negative impact for unknown companies since algorithms for search and information rankings give preference to big external companies over local ones. Moreover, as the power of the code is intended to set rules of behaviour, there can be problems associated with automatic production of information which shapes individuals and the concrete production of space as a result of the new landscapes of codes (Thrift and French 2002, Dodge and Kitchin 2005a, 2005b, Zook and Graham 2007).

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Cyberspace goes mobile through converging technologies in portable personal devices which generate new personal mobility and shape up living and behaviour (Kellerman 2006a). In parallel, the reflexive understanding of Google nesting on the Internet–in places, States– as a mindset proves that the Internet is a global device of complexity (production or reduction) and Google is a “superpower” challenging the traditional roles and capacities of States (Paradiso 2010). As the Internet rapidly spans over the Earth, there is ample opportunity to affect several principal human spheres: the “cultural one” as the Internet is the most comprehensive information and communication system on Earth, a “political dimension” due to its rapid coverage and reach with respect to international or national regulation of Communication Protocols and standards, and an “economic” dimension with regards to investments, profit accumulation, market share and control and “social, technological, and business dimensions”. The Internet with its adoption and evolution constitutes a global space for human cognition and action that affects individual perception, cognition, action and systems of localised values and meanings (Paradiso 2010). The structural changes and advances across the Globe have not excluded any regional society in the Mediterranean Basin from the adoption and use of information and communication technologies, nor any individuals from any kind of human environment, even though questions of digital divides among them are important. The main consequences of these trends for policies are pressure for increased activism in order to assist countries in becoming from mere consumption basins, production hubs. Additionally, Mediterranean institutions for information societies have margins of commitment to support their people’s creativity and dynamism for better local development. In this regard the surprising performances of Morocco (International Telecommunication Union, ITU 2009) and repertories of successful stories of creative use of the Internet and mobile communication to sustain local developments and culture are really promising (Mernissi 2004).

3. A conceptual assessment of Mediterranean Informational Society Mobile access to the Internet and mobile communication at large are unprecedented forms of “virtual mobilities” or at large personal mobilities (Kellerman 2006a). They may imply as observed by Kellerman (2007, 2009) an adaptation of mobility media to a given spatial infrastructure rather than facilitating their changes. The mobility with the lowest location

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can be considered the “first element” of a policy scenario (Paradiso 2008) where new communications are growing fast even in the context of low level traditional technologies of generalized technology such as, roads and electricity. In terms of policy goals, this implies taking care of “supply/demand of infrastructures” at the appropriate level. The positive character of mobility regardless of spatial arrays implies that small investments of urban and regional planning are necessary to sustain media adoption. A changing balance between human fixity and mobility has been introduced by the adoption and use of electronic communication, by accentuating but not nullifying, fixity (Kellerman 2006b; 2004). A specific dialectic presents one of the major axes of the contemporary “Information Age” (Kellerman and Paradiso 2007:209), the digital division seriously affecting human development: local residents may act outside their area of residence using ICTs while people from abroad, using the same technologies, may be attracted to act in the region. The new locational opportunities may enhance personal opportunities and fulfilment using the web and all other communication channels: individuals may act as active players in their area of residence; if obstacles and barriers for local innovation are low it may potentially bring about expansion of other locations (cities, regions, countries), flexibilities and opportunities in the event that the local informational conditions are depressing. Places and countries which are able to broaden the citizens’ and foreigners’ vision of activism, enhanced by ICTs, can gain “in place and incoming” activity more than “outgoing” activity. This may attenuate or possibly reverse adverse conditions such as urban-rural economic and opportunity dualism in developing countries and unemployment especially of young and skilled people. Moreover, diasporas and family ties are supported by ICTs; this can be considered another positive value of ICTs: diffusion anywhere as well as in other realms of human life (home/ social, work, public/ leisure/ education, so forth). The expanded locational opportunity but also flexibility can be considered “a second element” of a scenario for policies for an inclusive information society. The opportunity is generated by a dynamic relationship between “production/consumption of ICTs” including digital contents, applications, and services. Individuals, both in terms of people, NGOs and small microenterprises can also play a surprising role even in lagging regions: dynamic relationship “infrastructures/uses” is an important goal for information society policies. Geographical locations have both, creative, vibrant uses of infrastructure able to stimulate markets for software and

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application developers who can play an active role in a globalised world on its own cultural, economic, environmental basis. These three crucially coupled relationships (supply/ demand of infrastructures; production/ consumption of ICTs; infrastructures/ uses) constitute the main blocks of policy activities, also being obviously, interdependent. They shall be examined in detail below. They shall be considered differentiated by their principal actors (public-private) and their underlying critical factors for achieving good performances (based on Paradiso 2008).

3.1 Supply/demand of infrastructures Supply and infrastructures traditionally depend on public and mirror national regulative cultures, political decision-making skills, style and in general the State’s capability for multi-stakeholders’ governance. Critical factors for a successful supply and infrastructure regulation are directly linked to healthy competition among (private) providers, and (public) attention and stimulus of access for universal reach. France–as a successful example of good performance in dealing with the broadband digital divide–proves a creative interpretation of the local governments in stimulating the broadband supply overcoming constraints in peripheral and rural areas where the simple market logic is not interested in investments (Kellerman 2006b, 2009, Vidal 2007a, 2007b). Other critical factors include the price affordability and the network performance. The Italian case (years examined 1999-2008) of a national incumbent operator and a weak state attitude (both coalitions, both Ministers Stanca, right coalition, and Nicolais, left coalition) to assess and realise competition ideas have determined a situation of broadband width paucity with divides North-South, rural-urban, “last mile” problems for a long time (last mile means the “plugging in” of telecommunication often owned by the former monopolist creating problems for competition), and a unique Italian situation of a fee for mobile phone recharge. Also all providers, except one, owner of its own limited fibre optic network, used the old telecom copper fibre infrastructure without being forced to renovate the infrastructure until the end of 2008; they performed low maintenance efforts in such a context where regulators cannot afford the incumbent’s role. The Italian Government has never recognised universal access as an objective or undertaken multi stakeholders’ initiatives: a PIAP- Public Point of Internet access strategy was undertaken in a very limited size–but results were never evaluated–for just 11 national libraries in 2007. Now Italy is lagging behind the broadband penetration in households and SME

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(small medium enterprises). A high level of access (of a good broadband network) is one of the main strengths of a successful inclusive information society and dynamic markets; low network performances in housing and hosting are considered weakness factors (Atkinson and Gottlieb 2001). WIMAX’s (a next generation transmission technology both for mobile and fixed communications) recent attempts in Italy with an unbalanced focus on mobile communication do not sustain penetration and uses. Demand needs smart solutions and added value services and applications. High costs and mass applications discourage development, put on hold the start up of many businesses and markets, obstruct citizens from adopting it and consequently, they delay any substantial development of services, applications, and digital contents. Robust WiFi transmissions for territorial coverage of access (not simply for mobile clients) are currently available and effective for fighting digital divides and the broadband gap everywhere.

3.2 Production/consumption of ICTs Production mostly but not exclusively includes the business sector. However institutions play a crucial role in facilitating or stimulating an innovation atmosphere, to support and create innovation infrastructures such as Universities, innovation/knowledge districts, incubators etc. They have the pivotal role to: a) fill the competence gap (human skills are crucial in some cases even more than having industrial champions or solid ICT industrial basis); b) sensitise and orient enterprises to produce not mass applications but added value ones; c) stimulate and strategically design “flagship projects” with high strategic relevance. Korea is a brilliant example of flagship projects on crucial innovative segments capable of bringing pervasive effects of innovation (ITU 2005). The public sector can also offer “production” in terms of, for example, digital services and contents like the interactive e-government. Web 2 opens up new perspectives and nuances for production of services, applications, contents where the distinction between enterprises and individuals is blurred. The public sector can stimulate digital markets and contents. Critical factors of ICT production (knowledge, technologies, digital contents, services, applications, platform, etc.) are: investments in

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human resources, infrastructures for innovations, well focused and highly relevant industrial research (in multi stakeholder cooperative schemes), developments of personalised applications and added value ones, development of digital solutions and markets. In Italy, no investment on next generation networks (completely until 2008 but still weak), low R&D as engine, no hardware applications (situation due to the WIMAX and 3G, third generation mobile communications, incumbents’ actions), mass services, production market depressed by non-selective grants policies, no strategic systemic vision, no “call for collaboration” for example developing national platforms, but grant programmes not selective and unfocused (Colombo and Grilli 2007, for instance, claim that, by not releasing a specific grant programme for young enterprises depressed the enterprises’ potential) and therefore, the lack of public expenditure assessment depresses the country’s socioeconomic potential (Paradiso 2008). A bottom up approach for bids (i.e. without indications of service standards and common procedures) for e-government solutions fragments the country and discriminates between citizens: a national platform in collaboration with local bodies helps the e-government’s supply/demand game, helps citizens and enterprises’ performances and their lifestyle. They revitalise market expectations in the many sectors linked to the digital content production and services. The use of infrastructure depends on costs, geographical coverage of good performance networks, literacy, interactive one stop portal egovernment, added value services and applications. Italian statistics of egovernment uses (CNIPA 2006) demonstrate potentially no territorial divides in curiosity or vivacity: ephemeral approach by Government towards Information Society, lack of awareness campaigns, coverage, and secured infrastructures can depress individuals’ (both, people and enterprises) initiatives and demands and limit opportunities for new employment and business. A certain parasitical attitude of the business sector does the rest. Broadband universal access and favourable tariffs enhance consumption and permit the demand of new services, the latter to permit limited technology saturation effects and widen markets of enterprises of software, contents and services production.

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4. Hypothesis of socio-political regulation for competition and universal access As demonstrated by the Italian case in comparison with other countries’ policies (Paradiso 2008), the following factors deeply matter: national coordination (avoiding excessive regionalism and bottom up approach) flagship projects, national solutions in a multiple stakeholders’ partnership, State stimuli and actions propulsing private capital into R&D, and calls for collaboration in strategic projects. National coordination and clear vision of policies are extremely important to create a favourable environment for also taking actions at the regional and local scale: in Spain for instance the first important strategic plan (Info XXI) was harshly criticised for lack of coordination between administrations and actions undertaken by local bodies and autonomous communities (Lopez and Tricas 2007). In France, policies for information society had a difficult start too. A decisive step was undertaken in 2004 when the “Digital Economy Law” (Loi pour l’Economie Numérique) allowed local authorities to provide telecommunications services to users when the private operators showed low interest for marginal regions such as the rural or the mountainous ones (Latouche and Cote 2007). Moreover the National Regulation Authority expressed juridical arbitrates generally in favour of local communities. It must be noted also that France promptly solved the national incumbent problem. The principal force for the general successful performance in France in the last seven years is constituted by the dynamic appropriation of local and regional institutions of ICT and their insertion in many spheres of local developments and social issues (Latouche and Cote 2007). ICT in France has also been the domain where the local bodies challenged the national ones for an effective decentralisation. The State, on the other side, was flexible enough to start a role of facilitator and create rules, evaluations, stimuli for a general propensity to innovate and adopt ICT to combat economic decline. The French case is atypical but an excellent case of good performance for a broadband and related market deployment: it represents a “business model” led by elected governments to win the territorial divide and isolation. All these conditions have also generated cheap access prices. In this national-local articulation, regions were generally unable to agglomerate interests and lack of expertise (Ullman 2007). The local proactivism to wisely use ICTs especially in e-government in order to increase local potential and accompanying initiatives, complemented well the policy of household penetration of broadband: individuals, families

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and enterprises have more opportunities. The governance scale of municipal agglomerations proved very useful in achieving good results and matching better the users with the goal (Vidal 2007b), at a national level, of regulation. Additionally, one more key aspect beyond the national coordination of multi-scale and multi-stakeholders’ commitment deserves more attention: with many policy requirements or opportunities, initiatives can be ignored if not accompanied by dissemination and sensible campaigns as witnessed in some Irish cases (Mc Caffery 2007). Ireland, while not a Mediterranean country, is a country where Information Society policies were very successful in the industrial and economic attraction domain. However, it shared with some Mediterranean countries the limiting role of the incumbent, the slowness of broadband service introduction, and expensive prices. The lack of competition and innovation within the DSL (digital subscriber loop or line) market deeply shaped, not positively, the inclusive character of Information Society in Ireland (Mc Caffery 2007). Efforts to increase the use of ICTs are driven by the competition, the need to attract people and activities but are not enough in order to bring to its full the real potential of Information Society for social and economic aim: projects focusing on ICTs, counteract the negative impact on labour markets of restructuring industries and seasonal variations (Lorentzon 2007; 2004).

5. Emerging patterns of Mediterranean Information Societies Benchmarking the information geography of the Mediterranean countries is a hard task at this stage: the only official source for all countries to be considered is the ITU which developed its own methodology referring to a certain number of indicators (ITU 2009a,b,c, 2012). Secondly ITU is based on data provided by national countries: in some cases statistical reliability cannot be fully proven. Moreover most countries, including Italy, do not provide public access to urban data, something that would allow us to measure digital divides since data on adoption of new media are generally provided for citizens but not for enterprises. If some patterns can be individuated, field qualitative and quantitative research for gaining primary data are strongly needed to portray all patterns and assess critical factors for their generation, developments or limitations.

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Relevant ITU data are related to penetration: via fixed and mobile broadband, the proportion of households with Internet at home, Internet users per 100 inhabitants; to access: mobile cellular subscription per 100 inhabitants, international Internet bandwidth per Internet user. Other socio-economic indicators are provided, related to: adult literacy, population, density, gross enrolment ratio, GDP (Gross Domestic Product). There is no available data for the general public on public access points, which constitute relevant information on developing countries. Specific geographical studies on this type of access in developing cases were elaborated for some African non-Mediterranean countries (Eveno et al. 2008, Cheneau-Loquay 2004): they found interesting results similar to Mediterranean non-EU countries. Some Mediterranean countries also started to collect and show national data via the web for assessing the state of their information societies (Portuguese Republic, National Authority of Communications; Arab Republic of Egypt, Ministry of Communications French Republic, Post and Communications Regulatory Authority-ARCEP, Republic of Cyprus, OECPR; Republic of Lebanon, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority). However national data selection are different and not comparable in an optimal way; even the online collections of data and information on policies initiatives are an interesting source to detect signs and directions of more mature Mediterranean non-EU information societies. Until now Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, France, Portugal seem to have performed this initiative as they appear linked to the ITU website in the list of national statistics. Morocco, Israel and Italy did not invest in such public efforts for specific national e-readiness statistics. Morocco statistics are provided within the World Bank tutorship. Israel releases some official ICT data within the more general National Statistics System. Italian national systems carried out a certain number of analyses but the more promising and capillary data at the urban level are held by a public-private consortium, semi-financed by the State, which however, is not allowed to release data for public research institutions. Among nationally sourced processed data, a significant variability in data emerges. The basic infrastructural data are missing in many cases and once again it should be underlined that national statistics are not online. In this chapter, the former Yugoslav Mediterranean countries were not examined to reduce heterogeneity of observations. In 2008 (OECD 2009), latest available year of OECD statistics of households with broadband access, all Mediterranean countries included in the OECD, were above the EU 27 average (48.6%) except France (57.1%).

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Spain was just below the EU 27 average (44.6%), Portugal (30%) and Italy scored very low (25.3%) followed at a distance by Greece at a poor 7.5% and Turkey 1.7% in 2005. The Mediterranean “champions” in the OECD world “club” can be considered France and especially Portugal where statistics showed brilliant progress over the years (7.9% households connected in 2003, 30.4% in 2008) with a constant improvement of 6-7% points each year. Broadband supply is limited with a huge rural/capitol cities divide. Among non-EU countries, Tunisia, in particular, shows a clear focus on promotion of direct foreign investments and incentives for enterprises and research centres; it improved efforts in Wi-Fi transmission in rural areas. Household general Internet penetration is 3% of the population in Tunisia, 13.59% household in Jordan and 2.49% of total population, 9% in Lebanon (end 2008) (general Internet households is 38% in Lebanon showing a better literacy and adoption of PC at home). Egypt provides more data compared to other countries including business access penetration, in general an increase in international Internet bandwidth per inhabitants (619) and in Mbs 46.998 on May 2009, and 95% population covered by mobile cellular telephony. Algeria market seems exclusively linked to mobile telephony if we take into consideration the national online statistics. Cyprus and Portugal show successful performances in household broadband and rapid increase in the last years linked to public policy initiatives including, for Malta, a free one-year subscription. Jordanian (Kingdom of Jordan Telecommunications Regulatory Commission 2009) and Turkish websites seem to have technical problems in downloading Pdf materials in English. They both launched a 3G bid first in 2008; Jordan’s bid was unsuccessful and the only competing operator, Orange, claimed against the conditions. Turkey deploys the next generation network in April 2009 and showed rapid adoption of 3G subscriptions (ITU newslog 2009). One striking and paradoxical observation beyond the highly differentiated geography of the “EU MED” and “Not EU MED”: from one side the infrastructure supply is very weak, especially on the broadband coverage and adoption, and from the other side the mobile phone adoption is often at exceptional high rates (see table 11-1 for ratio of mobile cellular subscriptions to fixed telephone lines: Jordan 10.2:1; Algeria 9.6:1; Morocco 7.6:1; Tunisia 6.9:1). This demonstrates a high demand of communications and needs to overcome several structural barriers.

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Table 11-1. Basic indicators for Mediterranean Information geographies (2007-2008) Population (2008) Country

Total (M)

Albania 3.14 Algeria 34.37 BosniaHerz. 3.77 Croatia 4.42 Cyprus 0.86 Egypt 81.53 France 62.04 Greece 11.14 Israel 7.05 Italy 59.60 Jordan 6.14 Lebanon 4.19 Libya 6.29 Malta 0.41 Montenegro 0.62 Morocco 31.61 Palestine 4.15 Portugal 10.68 Serbia 9.84 Slovenia 2.02 Spain 44.49 Syria 21.23 TFYR 2.04 Macedonia Tunisia 10.17 Turkey 73.91 Med. Average World 6’772.5 Source: ITU 2009

GDP (2007)

Densit Per Total (B y (per capita US$) km2) (US$) 109 10.87 3’469 14 134.30 3’967 74 15.14 4’008 78 58.57 13’225 93 36.60 42’866 82 133.53 1’668 114 2’558.84 41’463 84 313.63 28’225 339 163.96 23’654 198 2’116.33 35’686 64 15.83 2’665 403 25.04 6’017 4 69.69 11’296 1’289 7.41 18’238 2 3.85 6’194 48 75.12 2’406 689 117 223.09 20’965 111 40.42 4’112 100 46.06 22’913 88 1’438.15 32’647 114 32.73 1’654

Ratio: Broadband mobile Subscribers (2008) subscripti ons/ Total Per 100 fixed tel. (000s) Inhab. lines (2008) 9.1:1 64 2.04 9.6:1 485 1.41 3.1:1 188.5 4.99 3.1:1 524.7 11.86 2.6:1 141.2 16.37 3.5:1 769.7 0.94 1.7:1 17’691 28.52 2.3:1 1’506.6 13.53 2.8:1 1’684 23.88 4.3:1 11’283 18.93 10.2:1 137.1 2.24 1.9:1 211 5.03 4.7:1 10 0.16 1.6:1 5.3 0.04 2.0:1 62.2 9.99 7.6:1 483.9 1.53 3.3:1 100 2.41 3.6:1 1’634.4 15.31 3.1:1 451.2 4.59 2.0:1 426.6 21.17 2.5:1 8’995.4 20.22 1.9:1 11.1 0.05

79

7.92 3’883

5.5:1

181

8.87

62 95

35.11 3’487 657.10 9’001

6.9:1 3.8:1

227.3 5’749.9

2.24 7.78

410’891

6.11

3.43:1 50 54’736.9 8’257

3:1

The exceptional high rates of value can be a proxy of specific culturalsocial geographies too since they are not positively correlated to GDP: in terms of regional patterns, they are more typical of states with less

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literacy, diasporas or settlements of refuges, connoted by divides between rural-arid and urban areas with nomadic cultural roots too. One can deduct, even at this early stage of observation and with the limited available information, that South-oriental Mediterranean society patterns can indicate “mobile communicative societies” while in North EU one can speak of “fixed communication societies with advanced personal (virtual) mobilities” propelled by 3G broadband. Evolutionary patterns (2006-2012) show a rapid societal adoption of wired broadband in the Balkan Mediterranean. Mediterranean European States which lagged behind until 2008, recently exhibited exceptional performances in terms of online societies adopting a mature connection (wired broadband). Exceptional cases are those of Greece and Malta. Gulf States, considered here for recent events and increasing influence in the Mediterranean Basin, generally show better adoption compared to North African Mediterranean. Some countries, such as Tunisia, suffer from recent uprises while Morocco itself, a growing developing country, shows modest rates at large. Indeed, North African Mediterranean societies can be considered as mobile communication societies where Wi-Fi connections have been boosted rather than wired households where the lack of literacy is still a serious problem. Here, a different profile of Mediterranean communication society can be perceived, specifically one with a locus of communication powered by satellite TV and mobile phones: they structure a pattern of change in society with increased exposure for local citizens to communications and ideas from abroad. Houses from all social segments in cities and the countryside, for example in Morocco, show an incredible density of satellite antennas. Recent geopolitical events like the so-called Arab Spring revealed the influence and performance of Gulf satellite TV like Al Jazeera (Paradiso 2012), followed by less extended targets by Saudi competitor Al Arabya. Western chains also reacted by investing in channels in Arabic language (i.e. BBC). North African figures of Facebook profiles and possibilities for vernacular cultures and everyday life by Arabic Google are spectacularly increasing and changing the Mediterranean interconnections and openness; they proselytise activism across boundaries (Paradiso 2012; Paradiso and Tabusi 2013). The Mediterranean communications context, thus, represents an incredible arena for geopolitical understanding of flows and encounters but also for local development of those with access and media literacy.

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Table 11-2. Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions (in 000) Country 2006 Albania Algeria 170 Bahrain 39 BosniaHerz. 40 Croatia 252 Cyprus 63 Egypt 259 France 12'711 Greece 488 Israel 1'421 Italy 8'497 Jordan 48 Kuwait 30 Lebanon 190 Libya Malta 53 Montenegro Morocco 392 Palestine 27 Portugal 1'424 Qatar 47 San Marino 1 Saudi Arabia 218 Serbia 121 Slovenia 280 Spain 6'739 Syria 5 TFYR 36 Macedonia Tunisia 44 Turkey 2'774 United Arab 241 Emirates Yemen 3 Source: ITU 2012

2007 10 287 67 85 387 98 477 15'750 1'017 1'529 10'122 89 35 192

2008 64 485 77 188 525 147 770 17'830 1'507 1'684 11'276 137 40 195 46 95 34 484

2009 92 818 76 236 685 176 1'046 19'852 1'915 1'723 12'082 203 45 197 63 110 53 476

2010 106 900 68 307 804 193 1'450 21'337 2'250 1'762 13'061 196 46 303 73 121 52 499

2011 128 1'000 183 365 861 210 1'844 22'749 2'463 1'879 13'426 200 47 371 70 129 52 589

2012 160 1'111 174 407 890 217 2'287 23'960 2'685 1'937 13'480 197 47 451 67 137 52 682

1'614 104 4 1'048 457 425 9'054 11

1'888 141 5 1'343 591 449 9'707 35

2'104 144 6 1'497 802 467 10'533 70

2'243 163 7 1'577 917 488 11'046 121

2'391 215 10 1'966 1'002 502 11'396 242

101

181

219

238

259

288

96 4'754

227 5'750

373 6'443

482 7'088

544 7'581

528 7'858

380

558

688

787

867

952

11

26

54

84

109

167

83 16 477 56 1'512 87 2 623 326 345 7'990 7

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Table 11-3. Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Country 2006 Albania Algeria 0.49 Bahrain 4.06 BosniaHerz. 1.03 Croatia 5.75 Cyprus 6.02 Egypt 0.35 France 20.55 Greece 4.42 Israel 21.02 Italy 14.38 Jordan 0.90 Kuwait 1.24 Lebanon 4.66 Libya Malta 12.71 Montenegro Morocco 1.29 Palestine 0.75 Portugal 13.51 Qatar 4.83 San Marino 4.91 Saudi Arabia 0.86 Serbia 1.50 Slovenia 13.93 Spain 15.30 Syria 0.03 TFYR 1.74 Macedonia Tunisia 0.43 Turkey 4.04 United Arab 4.94 Emirates Yemen 0.01 Source: ITU 2012

2007 0.32 0.82 6.47 2.19 8.86 9.18 0.64 25.32 9.19 22.06 17.02 1.57 1.37 4.64

2008 2.03 1.36 6.89 4.88 12.03 13.67 1.02 28.50 13.59 23.70 18.83 2.32 1.48 4.66 0.79 22.65 5.53 1.56

2009 2.92 2.25 6.38 6.13 15.75 16.12 1.36 31.57 17.26 23.69 20.06 3.29 1.58 4.64 1.06 25.98 8.57 1.52

2010 3.35 2.43 5.40 8.00 18.53 17.53 1.86 33.74 20.26 23.75 21.59 3.03 1.54 6.98 1.21 28.54 8.45 1.58

2011 4.06 2.65 14.16 9.49 19.92 18.80 2.32 35.78 22.15 24.91 22.11 2.97 1.50 8.28 1.15 30.28 8.44 1.84

2012 5.06 2.89 13.20 10.61 20.67 19.23 2.83 37.47 24.14 25.34 22.14 2.81 1.45 9.71 1.09 32.03 8.44 2.10

15.27 7.67 16.04 3.98 5.73 20.92 20.01 0.05

17.85 9.04 17.74 5.01 7.46 21.97 21.21 0.16

19.87 8.23 19.42 5.49 10.19 22.75 22.81 0.32

21.16 8.53 21.06 5.68 11.73 23.65 23.75 0.56

22.55 10.50 31.69 6.95 12.92 24.28 24.37 1.11

4.79

8.62

10.41

11.31

12.32

13.70

0.93 6.84

2.19 8.17

3.55 9.04

4.53 9.83

5.06 10.38

4.85 10.62

6.55

8.20

8.91

9.32

9.71

10.34

0.05

0.12

0.24

0.37

0.47

0.70

19.83 2.61 1.56 1.49 14.33 7.55 5.26 2.40 4.05 17.06 17.89 0.04

Failure in developing an inclusive Information Society represents a main threat for Mediterranean countries. The worst case scenario of threats for Mediterranean countries is that it continues being a consumers’ market, brain drained and an immigration geographical area that is not exploiting the national and regional potentials. Thus, it could become a passive

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consumers’ basin exposed to extra-Mediterranean communication, unable to influence public opinion rather than a circle of public opinion opportunities, à la Habermas. The young generations are adopting fast and better, new media; even in the event that digital divides are attenuated and geographical coverage of “good” broadband is ensured, at this phase of the global Information Society, the Mediterranean cannot afford to suffer out of lack of broadband since the latter is developing an environment for digital contents, jobs and professional activities. The Mediterranean Internet thus, proves to be highly interconnected along several paths of different nature: active citizenship and open discourse, transnational connected diasporas, geopolitical and religious communications which appear increasingly interlinked and in mutual recognition. One example of virtual mobility and militants’ networking beyond the Mediterranean Region is provided by foreign companies– global web companies–which technically support networking and open discourse from abroad. A significant example of this could be the application “speak to tweet”, created anonymously by Twitter and Google (supported by the company “SayNow”, previously acquired) in order to bypass the block imposed by regimes on Internet traffic from mobile phone and text messaging). Physical and virtual mobility of militants of various natures are nurtured over the Internet. For the intrinsic power of video media and thanks to the diffusion of mobile Wi-Fi equipment (so-called “smart phones”) capable of filming and easily uploading to the Internet, “YouTube” is one of the main methods used in the dialogue between European and North African movements, allowing for sharing of information and practices (Paradiso and Tabusi 2012). At this stage of an early individuation of Mediterranean information geography, the related basic patterns lead to assess: 1. The priority of supply/infrastructures with a specific focus on new Wi-Fi transmissions for mobile and fixed connections to decrease the city/rural digital divides; 2. Specific public policy commitment to develop advantages for competitive providers, bids for 3G and price affordability; 3. Price affordability, incumbent efforts in next generation networks should be accompanied by flagship projects to realise specific national platforms for services and increase the local production markets of digital contents, services, and applications.

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6. Recommendations for information society policies for Mediterranean countries Weakness factors in the Italian cases (Paradiso 2008) include the privileges of the incumbent for many years, the scarcity of broadband width (direct effect of the non-competitive market) and operators in disadvantaged areas, the lack of attention to policies for universal access, policy approaches often conceived in terms of individual grants and incentives without ex-post assessment and too generic targets, high fragmentation of measures and lack of clear organic vision for a bottom up approach and excessive regionalisation, lack of national “flagship projects” to create common platforms, standards, applications, research and investments, moreover strategic catalysts affect areas of investment such as the “next generation network”(until 2008 but still weakly and disappointing after that), generation and certification of new educational profiles and skills have been neglected. On the other hand, these weakness points can be translated into strategic and operational goals for policies. In terms of learning from Italy’s policy failures, some hypotheses are crucial and general to be assumed for Mediterranean non-EU countries too. They refer to a clear national view of policies in the field and to a policy style which considers multi scale and stakeholders’ governance; crucial too are the policies for coverage and universal access, calls for collaboration and investments in specific laboratories, universities, incubators and developing networks of international cooperation. R&D cooperation and higher education in the Mediterranean basin is now institutionalised in the multilateral arena of UfthM and a resource is constituted by two Euro-Mediterranean Universities, one in Portoroz, Slovenia the other one in Fès, Morocco. Call for collaboration produces impetus and coordination for production. The above mentioned issues are catalytic factors for many developments in the interlinked spheres of supply/ production/ consumption/ uses. Specialised and personalised applications fit local markets better and stimulate demand. Specific policies targeted in terms of young entrepreneurships, localised niche productions and intangible heritage propel local energies and countries’ distinctive competencies. They push export flows forward and transform regions from mere consumers to production basins. ICTs can finally be successfully integrated in environment production, heritage valorisation and e-learning. The second hypothesis is the capability of building up collaborations with regional and local actors: the aim is to elaborate a shared view of communication and information society which shall stem from national

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and local characteristics (distinctive competences) which shall also be proposed at an international level. In Italy, for example, it lacked effective attention to integrate ICTs with industrial district activities and in general to the so-called “Made in Italy” (Italian know-how and products) to strengthen as well as to integrate ICTs into cultural intangible heritage. The internationally famous district of chairs manufacturing lacked the broadband coverage since firms are located in a mountainous region, a typical example of the digital divide. The third (operational) hypothesis is that coordination should be clearly spelled out in policy documents and performed on a continued basis with adequate funds. The fourth (methodological) hypothesis is that thinking and implementing ICTs in many spheres of social economic country life is a golden rule for revitalising production markets and encouraging the regeneration of jobs and activities. The fifth hypothesis is encouraging and actively performing the local and national digital contents in many ways: from the public via an effective e-government including e-learning, via e-commerce, local production of geo-based information and contents delivered by citizens and associations, high education and research institutions. Taking into account the previous list of hypotheses, cases and literature, the list of policy recommendations is styled as follows by pertinent themes of information society development in Mediterranean areas. It is based upon some evident weak points and strategy of catalytic effects and good practices. Recommendations for Information Society policies for Mediterranean countries Research & Development Launch a Call for Collaboration on next generation networks. x Invest in specialised teaching programs, laboratories, and Research centres. x Push and stimulate industrial research programs in hardware application developments, also in European clusters. Supply x Solve the incumbent operator existing privileges. x Adopt universal access policies. x Push operators to invest in next generation networks and applications not simply services. x Promote the narrowing down of the digital broadband gap.

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Demand x Create an intensive programme for raising awareness to Internet potentials and uses for quality of life, productivity, education. x Launch a foundation for digital opportunities and territories. x Monitor and stimulate affordability and valuable services for mobile telephony. Production and Uses x Launch a Call for Collaboration to Universities and Research centres for flagship educational projects (also oriented to international students and networks) for hybrid competences humanistic/social/engineering. x Develop flagship solutions and digital contents related to country’s comparative advantage. x Develop flagship solutions for e-learning also in international networks (students/officers/enterprises). x Turn your country into a location for digital contents and solutions production, targeted to specialised knowledge, skills development and learning. x Select specific countries for industrial cooperation. x Launch a call for collaboration for e-commerce infrastructure and training and raise the interest of enterprises in specific fields for internationalisation (agro-food of quality, crafts, tourism, wellness, heritage and arts at large). x Launch a Call for Collaboration and technical assistance in supporting enterprises producers of ICT services, applications. x Create and arrange a start up scheme for young entrepreneurship. x Sensitise available capital and banks in supporting ‘angel’ venture schemes and incubators. x Select country targets for e-commerce and promotion.

7. Conclusion The chapter initially puts forward the role of Information Societies in shaping globalisation and being a structural change progress for both geographical areas and individuals’ opportunities. An initial portrait of Mediterranean informational patterns in terms of access and penetration along with basic population data has been stated in the paper. The permanence of Mediterranean countries mostly as consumer basins constitutes a major threat. The low wired broadband is an

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indicator. The enormous influence of Gulf satellite TV accentuates the character of consumer basin and factor of homogenisation including the language and world visions. It has put forward the hypothesis of the prominence of a “mobile communicative” character of non-EU information society geography compared to a “fixity information society and individual personal mobilities” for EU Mediterranean societies. Major opportunities can be caught in the sense of the new ICT media adoption for the generation of local personalised applications and local production of digital contents with specific attention to local and human development needs. The approach’s core is related to the valorisation of distinctive competencies, activities, heritage, individuals and promising firms thanks to ICT integration in everyday activities. This development path can transform Mediterranean areas into more active players in the Information Age. The problems of gendered and localized lack of literacy exacerbate North-South divides (and within countries) while paving roads and aligning communications along the West-East direction towards the Arab Peninsula. Major findings consist of a call for collaboration in supplying infrastructure, production of knowledge and products, and uses in terms of personalised applications and specific targets. In this chapter, the early individuation of Mediterranean information geography leads to assess: 1. The priority of supply/infrastructures with a specific focus on new Wi-Fi transmissions for mobile and fixed connections to reduce the city/rural digital divides. 2. Specific public policy commitment to introduce advantages of competitive providers, bids for 3G and price affordability. 3. Price affordability, incumbent, efforts in next generation networks should be accompanied by flagship projects to realise specific national platforms for services and increase the local production markets of digital contents, services, and applications. Given the current state of studies, future field research and comparative geographical research are needed in order to explore and deeply investigate patterns of the Mediterranean Information Society or Societies of every country, at a regional and global scale; to individuate critical factors of original developments in the Mediterranean region and possible extrapolation of Mediterranean models of information society in comparison with studies in other world regions. Specific themes should be addressed to explore the Information Society dynamics and they may refer

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to: gender; specific environments of ICTs uses (oasis; deserts; rural; mountain; urban peripheries); economic sectors; life realms (learning, socialising, politics, art, culture, entertainment, and leisure). This is the reason for which basic human needs of mobility and sedentary life, curiosity and communication, copying with uncertainty, coordinating, sharing, doing business, learning, training, comparing, socialising, sustaining families in diaspora, enriching local culture and practices may be assisted and brought to higher levels by new technologies based upon geographical characteristics and human needs. The horizon in the Information Age for the Mediterranean Basin is therefore, global.

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http://www.trc.gov.jo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id =1899&Itemid=1&lang=English accessed 20 November 2009. Latouche, D., Cote, G. (2007) La revanche du Territoire : l'évolution des politiques françaises en appui à la société de l'information. Netcom, 12, 81-112. Lopez, A., Tricas F. (2007) Public policies governing the information society. The situation of Spain. Netcom, 1-2, 53-80. Lorentzon, S. (2007) ICT-Policy in a geographical context: a Swedish approach. Netcom, 1-2, 241-258. —. (2004) Call centres–a Swedish geographical perspective exemplified by conditions in the West of Sweden. Netcom, 18, 203-223. —. (2003) The role of ICT as a locational factor in peripheral region. Netcom, 17, 159-186. Lorentzon, S., (Ed.) (2000). The use of ICT in a geographical context: Research at Gotheborg University, Sweden, Netcom 14. Lorentzon, S. (1998). The role of ICT as a locational factor in peripheral regions: Examples from 'IT-active' local authority areas in Sweden. Netcom, 1-2, 303-331. Mc Caffery, C. (2007) Irish Information Society Policy. Netcom, 1-2, 209240. Mernissi, F. (2004). Karawan. From Desert to Web. Florence-Milan: Giunti (Maroccon original edition, 2004). OECD, (2009). Broadband statistics. Households with broadband access, 2008 or latest available year. http:// oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband. Offner, J.M., Pumain, D. (1996). Reaseaux et territories: significations croisés. La tour d’Aigues: Les Editions de l’Aube. Paradiso M. (2012), North African democratic mobilisation: The role of ICTs in Tunisia Jasmines revolution, Growth and Change 4, 697-711. —. (2010) “Google and the Internet: A Mega-project nesting within another Mega-Project” in S. D. Brunn (Ed.), Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science+Business Media, 49-67. —. (2008). Is Italy on line? Geography of the Italian Information Society and assessment of policies in an international comparative perspective. Bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society, 2, 305-344. (Italian). Paradiso, M. (Ed.) (2003a). Geocyberspaces dynamics in an interconnected world, Netcom, 3-4. Paradiso, M., (2003b). Geography and Planning of the Information Society Milano, Angeli, (Italian). Paradiso, M., D'Aponte, V., (2003). Virtual urban geography in Italy and traditional-digital place interlinkage. Netcom 3-4, 215-247.

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Paradiso, M., Tabusi, M., (2012) R-Rete Internet, in P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (eds.) Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome: Geo-Italy – Series published by the Italian Committee for the International Geographical Union Italian Geographical Society publisher. Portuguese Republic, National Authority of Communications, http://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?categoryName=CATEGORY_ROO Republic of Algeria, Regulation Authority for Post and Communication, Observatory, http://www.arpt.dz/. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Republic of Cyprus, OECPR, Communications Regulatory Authority, http://www.ocecpr.org.cy/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=767&tt=ocecpr&lang= gr. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Republic of Lebanon, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, http://www.tra.gov.lb/. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Republic of Malta, Communications Authority, http://www.mca.org.mt/. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Republic of Tunisia Ministry of Communications Technologies, Information and communications technologies in Tunisia, national ICT statistics. http://www.infocom.tn/index.php?id=55. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Republic of Turkey, National Information and Communications Authority, http://www.tk.gov.tr/Eng/english.htm. Accessed: 20 November 2009. Roche, E. M. and Bakis, H. (1997). Cyberspace: The Emerging Nervous System of Global Society and its Spatial functions. In E.M. Roche, H. Bakis (Eds.), Developments in Telecommunications: Between Global and Local, (pp. 1-12). Aldershot: Avebury. Townsend, A. (2003). Wired/unwired: the urban geography of digital networks. Phd dissertation in Urban and Regional Planning, MIT, mimeo sent by the Author. Thrift, N. & French, S. (2002). The automatic production of space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27, 309 -335 Ullmann, C.(2007) Les régions dans le millefeuille institutionnel des politiques de développement numérique. Netcom, 1-2, 113-136 Vidal, P. (Ed.) (2007a). European ICT Spatial Policies. Does a political European information society model exists? Netcom 1-2. Vidal P. (2007b) La permanence d'une politique publique TIC : de Parthenay "ville numérisée" à Parthenay "ville numérique". Netcom 12, 137-164. Warf, B. (2001). Segueways into cyberspace: Multiple geographies of the digital divide. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 28, 3-19.

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Wilson, M.I. (2001). Location, location, location: The geography of the dot com problem. Environment and Planning A, 28, 59-71. Zook, M. A. (1998). The web of consumption: The spatial organization of the Internet industry in the United States. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/pubs/acsp1998.html. —. (2001). http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/domain_names/. Zook, M. (2005). The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital. Dot-coms, and Local Knowledge. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Zook, M. & Graham, M. (2007). Mapping DigiPlace: geocoded Internet data and the representation of place. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34, 466 -482. DOI:10.1068/b3311

CHAPTER TWELVE THE MEDITERRANEAN INTERNET BARNEY WARF

Abstract This chapter explores the social and spatial dimensions of the Internet among Mediterranean countries. First, it summarizes the infrastructure of fiber optics lines that makes the region’s Internet possible. Second, it maps the rapidly changing distributions of Mediterranean Internet users between 2000 and 2012 and their explosive rates of growth. Third, it explores the economic and social variables that underpin discrepancies in Internet access, including GDP per capita, literacy rates, and telephone penetration rates. Fourth, it examines some Mediterranean governments’ attempts to censor the Internet, and how these relate to geographies of access. It also comments on the role of the Internet during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. Finally, it summarizes the roles of electronic commerce and governance in this part of the world.

1. Introduction With more than 2.2 billion users in July 2012, the Internet is now a tool of communication, entertainment, and other applications accessed by roughly 37% of the world’s population (Source: www.Internetworld stats.com/stats.htm). This phenomenon stands as a clear illustration of Castells’s (1996, 1997) famous “space of flows,” the rhizomatic networks of power and information that typify contemporary globalization. Clearly, the Internet is having enormous impacts on interpersonal interactions, community and identity formation, urban structures, and public spaces, unleashing new forms of production, consumption, and distribution (Crang 2000), and ushering in non-Euclidean geometries in the context of a massive global wave of time-space compression. Geographers have artfully charted the origins and growth of cyberspace, its uneven social

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and spatial diffusion, and its multiple impacts, ranging from cyber communities to electronic commerce (Castells 2001; Kellerman 2002; Crampton 2003). The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the unevenness of the Internet among the Mediterranean region’s countries and to sketch some of the ways in which places of economy, society and politics have become transformed through it. First, it offers an overview of the infrastructure that makes the Internet possible, particularly the skein of fiber optic lines that has been laid across the Mediterranean region over the last two decades; it also briefly addresses the roles of satellites and the impacts of telecommunications deregulation. Second, it turns to the rapidly changing distribution of Mediterranean users with access to cyberspace between 2000 and 2012, including their respective collective representations on the Web. Third, it explores the economic and social variables that underpin discrepancies in Internet access, including gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, literacy rates, and accessibility to telephone landlines. Fourth, it examines government attempts at censorship of the Internet, which vary markedly. In this context, it addresses the role of the Internet in fostering the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Fifth, it summarizes the roles of electronic commerce and e-governance in several countries. The conclusion points to the Internet’s potential for broadening the sphere of public discourse in the region.

2. Infrastructures Enabling the Mediterranean Internet Any understanding of the spatiality of the Internet must begin with the technical and social infrastructure that makes it possible. Fiber optic lines are the central technology of contemporary telecommunications (Graham 1999; Warf 2006). Fiber carriers are heavily favored by large, informationintensive corporations for their enormous data transmission capacities and by financial institutions for electronic funds transfer systems, in part because of the higher degrees of security and redundancy this technology offers. The role of fiber optics as the primary medium for Internet backbones was accelerated by the introduction of Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN), TCP-IP protocols, and packet switching. As numerous telecommunications companies sensed an expanding market in global information services, worldwide fiber capacity grew explosively in the 1990s and 2000s and today faces problems of oversupply, which have greatly lowered the costs of transmitting data over the Internet. The skein of submarine fiber optic lines that crosses the Mediterranean includes several high capacity systems that integrate various cities within

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the region, as well as others that connect it to the wider world (Fig. 12-1). The predominant pattern consists of several networks that enter via the Straits of Gibraltar, extend eastward, and exit via the Suez Canal. Chief among these are the Columbus III, SeaMeWe, and the self-healing Fiber Link Around the Globe (FLAG, the world’s longest) line, each of which has extensions into various countries on either side of the sea, particularly in Algeria, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. A secondary system of NorthSouth lines connects Marseilles with various destinations in Algeria and Tunisia. In addition, the Trans-Balkan Line, a combined submarine and land-based fiber system, provides additional connectivity to Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Turkey. The construction of such networks generated new geographies of centrality and peripherality, throughout the region: for example, once-marginal places, such as Marseilles, Palermo, and Alexandria have become unexpectedly important in the new world of Mediterranean cyberspace.

Fig. 12-1. Fiber Optics Lines of the Mediterranean

Although fiber optics lines carry the vast bulk of global telecommunications traffic, satellites nonetheless offer a low-cost alternative that does not require an expensive infrastructure. The southern European part of the Mediterranean region is serviced in this respect by Eutelsat, formed by the European Telecommunications Satellite Organization (CEPT) in 1977 and coordinated by the European Space Agency, which provides, in addition to television and telephony,

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data communications for the Internet via 24 geosynchronous satellites and 23 large earth stations (Warf 2007). Various private satellite Internet Service Providers (ISPs) complement this system, such as Globaltt, IsoTropic Networks, and CorpSkies. On the other side of the Mediterranean, the Arab League formed Arabsat in 1976, a regional satellite system with only three satellites and 18 earth stations (Egypt was barred from membership between 1979 and 1989 because it signed the Camp David Accords with Israel). A few brave private satellite Internet ISPs have succeeded in the Arab world, such as WAFA. However, given the authoritarian mode of governance in most Arab States regarding crossborder flows of information, this system is hindered by prohibitions against imports of satellite programs that are deemed immoral or decadent (Anderson 2003). The Internet in Mediterranean countries also became increasingly more affordable, due to price declines induced by the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, which centered upon the transformation from State-owned or regulated monopolies to competitive, private carriers. For example, Turk Telecom was privatized in 1993 (Wolcott and Ça÷iltay 2001), Portugal Telecom in 1995, Telecom Italia and Spain’s Telefonica in 1997, and Greece’s Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation in 1998; even France Telecom has begun to go down this route. In cases of telecommunications monopoly, in which former stateowned firms typically hold a dominant market position (e.g., Telecom Egypt, Maroc Telecom, Algeria Telecom, and Syria Telecom), access rates remain comparatively high. In Syria, for example, access costs until 2008 were more than $2 per hour in a country in which per capita income averages $110 per month. However, numerous Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have sprung up since 2000 throughout Mediterranean countries (Alampay 2006), as the Internet has grown in size and scope. As elsewhere, many offer free email accounts, deriving revenues from web advertising, or “banners.” Because personal computer ownership rates are relatively low in much of the developing world, and because Internet Service Provider (ISP) individual access charges are often high, many users rely upon privatelyowned Internet cafés for access, rather than individual ISP accounts. Cafés are particularly important for those who lack dial-up access at home or at work or who simply cannot afford personal computers of their own. Mediterranean Internet cafés tend to be most commonly found in commercial districts frequented by tourists, exhibit a range of ownership structures from sole proprietorships to international chains, and charge

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access prices that vary widely among and within countries. In addition to for-profit cybercafés, many non-profit and non-Governmental organizations have established networks of neighbourhood telecenters, which have played catalytic roles in community development in many areas (Hunt 2001). Many Governments, particularly in Southern Europe, have subsidized the expansion of the Internet into their school systems. In countries with growing middle classes, however, home-based Internet access is more likely.

3. Geographies of Internet Usage in Mediterranean Countries Data on Internet users in 25 Mediterranean countries (all those bordering the Mediterranean Sea as well as Portugal, Jordan, Bulgaria, and Macedonia) were drawn from Internet World Users Statistics (www.Internetworldstats.com). The data include estimates of the numbers of users in 2000 and 2012, as well as penetration rates (the proportion of the population with reliable Internet access at home, work, or in Internet cafés). Unfortunately, they do not include information on the socio-demographic characteristics of users or their location within countries. Thus, it is important to note that while this analysis focuses on variations “among” the Mediterranean region’s States, there are equally profound differences “within” them, including uneven access by class, gender, ethnicity, age, and persistent schisms between rural and urban areas. In June, 2012, 256.2 million people in Mediterranean countries used the Internet (Fig. 12-2). The number of Internet users, as one would expect, is closely associated with the total population size and national wealth, with the largest numbers found in France (52.2 million), Italy (35.8 million), Turkey (35 million), Spain (31.6 million), and Egypt (29.8 million). The Mediterranean region exhibits a mean penetration rate of 52%, higher than the world average (37%) but considerably lower than Northern Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and the U.S. and Canada. Penetration rates vary widely across the region (Fig. 12-3).

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Fig. 12-2. Internet Users (000s), June 2012 Source: data from Internetworldstats.com

Fig. 12-3. Internet Penetration Rates, June 2012 Source: data from Internetworldstats.com

Israel, with the region’s highest penetration rate (72.8%), higher than Southern European States, attests to that nation’s long history of technological innovation and its large computer software industry. However, with this one exception, the highest rates are, not surprisingly, found in the Mediterranean’s wealthiest countries, i.e., France, Italy, and Spain, where 60% to 72% of residents are Internet users. Morocco,

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Portugal, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent, Turkey, form a secondary tier in this regard, with penetration rates ranging between 50% and 60%. Finally, the Arab States in the Middle East and North Africa exhibit the Mediterranean’s lowest rates of Internet usage (typically 20 to 40%); in Libya it is a mere 17%. Broadband technologies of different sorts, particularly fiber optic lines to the home, have become increasingly important in engaging graphicsintensive forms of Web activities. As a percentage of Internet users, broadband penetration rates vary widely and predictably across the Mediterranean region (Fig. 12-4). Israel–where 77% of Internet users have broadband access–stands in a class by itself in this respect, with a penetration rate that rivals or exceeds that of many northern European or North American countries. Southern European countries exhibit broadband penetration rates between 11 and 30%. Surprisingly, Libya, with a minuscule overall Internet penetration rate (5.1%), also falls into this category, a reflection of its Government’s recent investments in that country’s telecommunications infrastructure. In most of the Arab Mediterranean, however, broadband serves less than 2% of Internet users.

Fig. 12-4. Broadband Penetration, 2012 Source: data from Internetworldstats.com

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Why the Internet has not flourished more than it has in the Arab world, is an important question (Warf and Vincent 2007). Mediterranean Arab States tend, as a whole, to be somewhat less traditional in outlook and more oriented towards modern norms than are their counterparts in the Saudi Peninsula and Persian/Arab Gulf; ironically, however, it is those traditional sheikdoms such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates which have much better developed Internet systems. While several factors explain the gap between Mediterranean Arab and Southern European Internet usage, chief among them are relatively low Arab per capita incomes and high rates of poverty, illiteracy, repressive gender roles (with some exceptions) that discourage women from logging online, and Government attempts to inhibit Internet usage due to fears of its political implications (a topic addressed later in this chapter). The overriding feature of the Internet, however, is its very high rate of growth; it is arguably the most rapidly diffusing innovation in world history (Castells 2001). In economically developed countries, the Internet has become thoroughly intertwined with the rhythms of everyday life and commerce for most of the population. In the developing world, however, poverty and other obstacles often limit access to this technology. Nonetheless, fuelled by falling prices of computer hardware and software, growing computer literacy (especially among the young), and slowly, if unevenly, rising incomes, Mediterranean Internet usage grew explosively between 2000 and 2012. The region as a whole witnessed a growth rate in users of 600%, meaning that during this period the number of users increased by 20% annually. Inevitably, growth rates were highly uneven geographically (Fig. 12-5) and were highest in countries with a very low base of users in 2000 (in this sense, relative growth rates can be misleading). The region’s greatest relative growth in Internet usage occurred in Albania, with an astounding 58,740% increase, followed by Bosnia (33,142%), Syria (16,796%), Morocco (16,377%), and Algeria (10,360%). Growth in relatively prosperous countries that had higher penetration rates in 2000 was more modest, including Portugal (138%), which saw the slowest rate of increase in Internet usage in the region, as well as Italy (171%), and Israel (314%). It should be emphasized that even those countries with low rates of growth nonetheless witnessed more than a doubling in the number of Internet users. The fact that growth rates were considerably higher in the poorer states with low penetration rates points to a possible future convergence in Internet usage, although this outcome is not inevitable and is unlikely to be materialized for many decades to come.

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Fig. 12-5. Growth in Internet Users, 2000-2012 (000s) Source: data from Internetworldstats.com

Fig. 12-6. Total New Internet Users (000s), 2000-2012 Source: data from Internetworldstats.com

Rapid growth in Internet usage propelled countless numbers of new users into cyberspace: between 2000 and 2012, more than 219 million new entrants to cyberspace came on-line in Mediterranean countries, or 85.7% of the region’s total. For the vast majority of the region’s cruisers in cyberspace, therefore, the experience is comparatively recent. The spatial distribution of the

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absolute growth in users reflects, inter alia, population growth and changes in penetration rates, and was uneven among the region’s countries (Fig. 12-6). Most new users were found in vast, relatively well off countries such as France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, although Egypt and Morocco added 29 million and 16 million new users, respectively. Although precise data of the social composition of new Internet users in the Mediterranean is not available, anecdotal and survey information indicate that the greatest increases are to be found among the relatively young, well educated, and urbanized populations.

4. Explaining Variations in Mediterranean Internet Access A growing literature has addressed the global digital divide (Wresch 1996; Schiller 1999; Warf 2001), pointing to the key roles played by variables such as wealth, literacy, and telephone penetration rates as fundamental dimensions underpinning access to cyberspace (“Use” and “access” are admittedly vague terms, but, in the digital divide literature (Barzilai-Nahon 2006), they are generally taken to mean deployment of the Internet at home or at work; rather, than a simple access/non-access dichotomy, it is more useful to think of a gradation of levels of access, although data on this point are non-existent). Not surprisingly, often elites situated in urban areas tend to exhibit the highest rates of connectivity. Mediterranean Internet penetration rates in 2012 were significantly correlated with three variables hypothesized to be directly associated with access: per capita GDP in 2008 (r = .83), adult literacy rates (r = .58) and landline telephone densities (r = .81). GDP per capita–a flawed but widely used measure of income–ranges widely throughout Mediterranean countries, from US$4,500 in Morocco to US$42,500 in Andorra, and its significant correlation with penetration rates indicates that wealth (or lack thereof), throughout the region, is a prime determinant of who is able to log in and who is not. Similarly, there are wide variations in adult literacy throughout Mediterranean countries, but tend to be almost universal in Southern European countries and lower in parts of the Arab world (e.g., 52% in Morocco). The widespread presence of nearly universal literacy is reflected in its lower correlation with Internet penetration rates. Important gender differences emerge in this regard, as women, particularly Muslims, are more likely than men to be illiterate and thus be denied Internet access. Third, the density of telephone landlines is highly correlated with Internet penetration rates: despite the growth of the wireless telephony, relatively few people in the developing world utilize cell phones to access

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the Internet (although this situation is changing quickly). Because wireless Internet access is generally confined to a few “hotspots” such as coffee houses or airports, most users must utilize a landline in order to access cyberspace. Telephone access, predictably, is relatively high in European countries, where Internet penetration rates are also high, and much lower in Arab countries (and Albania). However, as wireless technologies proliferate, and as cell phones have surged well ahead of landlines, Mediterranean countries may enjoy the potential to leapfrog old technologies. Extremely rapid growth in cell phones in the Arab world testify to the growing impact of the mobile Internet in the region.

5. Internet Censorship in Mediterranean Countries Internet accessibility reflects, among other things, the tolerance of different Governments regarding their population’s access to cyberspace. The type and degree of Internet censorship varies widely throughout the Mediterranean region and reflects the relative openness of its diverse political systems. Internet censorship is rarely a problem in democratic countries. In France, the Government in 2000 banned Yahoo! from allowing access to websites that promote racial hatred or Nazi memorabilia (http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens3.html#fr) or those portraying child sexual abuse. However, the Vatican lobbied for restrictions on the Internet’s “radical libertarianism” and the Italian Government has shut down websites critical of Catholicism. The Government has also attempted to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from allowing websites that defend or instigate crimes or portray the Mafia in a positive light. Repressive, authoritarian Governments fear the potential of the Internet, which allows individuals to circumvent the State-controlled mass-media and to obtain alternative viewpoints. Typically, repressive Governments that censor cyberspace use the excuse of protecting public morality from ostensible sins such as pornography, atheism, or gambling, and, more recently, they claim to do so in the guise of combating terrorism. Methods to restrict Internet access include laws against visiting certain websites, content filtering, tapping and surveillance, hardware and software manipulation, harassment of bloggers and Internet journalists, and perhaps most commonly, self-censorship. In the former Yugoslavia, Internet censorship was widespread under the Government of Slobodan Milosovic in the 1990s. Cyber-repression included: the arrest and persecution of the journalist Miroslav Filipovic, who wrote about military human rights abuses;

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politically motivated tampering with websites during the 2000 presidential elections; filtering of academic networks; and ordering some ISPs to close politically “unsuitable” websites. The overthrow of the Milosovic regime in 2000 greatly improved that country’s affairs in this regard. Israel’s long-standing confrontation with the Palestinians has shaped Mediterranean cyberpolitics. Before the Oslo Accord of 1995, the Israeli military’s Order 1279 forbid Palestinians from using electronic transmissions for political purposes, including leased telephone lines (Parry 1997). In response, Palestinians in the West Bank created a wireless network, PalNet, using microwave transmitters, which has been subject to occasional disruptions by the Israeli army. In 2000, the Israeli Government attempted to shut down several Hezbollah websites, leading to retaliation by Palestinian hackers against the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s website, flooding it with spam messages. In a more constructive vein, Israel launched ArabYnet, an interactive Internet site aimed at Arabs, that offers more positive portrayals of Israel than that provided by Arab ISPs. With one million users per month, “ArabYnet is the most interactive news site on the Arab Internet” (Diker 2003). Conversely, the Palestinian Authority launched a Hebrew-language version of its Wafa News agency website to circumvent what it called Israel’s censorship of cyberinformation about Palestinians. The Israeli Government has also actively recruited bloggers to combat anti-Zionist websites, including those that deny the Holocaust. Finally, it should be noted that the Ultra-Orthodox community within Israel has attempted to impose Internet censorship as well, efforts directed primarily at preventing access to adult material on-line. Turkey briefly blocked a YouTube site that insulted the founder of the modern Turkish state, Kemal Ataturk. In 2000, the Ministry of the Interior barred Internet cafés from allowing access to websites that espoused antisecularist (i.e., Islamicist) or Kurdish nationalist views (Economist 2007). More recently, the Government of Erdogan, enmeshed in turmoil over corruption scandals, has sought to ban access to Twitter. In much of the Arab world, the media are closely monitored and controlled by Governments, either through laws and regulations or via direct ownership in State monopolies. Journalists, editors, and bloggers may face penalties for “slighting the Islamic faith,” blaspheming Government officials, promoting political change, or advocating “immoral behaviour” (Human Rights Watch 1999). Some Arab countries in the region, such as Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon, are relatively lenient with regard to Internet regulation. Even so, Egypt created an agency in 2004, the Department to Combat Crimes of Computers and Internet, to censor “subversive” Internet sites, and has

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often arrested programmers, journalists and human rights activists for violating censorship standards. In 2001, the webmaster for al-Ahram Weekly newspaper was arrested for posting a poem online critical of the State. Despite the Government’s attempts to halt the publication of several books, many authors found alternative outlets on the Web (Gauch 2001). Syria’s regime under Bashar al-Assad routinely blocks Internet access to Kurdish-language news websites and any domain name ending in “.il,” i.e., Israel. In Syria, the Government blocks access to Kurdish-language news websites overseas. In Tunisia prior to the Arab Spring, the Government forbid access to services such as Hotmail and human rights websites; in addition, every Internet Service Provider (ISP) must submit a monthly list of subscribers to the State censorship agency. In 2002, a Tunisian court sentenced cyber-activist Zohair Ben Said al Yehiawy to 2½ years in jail for criticizing the judiciary and corrupted Police practices. Tunisia’s suppression of freedom of speech led the advocacy group Reporters without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) to criticize the United Nations’ 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, referring to it as a joke. To what extent can spatial variations in Mediterranean Internet penetration rates be explained by political forces? To assess this issue, this analysis measured political openness, or lack thereof, via the widely used Freedom House index of political freedom (www.freedomhouse.org), which assesses countries on the basis of electoral freedoms, political pluralism and civil liberties with a score of 1 to 7 score (1 = most open). When compared with Internet penetration rates, a scattergram indicates that political freedom is an important driver of Internet usage. A correlation of -.82 (albeit with a sample size of only 25) was statistically significant at the 95 % confidence level. Thus, within the Mediterranean world, the region’s least democratic countries have among the lowest penetration rates, while the comparatively wealthy and democratic republics have the highest rates. However, Internet censorship should be seen as part of a more complex array of contested relations in cyberspace: the Web is not simply a tool of Government control, but an arena of conflict. Thus, the Internet also serves a variety of counter-hegemonic purposes, including human rights groups and ethnic or political movements in opposition to Governments (Warf and Grimes 1997; Crampton 2003). Attempts at censorship are often resisted, sometimes successfully, by local cyberactivists. The Internet is relatively low in cost and easy to use, and thus reduces a major obstacle to the participation in public debate by the poor. Today, throughout Mediterranean countries, numerous groups in civil society use

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the medium to connect isolated once-invisible populations (e.g., gays and lesbians), to unite and empower women’s movements, to give voice to human rights activists, and to allow political minorities to promote their own agendas.

6. The Internet and the Arab Spring The popular rebellions that have destabilized, and sometimes overthrew, some autocratic Arab Governments since early 2011 have been the focus of considerable scholarly scrutiny. Beginning with Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, democratic movements consisting of hundreds of thousands of protestors, which enjoyed varying degrees of success, became collectively known as the “Arab Spring” (Anderson 2011; Gause 2011; Lynch 2013). This loose collection of demonstrations, protests, riots, and, in the case of Syria, civil war, has ushered in a new political chapter throughout the Arab world, with far reaching implications. The Internet played an important role in fomenting the revolts of the Arab Spring (Fekete and Warf 2013). In Tunisia, the Jasmine Revolution was launched following Police harassment and subsequent suicide of the fruit vendor Mohammed Bouzidi in December, 2010, which was captured on a grainy cell phone video and posted to Facebook (Diamond and Plattner 2012), catalyzed popular anger and paved the way for mass political protests. However, with so many videos uploaded to YouTube, filming of events alone does not guarantee widespread exposure; rather, typically only when a home-made video is picked up by a mass media source such as Aljazeera goes indeed “go viral” and reaches a very large audience. In an analysis of refugees fleeing Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Paradiso (2013) notes that those who fled to the Italian island of Lampedusa –on which she conducted fieldwork- maintained that cell phones and YouTube were the primary sources of information about the rapidly changing political scene and a common means of staying in touch with one another. Video streams were used to reach wide audiences during the Egyptian protests as well. When an Egyptian blogger, Khaled Said, was beaten to death outside a cybercafé in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, the café owner recorded a video interview about the event. This film, along with photos of Said, was quickly posted online and spread through social media sites. A Google executive who picked up on the story created a Facebook page in response titled “We are all Khaled Said” (Khondker 2011). In Egypt, it is widely observed that the initial protests were formulated through Facebook. The first protests were organized on Facebook by the activist

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group “April 6 Youth Movement” (Stepanova 2011). On the date of the first protest, January 25, 2011, approximately 85,000 people have pledged to join the movement through Facebook (Bhuiyan 2011). Although it is uncertain how many people were involved in the protests, thousands had shown up to Tahrir Square on January 25, with thousands more protesting in other areas of the country such as Alexandria, Mansura, and Aswan. Only two days later, reports of Government interference in Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry services were reported. Twitter was also a popular mode of information sharing in the supposed “Facebook Revolution” in Egypt. Once Twitter had been blocked by the Egyptian Government early on in the protests, its services continued to be used. Google released its speak2tweet technology, where people can call a phone number and leave a voice message that would then be converted to a link and posted on Twitter. However, as Stepanova (2011) points out, during both the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions there were only a few thousands of identifiable Twitter accounts in both countries. Digital media have also played a particularly important role in the long, bloody Syrian rebellion against the Assad regime, which to date has claimed more than 70,000 lives. Chozick (2012) notes that “If the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were Twitter Revolutions, then Syria is becoming the Skype Rebellion.” Faced with a massive and immensely bloody uprising, the Assad regime shut down the entire Syrian Internet on November 29, 2012, blaming the incident on a “terrorist attack.” Syria had previously shut down the Internet in specific locations over the past 20 months, but an entire blackout had never before been attempted (Chulov 2012). Another shutdown occurred on May 7-8, 2013. Many suspect that Bashar al-Assad understands the benefits of keeping the Internet live, as it enables his Government to track down rebel groups, as he has been reported to make comments on his “electronic army” (Fisher 2012). The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad group, has repeatedly hacked websites and Twitter accounts of the opposition (Perlroth 2013).

7. Mediterranean E-Commerce and E-Government One segment of the Internet that has grown rapidly in importance is electronic commerce (‘e-commerce’), which reduces transactions costs for business-to-business and customer-to-business sales (Brunn and Leinbach 2001).

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E-commerce includes several types of activities, such as electronic data interchange (EDI) (e.g., inventory data, digital purchase orders, invoices, contracts, payments, and product updates), Internet marketing, recruiting and advertising, web-based banking, consumer bill payments, and stock trading, “e-tail” shopping, and digital gambling. Internet video, videogames, and telephony (e.g., Voice Over Internet Protocol) have also gained popularity. Increasingly, cyberspace is crucial to managing supply chains over large distances and to coordinate far-flung corporate operations. The Internet has generated opportunities for small, localized firms to find new, larger markets, and for customers to engage in comparison shopping. The increase in information available to both, suppliers and clients, reduces uncertainty and lowers transactions costs. On-line shopping, however, has grown relatively slowly, in part due to consumers’ fears about web security and identity theft. Obstacles to the growth of e-commerce include poor access to the Internet and requisite technical skills, the relatively lower use of credit cards, lack of secure online transactions, and the lack of a critical mass of users. In many countries, there are significant concerns over copyright and intellectual property rights. Many states have enacted legislation to protect property rights in cyberspace via secure Protocols, including electronic signatures, contracts, and data. Centers of offshore banking such as Malta and Gibraltar have taken the lead in this respect. The Economist magazine provides a rough index of “e-readiness” for the world’s 70 largest economies, that is, the legal and technological ability for a country to engage in electronic commerce. The index reflects the weighted average of several variables that reflect each country’s digital infrastructure, its legal and regulatory context and the business and cultural environment that either, encourages or discourages the use of the Internet for commercial purposes. Of the 25 Mediterranean countries under consideration here, 14 were ranked in 2010, including most of Southern Europe, Israel, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Algeria (Table 12-1). The results point out to wide variations in e-readiness that correspond closely with other indicators of the Internet such as penetration rates and web visibility. Mediterranean e-commerce is most prevalent in the relatively wealthy Southern European countries, in which disposable incomes and Internet penetration rates are high. In France, for example, one-half of Internet users have purchased goods or services on-line. Despite the 2007-2010 economic crisis, e-tailing there has fared well. In spite of its robust nature, however, segments of the European e-commerce market face limitations: French curbs on Internet gambling, for example, have faced threats from

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the European Union. E-commerce in Southern Europe is relatively undeveloped compared to their northern neighbors: less than 10% of companies in Spain, Greece, and Portugal, for example, utilize the Internet for sales, compared to 30% in Germany and the United Kingdom (Nicola et al. 2004). Table 12-1. The Economist E-Readiness Rankings and Scores for Selected Mediterranean Countries in 2010 Rank (1 to 70) 20 23 24 26 27 28 29 33 43 47 48 50 57 67

Country France Malta Spain Israel Italy Portugal Slovenia Greece Turkey Bulgaria Romania Jordan Egypt Algeria

Score (10 = max) 7.67 7.32 7.31 6.96 6.92 6.90 6.81 6.20 5.24 5.05 5.04 4.76 4.21 3.24

Source: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/pdf/eiu_digital-economyrankings-2010_final_web.pdf

E-commerce in the Balkans is yet another step behind: in Greece, for example, only 20% of companies with ten or more employees have the capacity to take on-line orders (Economist 2006a). In Serbia, the cessation of hostilities in 2000 has led to an explosion of Internet-related activities, including a nascent software industry in Belgrade, although collectively the number of Serbian ISPs remains small in comparison to economically advanced countries. Tentative steps in the country towards developing an e-commerce system include the formation of Knjizara.com, an online bookstore emulating Amazon.com, and Balkanmedia, a Web-based music store (Travica et al. 2007). Bulgaria, despite its relatively well developed software and telecommunications sectors, has the least developed ecommerce sector of the European Union; with modest incomes and fears for consumer rights, only 6% of the population shops on-line.

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Turkey’s e-commerce sector suffers from an overloaded telecommunications infrastructure and the lack of adequate legal safeguards to protect consumers and intellectual property. However, the Turkish Government has supported the development of e-commerce as part of its efforts to gain entry into the European Union, including the ETransformation Turkey Project, initiated in 2002, which aims to coordinate and standardize various EDI and business-to-business Internet activities. As one might expect in a technologically sophisticated society with a large computer technology industry, the Israeli e-commerce sector is robust. In 2005, the nation’s e-commerce sector witnessed roughly US$350 million in sales (Economist 2006b). Starting in 1999, Israeli banks developed a well-integrated EDI system, and today almost ½ of the country’s population uses electronic banking. The introduction of a centralized portal by Bezeq, the National Telecommunications carrier, greatly facilitated this process. The digital convergence of the Internet, telephony, and broadband cable has allowed cable companies to bundle all three services, greatly expanding e-commerce in the domain of household (final) demand. Five major retail chains dominate the Israeli e-tail market (most of which centers on electronics and computer products), with a combined share of 60%. In the Arab Mediterranean, e-commerce is relatively poorly developed compared to that found in the Persian Gulf States. Nonetheless, in 2003 ecommerce in the entire Arab world is estimated to have exceeded US$5 billion in sales (Pons et al. 2003) and offers great potential to further trade both among Arab States and with the rest of the world. Obstacles to the growth of e-commerce in States such as Egypt, Syria, Jordon, Algeria and Morocco include the relatively low use of credit cards, insufficient security in on-line transactions, and the lack of a critical mass of users (Aladwani 2003). Moreover, some countries, such as Tunisia, have strict limits on currency transfers outside their borders. Closely related to e-commerce is e-Government, which involves a variety of new forms of interaction between States and citizens. E-Government takes a variety of forms, ranging from simple broadcasting of information to integration (i.e., allowing user input), in which network integration minimizes duplication of efforts. EGovernment allows, for example, for the digital collection of taxes, electronic voting, payment of utility bills, applications for permits, passports and driver’s licenses, on-line registration of companies and automobiles, access to census data and reductions in waiting times in Government bureaucracies.

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France exhibits the Mediterranean region’s best developed eGovernment, including easy access to Government forms, legislation, libraries, public transportation information and tax payments. Almost all of the country’s schools are connected to the Internet, with important implications for the nature of education. Some municipalities, such as Issy-les-Moulineaux, have experimented with cyber-voting. In the 2007 French Presidential election, 1.3 million people submitted digital votes out of a total of 43 million. In Spain, Portugal and Italy, where e-Government lags behind France, it has been used to reduce the size of public bureaucracies. Often with the assistance of European Union funds, Governments in Southern Europe have sought to overcome the digital divide in their respective countries, facilitating access in rural and low income regions, encouraging telemedicine for those who live far from hospitals or doctors, emergency communications services, targeted information assistance for disabled persons and the elderly, and promoting “distance learning” in secondary schools and universities. In Greece, the nation’s first “digital city,” Trikala, was launched in 2006, giving 70% of its residents Internet access and giving them an ability to participate in telework, on-line library and school programs, emergency response systems, environmental and transportation information and demographic data that can be utilized through publicly available geographical information systems. Turkey’s e-Government efforts, which arose in tandem with its hopes of entry into the European Union, have been used, among other things, to improve public management, minimize duplication of efforts, distribute public payments, solicit corporate bids and issue contracts, collect customs duties and some types of taxes and enable digital job hunting (Çayhan 2008). Because the Government has prioritized corporate needs over those of households, however, the resources directed at schools, households and marginalized social groups have been relatively small. In the Arab Mediterranean world, where e-governance has generated more hype than reality, its impacts are substantially less impressive than in the northern side of the Mediterranean (or in comparison to Gulf states). Major barriers to its successful implementation include these countries’ relatively low literacy and penetration rates, lack of technical skills among civil servants, a “brain drain” from the public to the private sector, lack of Government financial commitment and systematic coordination of efforts, and unstable, often corrupt, administrative hierarchies with high rates of Personnel turnover. Frequently e-Government is viewed as cosmetic and complementary to existing, paper-based means of administration rather than as the basis of a thorough reworking of the public administrative

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apparatus (Salem 2006). Several countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia, have launched Government portals that offer free e-mail accounts and some electronic bill payments. For example, the Egyptian Government site, alhokoma.gov.eg, provides information but not interactive services. Tunisia, by no means a leader in terms of Internet penetration rates, offers several services through its portal, bawaba.gov.tn, including income tax payments, job searches and building applications. By increasing the probability of discovery, e-Government may lower levels of corruption, enhance accountability, circumvent dictatorial leadership and, by making Government records more open, may empower citizens to challenge arbitrary Government actions.

8. Conclusions The Internet has rapidly become increasingly important to the Mediterranean region, particularly to its 193 million people who used it in 2009. A network of fiber optics cables, and, to a lesser extent, satellite services, has made access to cyberspace increasingly easier and faster on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. While the region’s average penetration rate was 39%, this percentage greatly varies among and within countries, falling as low as 5.1% in Libya to as high as 72.8% in Israel. Similarly, access speeds range from low-speed dial-up connections, in rural areas, to high-speed broadband. Internet access and usage in the Arab world is uniformly low, compared to that in Southern Europe. Thus, in many ways, the geography of the Mediterranean Internet mirrors longstanding social and spatial discrepancies in wealth, literacy, and participation in a globalized information economy. Central to this issue, however, is the remarkable growth of Internet users in the region: fuelled by the declining prices of telecommunications services (in part brought on by the global glut of fiber optics lines) as well as ever-cheaper personal computers and software, the number of users has jumped exponentially. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Mediterranean residents online jumped by 427%, or 20% annually; even the lowest rate of increase, 79% in Portugal, signalled a considerable increase, while many Arab countries with low penetration rates in 2000 witnessed the number of people online rise by several orders of magnitude. Thus, 80% of the region’s users are relatively new, i.e., starting after 2000. As the Internet has become increasingly popular, its applications have steadily multiplied. For many users these extend well beyond email to include e-tailing, bills payment, reservations, video games, chat rooms, Internet telephony,

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downloading television programmes and digital music and pornography, as well as popular sites and social networking services such as YouTube, Google, Facebook and MySpace. In all these ways, and more, cyberspace offers profound real and potential effects on social relations, everyday life, culture, politics, and other social activities in the region. Indeed, for quickly rising numbers of Mediterranean residents, the “real” and the virtual have become deeply interpenetrated with one another. In this light, access to cyberspace is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Precisely because cyberspace allows relatively unfettered access to information, it has been viewed with alarm by numerous Governments in the Mediterranean region, particularly in its Arab parts. Hence, measures of the relative openness or democratic inclination of Governments in the region were significantly correlated with Internet penetration rates. In and of itself, of course, the Internet does not simply produce positive or negative effects, for its information is always filtered through national and local cultures, biases and predispositions. However, as ever larger numbers of people come into contact with one another on-line, cyberspace may expand opportunities for engaging in political activity, some of which challenges or delegitimizes prevailing models of authority by undermining the monopoly of traditional elites over the means of communication. In this way, cyberspace deeply resembles Habermas's (1979) famous “ideal speech situation”, in which unfettered discourse is central to the "public sphere" and in which discursive truth is constructed in the absence of barriers to communication. Thus, it is highly likely that the substantive impacts of the Internet upon the Mediterranean region have just begun, and, while they are difficult to predict, they will, nonetheless, be substantial.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jean-Louis Ballais Professor Emeritus of Géography, Aix Marseille Université, CNRS UMR 7300 ESPACE, 29 Avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix-enProvence, France [email protected] Pavlos Marinos Delladetsimas Professor, Department of Geography, Harokopio University Athens, Eleftheriou Venizelou Av. 70, 17671, Athens, Greece. Tel: +30 2109549343, +30 2109549150 Fax: +30 2109514759 [email protected] Annick Douguédroit Professor Emeritus of Géography, Aix Marseille Université, CNRS UMR7300 ESPACE, 29 Avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix en Provence, France [email protected], Igor Jelen Associate Professor, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Università di Trieste, piazzale Europa 1, 34100 Trieste, Italy [email protected] Aharon Kellerman Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Haifa, Israel President of Zefat Academic College, Haifa, Israel [email protected] Piero Lionello Associate Professor, University of Salento and CMCC, DiSteBA, Via per Monteroni, km 1.2, Plesso M, 73100 Lecce, Italy. [email protected] web-page: http://www.dsm.unile.it/WEBUtenti/piero.lionello/ Sophie Liziard Doctor of Geography, Associated Reseacher, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS UMR 7300 ESPACE, Nice, France [email protected]

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Contributors

David Lowenthal Professor Emeritus of Geography, University College London Author among other books of West Indian Societies (OUP, 1972), The Past Is a Foreign Country (CUP, 1985), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (CUP, 1998), and editor of The Politics of the Past (Routledge, 1994) Maria Teresa Melis Geologist, Professor in GIS, Laboratory of Remote Sensing and GIS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Maria Paradiso Professor, Department of Economic, Juridical, Social Sciences and Quantitative Methods (DEMM), University of Sannio, Benevento 82100, Italy [email protected] Oded Potchter Doctor, Geography and Human Environment Department, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel [email protected] Izhak Schnell Professor, Geography and Human Environment Department, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel [email protected] Maurizio Stanic Professor, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Università di Trieste, Gorizia Campus, via D’Alviano 18, Gorizia [email protected], Italy Theano S. Terkenli Professor, Department of Geography, University Hill, University of the Aegean, Mitiline 81100, Lesvos, Greece [email protected] Michel Vennetier Divisional Engineer agriculture environment, UR EMAX Ecosystèmes Méditerranéens et Risques, Irstea, Centre d'Aix en Provence, 3275 route de Cézanne, CS 40061, 13182 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 5, France ECCOREV FR 3098, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Europôle Méditerranéen de l'Arbois, Bâtiment du CEREGE, BP 80, 13545 Aix en Provence Cedex 4, France [email protected]

Connections, Mobilities, Urban Prospects and Environmental Threats

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Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis Associate Professor, School of Pure & Applied Sciences, Open University of Cyprus, Latsia, Cyprus [email protected] Christine Voiron-Canicio Professor of Geography, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis Director of the research unit CNRS UMR 7300 ESPACE, Campus Carlone, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 98 boulevard Édouard Herriot, BP 3209, 06204 Nice Cedex 03, France Tel: +33 (0)4 93 37 54 64 [email protected] Barney Warf Professor, Department of Geography, University of Kansas, 213 Lindley Hall, 1475 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS 66045, Kansas city, USA [email protected] Norbert Weixlbaumer Professor, Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung der Universität Wien, Universitätsstr. 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria [email protected] Yaron Yaakov Researcher, Laboratory for Climate and Environment, Department Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel