Emotional scapes in Mediterranean port cities: Walking Barcelona,Marseille and Genova

Introduction

This article examines how emotions are intimately tied to the imagined and material geography of Mediterranean ports and does this through a case study of Barcelona, Marseille and Genova. The emotions that we associate with these cities vary and are shaped by the spatial, historical and social norms of the urban setting, including the continuing influence of the sea in their cultures and economies. In the ensuing sections, we focus on our observation of three emotional responses in these cities: hope for Barcelona, nostalgia for Marseille and kinship for Genova. For each case study, we ‘walk’ the respective city, tracing a specific emotional and sensorial map. While hope, nostalgia and more–than–human kinship become, for the purposes of our argument here, noticeable threads in these cities’ emotional economies, obviously they are not our only analytic possibilities. We are not claiming homogeneity in the emotional landscapes which crisscross these cities. Instead, we argue that emotional trajectories that we identify therein are significant for revealing the identity of distinctive spaces like port cities because they allow us to comprehend some of the possible reactions to cityscapes’ transformation and gentrification. Analysis of everyday meanings and responses invested in built and ‘natural’ landscapes also takes our understanding beyond economic and branding strategies in a post–industrial space and allows reflection on urban intimacies.

Port cities have been examined in a diverse range of urban contexts and have been often described as cities ‘on the edge’, with reference to their location on the fringe of nations, oceans and cultures (Mah, 2014: 31). The edges of port cities usually delineate geographic boundaries. However, on a more metaphysical level, these edges sometimes suggest liminal spaces and social tensions. Conversely, these edges also refer to new ideas, difference, risk and contact. Meanwhile, Hein’s (2021: 3) work on port cities challenges the idea that port cities are often presented as ‘clearly bounded entities’, emphasising rather the ‘discontinuous and not clearly bounded’ characteristics of these spaces. For Hein (2021: 3), a port city’s spatial footprint extends beyond the ‘port’s demarcated borders and into neighbouring cities and regions’ as a result of ‘logistics networks’ as well as environmental impacts relative to factors such as pollution. Over time, ways of understanding port cities evolve as ‘borders are constructed, broken down and rebuilt, continuously creating new patterns of engagement between port, city, and territory’ (Hein, 2021: 6).

Defined therefore as either demarcated entities or fluid spaces, Mediterranean port cities are often seen to possess similar trajectories and characteristics. Numerous studies articulate their interconnected industrial trade networks, cosmopolitanism and post-industrial development as sites of urban renewal, gentrification and tourism (Hein, 2021; Mah, 2014). As these studies point out, since the 1960s, many port cities have become entangled with deindustrialisation and the flight of manufacturing to Asia, facilitated by container shipping (Mah, 2014: 29; see also Warsewa, 2017). For Mediterranean port cities, the Mediterranean Sea itself is a critical presence. In fact, because of these cities’ location on the Mediterranean shores, the sea provides the primary backdrop to urban renewal and intensification of tourism. Many European port cities have favoured strategies focused on promoting creative industries (Tommarchi, 2021). Scholarly studies suggest that ‘urban villages, place-making strategies and public art may well improve the visual appeal of places, attract tourists, lead to rises in private property values’ (Barnes et al., 2006: 338) and thus ultimately fuel gentrification (Smith, 2002). Warsewa (2017) goes as far as stating that the port city has today become ‘an exhibited city’ as a result of its ‘maritime tools’ that generate ‘the inevitable maritime museum, historic workshops, maritime heritage trails, open shipyards’ and so on (p. 152). To this end, the port city’s maritime past is commodified as a way of branding the urban space (Kowalewski, 2018; Tommarchi, 2021). Meanwhile, port cities have been also described as ‘precarious’ cities (Ascaride and Condro, 2001), as they simultaneously grapple with both the realities of globalisation and post-industrial change. Port cities thus highlight the ‘uneven geography of capitalism’ (Harvey, 2012; Smith, 2002) because, as Mah (2014: 12) points out, although they have lost their global competitiveness they still harbour global aspirations.

Recent studies on port cities explore the ‘specific values, mindsets, and cultures that drive socio-spatial developments’ (Hein, Luning, and Van de Laar, 2021: 8), with researchers building on various theoretical tools for the analysis of urban renewal in port city socio-spatial relationships by drawing on concepts such as ‘demaritimisation and remaritimisation’ (Tommarchi, 2021: 60). Tommarchi’s (2021) work, for instance, argues that ‘cultural demaritimisation is visible (. . .) in redeveloped waterfronts celebrating the relationship between contemporary architecture and water, rather than connecting with their maritime past’ (p. 68). Other recent studies explore the way architecture serves to alter port city narratives in processes of urban regeneration (Alaily-Mattar et al., 2021; Sennema and Van de Laar, 2021). This work also suggests that the redeveloped waterfronts of port cities now display ‘a certain ‘sameness’ (Norcliffe et al., 1996: 130); generating a ‘sense of déjà vu’ (Van Hooydonk, 2009: 19), influenced by maritime-related stereotypes and myths (Kokot, 2008: 10; see also Tommarchi, 2021: 62).

While the literature on port cities emphasises their shared trajectories – deindustrialisation; urban renewal along waterfronts; cultural initiatives; architectural innovation – these narratives around sameness run the risk of stereotyping port cities into homogeneous and standardised symbolic spaces. With this in mind, this paper shifts this focus from homogeneity to argue rather that port cities also create unique and distinct narratives in response to urban change and often this response to urban renewal is emotionally charged. Little scholarly work, however, has examined the emotional responses to urban change that crisscross Mediterranean port cities as they juggle community interests with the global processes of post-industrialisation. Indeed, in the case studies that ensue, various discourses and processes around gentrification and modernity often clash with local cultures or generate new balances.

To examine how Mediterranean stories attached to Barcelona, Genova and Marseille are multi-layered and related to urban identities vested in emotion, this article draws on a multiple case study. Fieldwork was undertaken in 2019 through a mixed-method approach encompassing the review of relevant discourse such as media, urban regeneration papers, and literary works as well as in certain cases personal observations, informed by casual conversations with local city dwellers working across various fields such as education, cultural initiatives and hospitality. These observations build on each author’s regular visits to their respective city over the last 10 years as part of their broader research. The case studies in this paper highlight that while Mediterranean port cities share similar historical and ecoregional trajectories, their emotional response to urban renewal is intimately tied to narratives that may mirror local concerns, whether, for example, the hope that emerges when a city is in crisis (Barcelona), the nostalgia that is mobilised to reimagine the city in the national consciousness (Marseille), or the more-than–human kinship mobilised by urban regeneration (Genova). These encounters are not neutral and they elicit an emotional response. While walking the city in Barcelona, Marseilles and Genova, the emotional repertoires the authors are able to perceive and feel are thus closely linked to processes of gentrification and modernity.

A study purporting to reveal some of the emotional responses to Mediterranean port cities is riddled with complexity since the word ‘emotion’ is potentially unreliable in comparative studies due to its cultural specificity. According to Sara Ahmed (2004: 4), moreover, emotions are not simply individual responses to the environment or personal circumstances but part of an intricate web of changing and ‘sticky’ connections to people and places. Meanwhile, Barclay and Riddle (2021) single out the urban as a place that particularly demands negotiation of such relations, forged as these are within tangled and diverse intimacies of people, places and their imagined communities. Agreeing with Ahmed, Barclay and Riddle (2021: 6) contend:

Emotions are not simply the products of bodies but become implicated in social relationships – even moving across them. [. . .] emotions can come to ‘stick’ to people, things and . . . place, informing how people, things and places are engaged with, their placement within hierarchies of authority and their agentic capacity.

It is this dynamic of encounter that we hope to trace in our chosen cities – the ‘stickiness’ of proximity, the power relations of everyday living in cosmopolitan, ethnically ‘mixed’ communities and the glimpses of possibility for emotional agency within these relations. In other words, how do city dwellers perform their emotional landscapes, how do they (in the words of Mediterranean noir writer, Jean–Claude Izzo, 2013) ‘feel the city’ (p. 73)? To discover how ‘mixed’ communities of people ‘feel the city’ may seem a somewhat complicated and elusive quest. Our approach to tracing examples of emotional landscapes of the urban must become, of necessity, a fluid one, and of course, a partial one, in both senses of the word. In the next section, we discuss the core theoretical underpinnings of our approach. Specific methodological detail about each site is provided in the relevant segments that follow.

Montage: walking emotional scapes

The objective of our study was to formulate an intellectual and methodological experiment that follows the logic of montage. Montage is a methodology that seeks to juxtapose diverse sites that both complement and contradict one another (Saukko, 2003: 188). The emotions that we ‘read’ while walking the cities of Barcelona, Marseille and Genova are ‘tension-riddled’ and do not produce ‘closure’ (Saukko, 2003: 188), yet they are the beginning of a productive exercise that facilitates bringing together different stories, narratives and lived experiences (including our own), into a dialogue that acknowledges disjuncture yet seeks to reveal emerging resistances and emergent communality (Saukko, 2003: 33). Appadurai’s (1997) concept of ‘scapes’ and de Certeau’s (1988) method of ‘walking’ are two key concepts and methods that we utilise to frame our analysis and to point out the connections and divergences between our three sites.

Scapes, which Appadurai conceptualises as flows that connect people, have been used to investigate all sorts of lived experiences, whether in the area of politics and economics or texts and discourses (Saukko, 2003: 180). In this article, we propose that ‘emotional scapes’ circulate in cities and that these scapes can be read and analysed by scholars who seek to connect people to the wider social context of the Mediterranean region that is shaped by gentrification and urban renewal. The three emotions that we associate with the Mediterranean port cities of Barcelona, Marseille and Genova are drawn from our own experiences of walking the cities in question, from simply ‘being there’ and immersing ourselves in these sensory landscapes, as well as recalling memories of earlier visits: we listen to the voices on the streets, smell the aromas in their establishments and reflect on the literary texts they inspire. Such an approach ensures that our reading of the emotional scapes are not simply ‘empty signifiers’ (Barclay and Riddle, 2021: 5) but instead are informed by meaningful historic and cultural context while bringing each site into conversation with one another. In agreement with Henri Lefebvre, then, we acknowledge that each port city has its own ‘emotional repertoire’ as the specific environment of the city can shape the emotions circulating in and among its residents (Barclay and Riddle, 2021: 3). While we, as authors, present here our own readings of the paths we traverse, our multi-sited approach allows the emotional repertoires read in each study to contribute to a larger discussion on the future(s) of Mediterranean port cities, futures that are both affective and constrained (Barclay & Riddle, 2021: 3).

We draw on Michel de Certeau’s (1988) classic essay, ‘Walking in the City’ (pp. 91–111) for a nuanced meditation on people’s daily inhabitance of the streets – the minutiae of everyday life – a view ‘from below’ that, he says, might be placed in sharp contrast to the totalising view of city planners and other urban professionals. Using walking as a method implies a radical change of scale. We allude to walking both in a literal sense of exploring streets and laneways and immersing ourselves in the immediate sights, sounds, smells and tastes of a city’s sensory geographies, and more figuratively, with walking imagined as our ways of thinking, collectively reflecting on and reacting to the cities, their imagery and their narratives. Importantly, de Certeau identifies spatial practices as individuals’ ‘lived’ means of negotiating bureaucratic and administrative power. Studying these practices is significant for understanding how people operate within structural, disciplinary regimes of power, with discipline understood in the Foucauldian sense. As de Certeau (1988) himself says,

I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city. (p. 96)

Walking through our respective cities then, we shall be alert to ‘multiform, resistance [sic], tricky and stubborn procedures’ as indications of ‘disquieting’ moments, as unexpected interruptions to the regulated ‘ordinary’ of everyday life.

As researchers ‘walking’ a space that is not our regular or current place of residence we are therefore, as de Certeau (1988) puts it, ‘reading’ a space that is intimately linked to our own position in that space. Hence, although Gille (2001) is wary of researchers activating their scholarly imagination to identify sites of study in an arbitrary way, we agree with Saukko (2003) who counters that ‘research always partly constructs its object of study’ (p. 187). By ‘walking’ these Mediterranean port cities, our reading of their emotional economies and affective atmospheres inevitably relies on our positionality as outsiders, as well as the ensemble of emotions we each attach to our selected site. And as Sara Ahmed (2004) points out, attributing an emotion with significance ‘already involves a process of reading’ (original emphasis, p. 6). We thus propose an approach that uses the method of walking to frame and make sense of emotional scapes, underlines that what is important in the analysis is not necessarily the emotional lens that we, as researchers, privilege in our reading but rather how the use of such a lens opens up new possibilities for reinterpreting the future(s) of Mediterranean port cities, possibilities that are polyvocal and pay attention to both specificities and contradictions.

Our methodological approach also aligns with the social anthropologist Sarah Pink, who criticises a dominance of the visual in the analysis of ‘walking’ ethnographies and argues for a multisensory ethnography in the tradition of James Clifford (Pink, 2008: 181). For each of the cities discussed in our project, we have attempted an embedded, multi-sensory approach to experiencing the site, whether it be ‘feeling’ Barcelona as a city with crisis its pervasive mood, trawling an engaging local marketplace in Marseille or reading the relationship between human and non-human within Genova’s literary past and its present harbour front. According to Pink (2008):

by theorizing collaborative ethnographic methods as place-making practices we can generate understandings of both how people constitute urban environments through embodied and imaginative practices and how researchers become attuned to and constitute ethnographic places. (p. 176)

Our collaborative effort brought us to adopt and develop a methodological lens which is flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of our experiences and case studies, and at the same time is concerted and cohesive enough to indissolubly weave our walks. The subtle yet solid thread that unites our cities across a shared sea brings together our steps as researchers as well, while we conduct our distant yet parallel walks.

In addition to embodied, sensory responsiveness, the act of walking as ethnographic reflection allows a degree of eclecticism in tracing sources of de Certeau’s ‘tricky and stubborn procedures’. Fragmented moments of everyday urban life, such as, in Barcelona, street protests, anti-tourist slogans and the appearance of a picketing mayor, disrupt the smooth surfaces of the predictable everyday and intimate the tensions of disquiet. Likewise in Marseille and Genova, there are rich pickings for reflection on the unexpectedness of people’s everyday ‘tactics’, whether these emerge from reactions to state-building programmes, renovated shopfronts, instances of popular media, the sensual chaos of an outdoor market or civic archival records.

To investigate how hope underpins responses to both economic crisis and expressions of Catalan nationalism in Barcelona, Nicholas Manganas refers to ongoing debates about the touristification of the city and his personal observations walking the city in the immediate aftermath of the jailing of Catalan leaders who promulgated the referendum for independence in 2019. To examine the concept of nostalgia in Marseille, Jean Duruz and Angela Giovanangeli refer to personal observations of the Noailles market place in Marseille – its sights, sounds, smells and ‘mood’ – as well as media discourse and institutional reports from the 1980s to the present day on Marseille’s urban development archived in Marseille’s municipal archives. Finally, to analyse the developments of more-than-human kinship in Genova, Alice Loda refers to historical literary productions within and on the city and compares these to her personal observations, conducting a walk across Genova, the cool touch of its wind, its movements and rhythms past and present.

Our story begins in Barcelona, a city where ‘crisis’ is experienced as a ‘chronic’ and ‘pervasive context’ (Vigh, 2008: 8). The emotional response to the city in crisis is, we argue, one of hope, a ‘sticky’ emotion that is performed on its streets (Ahmed, 2004: 4). By walking the city of Barcelona, we read the performance of hope as a critical act that seeks to overcome the constraints that emerge when crises are experienced as ongoing phenomena and, instead, reinscribes the city as a site of emotional possibility (Barclay and Riddle, 2021: 2).

Barcelona: hope in the city

Barcelona is a city that I am both very familiar with and distant from. As an Australian who lived for ten years in northern Spain, I would often visit the city and thrived on its spirit of the international and its Mediterranean entanglements, yet always struggled to understand its nationalist fervour. As I arrive in Barcelona on the morning of 14 October 2019, the Supreme Court of Spain announces its verdict in the Catalan referendum case: nine former leaders are sentenced to between 9 and 13 years in prison for sedition and misuse of public funds. The country’s security forces mobilise to contain the expected backlash. I walk the city streets those first couple of days in an attempt to ‘feel the city’ (Izzo, 2013: 73). This time, visiting Barcelona will be different, I thought to myself. Parts of central Barcelona are in lockdown; shops shuttered down, barricades in place and the police presence overkill. It feels like something big is brewing but the streets are radically still compared to the usual bustle. I pass the Plaça de la Universitat where scores of people are already congregating, on to an eerily quiet Plaça de Catalunya, and turn right on to La Rambla, Barcelona’s key thoroughfare and tourist magnet. As I amble along, the city begins to come to life as tourists wheedle in and out of overpriced cafés and souvenir shops selling Barça FC football jerseys. By the time I reach the Mirador de Colom, a towering 60m-high monument to Christopher Columbus, the sense of dread in the air in the central parts of the city has dissipated, the sunlight hitting the Mediterranean blue ahead, as the port stretches to welcome me and the hordes of tourists around me. I join the revelry and head straight to the commercial heart of Barcelona’s port. As I look around, it dawns on me that there are two Barcelonas: the barricaded one I left behind, and the one I am in now; the Barcelona built and designed for the cruise ship traveller. I feel a slight sense of guilt as I immerse myself in this second Barcelona, relieved that there is a part of the city unburdened by turmoil, undefined by a crisis. It is unnerving how easy it is to feel comfortable in this Mediterranean Port City utopia. It is designed to evoke a particular sensory experience that drowns out the ‘real’ real of the city and its problems. This is a different reality altogether; it is not unreal, but I am perturbed by how comfortably these two Barcelonas sit alongside each other, how people experience the second Barcelona with no inkling of the political unrest about to unfold in the other.

In many ways, Barcelona is similar to other Mediterranean port cities: it has transformed from an industrial city with poor infrastructure, into a revitalised city with new urban planning projects that facilitate tourist growth (Mansilla and Milano, 2018: 39–42). Since the 1980s, urban regeneration and development have transformed Barcelona and the city has been celebrated for successfully promoting economic growth and social cohesion (Benach, 2015: 80). The redevelopment of the port area followed the model of Baltimore and was completed in time for the 1992 Olympics. IMAX cinemas, an aquarium, a maritime museum, shopping centres, fancy restaurants, bars and clubs supplanted the gritty port area.

But Barcelona is unique in the Mediterranean region in at least two ways. First, no other Mediterranean port city has been so successful in rebranding its image. Dubbed the ‘Barcelona model’, the city has welcomed foreign capital and increasing numbers of foreigners as it emerged as one of southern Europe’s most desired coastal cities (Benach, 2015). Barcelona is now the fourth most visited city in Europe after London, Paris and Istanbul, and the city has come under strain as it struggles to cope with the massive inflows of people and capital. The city has been so successful at selling its brand of a modern, tolerant and cosmopolitan Barcelona, that 14 percent of the population of Ciutat Vella (the historic centre) is made up of young people from around Europe who flock to the city to live the ‘Barcelona experience’ (García Cócola, 2016: 49). Second, Barcelona is also at the centre of an ethno-nationalist struggle. It is a city torn in two: pro-independence supporters on the one side, unionists on the other. This ‘territorial crisis’ (Dowling, 2018) has coincided with not only processes of deindustrialisation (Sarasa et al., 2018) but an array of other crises that have impacted Barcelona since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis: a mortgage crisis (Gutiérrez and Domènech, 2018), toxic real estate assets (García-Lamarca, 2021), a housing rent bubble (Blanco-Romero et al., 2018), and tourism phobia and desertification of the city centre exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Frago, 2021). If urban space is a fundamental instrument of the state, as Lefebvre (1974) suggests, then it is in the city, too, where we witness the conflation of economic and political interests, and in Barcelona’s case, with the undercurrent of hot nationalism.

As an outsider it was easy to walk between the two Barcelonas: a Barcelona where ‘the meaning of the local has been re-discovered’ (Kokot, 2007: 16) with the recent intensification of Catalanism; and a Barcelona that has increasingly come to represent a club med tourist paradise (Dainotto, 2011: 38). It felt to me a tale of two cities. In the first tale, processes of gentrification, airbnbification and museumisation displace local populations; and skyrocketing housing prices and neglected social spaces have become common features of the urban cityscape. In the second tale, Barcelona becomes a direct object of consumption (Grupo de Estudios Antropológicos La Corrala 2016, 17). Underlying both tales is the lived experience of crisis. In the first tale, street demonstrations are a common sight, whether it be for or against the demands of national self-determination, or to protest for the right of neighbourhoods to be spaces to live social lives and not bend to the will of markets that wish to extract profit from them (García Cócola, 2016: 32). In the Barcelona of its port and cruise ship ethos, it is difficult to identify anything autochthonous in the waterfront spaces selling paellas, Açai juices and takeaway pizzas. García Cócola (2016: 32) is particularly scathing in his assessment of both Barcelonas, arguing that gentrification and mass tourism have converted the city into a theme park. Living in Barcelona, he contends, has become an authentic act of resistance (García Cócola, 2016: 32). Such an assessment points to a deep, fundamental shift in how people negotiate their city and understand the meaning of home.

As I walked the city’s streets between the port and Plaça de Catalunya, the neighbourhoods of La Barceloneta, the marina at Port Olímpic, the beaches of Nova Icària, Bogatell, and Mar Bella, Montjuïc, and the Gothic Quarter, the neighbourhoods of El Raval, Eixample and Gràcia, I sensed that the city has two distinct emotional repertoires, each of these corresponding to its own imagined community. The imagined community of the first Barcelona is a tale of competing expressions of nationalism(s), between those who identify as Catalan and those who identify as Spanish, and everything in between. It is an imagined community rooted in locality; in the shared sense of ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’, that belonging to either the Catalan or the Spanish nation provides (Anderson, 1983: 7). It is also a Barcelona where residents are living in perpetual resistance to the inequality that capital flows bring. In the second Barcelona of the cruise ship ethos, there is no imagined community articulated in the language of ethnonationalism or class struggle. Rather, what emerges is an imagined utopia, where the city adapts to the exigencies of the global cruise ship traveller. Consumption governs this post-historical and post-political utopia. Any sense of community and relationality is superseded by the marketplace, where a little taste of the Mediterranean comes in bite-sized pieces. One taste here, another on the next stop on the Club Med paradise.

How do residents in Barcelona reconcile the tension between the distinct emotional repertoires of the two Barcelonas? In the Barcelona of the cruise ship ethos the emotion was muted, but, nonetheless, I could feel the joy of the tourists who were making the most of their hard-earned holidays. On the beachfront, the utopia of the port city was only disrupted by a sea of manteros. The manteros, street hawkers that sell their wares from blankets (mantas), are almost always West African, having escaped poverty and/or conflict and reached the shores of Europe on perilous sea voyages. It is estimated that there are between 1000 and 2000 of them in Barcelona alone (Burgen, 2018). These men are the lucky few that made it, their bodies not lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean. But as I looked around me, I realised that the manteros were largely ignored, they blurred into the landscape as tourists entered the Mediterranean Sea even though it was mid-October. By late afternoon I returned to the streets of the first Barcelona and I was haunted by García Cócola’s (2016: 32) claim that living in Barcelona is an authentic act of resistance. I saw that resistance performed as protesters took their positions in the city’s luring plazas draped in the yellow, red and blue of the Catalan flag, the Estelada. Yet although there is no denying that the youth on the street were angry about the imprisonment of their nationalist leaders, what I witnessed in that early afternoon was how the affective bonds of a city in crisis had the potential to transfigure the urban space with a hopeful emotional resonance. To paraphrase Ghassan Hage (2003: 3), cities are the mechanisms for the distribution of hope. Hope is an emotion that is sometimes experienced as a momentary feeling and other times as an ongoing state of being (Hage, 2003: 10). Whichever the case, it is always intimately determined by considerations of the future (Bloch, 1986: 5). The project of wanting to make one’s life better is future-oriented because it is where people’s hopes and aspirations reside. Yet past experiences both frame and haunt the hope for a better life (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014: S10). And it was evident to me in those hours before violence erupted, that it is because of, not despite, the Mediterranean port city utopia at their doorstep that residents seek to rediscover the meaning of the local in their city.

As dusk fell and I returned to my hotel I pondered Carles Feiza’s contention that for the young Barcelona students that I had just left behind, ‘an independent Catalonia is the only concrete utopia they have’ (Martín, 2019). When economic hopes are diminished because of precarious jobs, high university fees and a generalised sense of injustice, it is not surprising that many young Catalans look towards an independent nation-state as an ontological object of hope. It might be one of the few ways that people have to reassert their identity when the mere act of living in their city could be experienced as an act of resistance. I switch on the television and watch as the city descends into chaos – a push and pull, pull and push – between the authorities and the city’s youth. I re-read the city’s mayor Ada Colau’s description of her perfect city, written almost twenty years before she took office: ‘Querría una Barcelona abierta, plural y tolerante, liberal y solidaria, mediterránea y europea, donde se combinen modernidad y tradición, memoria del pasado y el valor de las nuevas ideas’ [I would like a Barcelona that is open, plural and tolerant, liberal and supportive, Mediterranean and European, a Barcelona that mixes modernity and tradition, memory of the past and new ideas] (Forti and Russo Spana, 2016: 9). And in an eerie way her vision was rather prescient. On 15 July 2015, a day after she was elected mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau was on the city streets picketing. As one of the founding members of Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), she fought to thwart the evictions of hundreds of people who lost their homes in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (Forti and Russo Spana, 2016: 7). In January 2017, her local government banned the establishment of new hotels in the city centre after restricting the promotion of Barcelona properties on Airbnb. In February 2020, Barcelona’s Town Hall announced that for the first time, residents will have a say in how the local government invests 75 million euros of its budget. These are small victories for a city in crisis. But these small resistances, I feel, are not so different from the wishes of the protesters outside my hotel room. Everywhere I walked in the city during those few days I experienced the tension between modernity and tradition, the past and new ideas.

In those hours before violence erupted, I felt the repertoire of hope in a city seeking a better life for its residents. I saw and felt a city that seeks to respond to the political, social and economic tensions that its successful rebranding as a cosmopolitan Mediterranean mecca has wrought, responses that open up a space for hope to be the engine of change and transformation (Ahmed, 2004: 184). By walking the city during those days of crisis I understood that it is in the city where utopias are remade every day. I wondered whether the intensification of Catalan nationalism and the rediscovery of the locals were not partly a direct response to a city still negotiating how to manage that cruise ship utopia that engulfs its port and surrounding areas. And I questioned, too, whether utopias are possible without drawing from an emotional repertoire of hope. Nonetheless, as I walked the city in an attempt to ‘feel the city’ I was certain that it was impossible to separate the two Barcelonas. Despite their differences, they were phantasmatic mirrors of each other. The Mediterranean port city utopia that encircles the city propels the first Barcelona to manifest its repertoire of hope; whether it is in its street art, its culture of protest, its longing for self-determination, or simply in the everyday lived experience that García Cócola (2016: 32) calls an authentic act of resistance. In that sense, the residents of Barcelona take to the streets because they perceive the situation in their city as critical. Without this recognition there is no pressing need to at least engage in the city’s transformation and, by extension, to transform the lives of the people residing in it (Eagleton, 2015: 5). As an outsider such wistful hope jarred with my own experience of late capitalism, an era often considered less hopeful and more dispirited than earlier times (Eagleton, 2015: 9). Although nationalist fervour is more often interpreted negatively for its retrograde qualities instead of for its hopeful potential, I sensed on that fateful day of 14 October 2019, the seeds were being sown to shape broader perceptions of the city away from the port city utopia and towards a Barcelona that can revel in its contradictions. We now turn to the French Mediterranean port city of Marseille where the tension between future and past is also visible and where we read nostalgia in its emotional repertoire.

Marseille: nostalgia in the new Mediterranean

Over the last 200 years, Marseille’s urban identity has been shaped by the settlement of refugees fleeing political upheaval in diverse parts of Europe and by migrants who, for the most part, came from France’s former colonies in Africa and Asia. The dominant narrative to trace throughout the city streets is one of ‘passage (ancient traders; crusaders; colonisers; migrants) and the north south dichotomy (Europe/Africa; Europe/ Middle East; France/colonies; Christianity/Islam)’ (Giovanangeli, 2015: 304). According to historians Blanchard and Boëtsch (2005: 217), the number of people with migrant origins in Marseille totals around 52 percent with a large proportion of these migrants from Algeria, Comoros and Armenia. Some studies refer to the predominantly North African ethnic makeup of Marseille’s migrant population (Peraldi et al., 2015: 74). On another note, public discourse on the city is often limited to statistical reports that, according to sociologist Michel Peraldi, all too often exaggerate Marseille’s negative reputation and focus on the city’s high rate of unemployment and crime (Robert-Diard, 2013).

Significant transformation of Marseille’s urban landscape started in 1995 under the Euroméditerranée project. Both local and national policy makers selected the concept of the Mediterranean in a strategy to increase tourism, encourage the development of creative industries and attract foreign investment to the city, as well as to suggest that the EU orientate its attention towards the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, in 2013, Marseille led numerous cultural events and underwent major architectural transformations that underscored the city’s cosmopolitan features (Giovanangeli, 2015). In particular, Marseille hosted the European Union-led initiative European Capitals of Culture (ECOC) programme, with the city, through locally and internationally renowned artists, choosing to showcase Mediterranean themes as representative of its urban narrative.

As a result of the city’s transformations in the context of cultural and economic expansion, Marseille privileged the local and the city’s aspirations for change. It is in this context that we now set out on a walking tour to explore our own sensitivities to the city’s emotional landscapes, seeking, in particular, traces of nostalgia to be ‘read’ from these. Here, Svetlana Boym’s writing on nostalgia, including the theorisation of ‘reflective nostalgia’, should provide some conceptual guidance. For Boym (2001), reflective nostalgia is a way of understanding how a city ‘becomes an alternative cosmos for collective identification, recovery of other temporalities and reinvention of tradition’ (p. 76). This imaging of nostalgia does not try to rebuild an aspect of the past, rather, the ‘past opens up a multitude of potentialities’ (Boym, 2001: 50). Following Boym then, our framing of nostalgia does not over-romanticise the past but rather draws specific aspects from the past to create creative ways of understanding the present. To this end, Boym’s ‘reflective nostalgia’ becomes a useful tool for complicating the processes of remembering, with our aim to expand the use of this concept and, perhaps, to rework it here for our own purposes.

So, we now begin our walk in the heart of Marseille’s oldest district. However, you might ask what brings this section’s authors to the streets of Marseille in particular? As Australians each author of this section has different attachments to this city. For me, Angela, after having lived in France for 13 years, professional commitments allowed me to visit Marseille on a regular basis from 2012 to 2019 and to witness how aspects of urban renewal shaped Marseille’s discourse and landscape during that period. For me, Jean, this street-walking of a Mediterranean city’s sensorily rich foodscapes is an extension of my embedded research in the culinarily and ethnically ‘mixed’ cities of Singapore and Toronto – research shaped by the haunting question of how people in such cities of multiple migrations live together (or not) through food exchanges. How, in fact, do people ‘feel the city’ by ‘eating together’? My visits to Marseille in 2018 and 2019 have tended to remind me of my outsider status (in history, geography, language and ethnicity). At the same time, immersive walks through Marseille’s oldest neighbourhood have resonated, for me personally, with the cultural connections of food markets and their rituals.

Meeting up in Marseille in 2019, together we intend to explore ways that gentrification of this port city has generated diverse narratives, with feelings of nostalgia – of mourning, loss and of the bittersweet pleasure in remembering – emerging as examples of distinct, local responses to the modernisation of the city. Our first stop, surrounded by a backdrop of urban transformation, is the Marché des Capucins or, known more informally, the Noailles market. This is because of its location in the centrally situated Noailles district, about 100 m from the city’s historic port. The market’s close proximity to the port means that it is directly adjacent to the many transformations that have been taking place by the waterfront such as pedestrian-friendly spaces, refurbishment of the former docks into modern retail spaces and eateries, the docking wharf of cruise liners and, at the entrance of the old port, the strategic location of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations.

While the open-air Marché des Capucins features primarily fruit and vegetable stall vendors, adjoining streets such as rue Longue des Capucins, rue des Récolletes and rue d’Aubagne have expanded the market landscape of the area. These narrow and cramped streets are lined with food and smallgoods shops – butchers, bakeries, épiceries, olive vendors, spice shops and shops with bath house products – with wares spilling out onto the street. Reports from the city’s archives dating back to the 1980s (Quartier Noailles 1987: 6) describe this area as a space almost entirely dedicated to food produce. It is also an area that is ‘extrêmement varié et cosmopolite’ [extremely diverse and cosmopolitan] while catering to a population with limited purchasing power (13) and surrounded by residential buildings that are classified ‘vétustes et inconfortables’ [rundown and uncomfortable] (14). Despite their pervasive narratives of dilapidation and decline, urban planning documents highlight the vibrancy of the area produced by the market and food activities of the district. The report titled Quartier Noailles (1987: 16) refers to retail businesses run by ‘étrangers’ [foreigners] such as the Maghrebi, Chinese and Vietnamese and how these activities are ‘cosmopolites’ [cosmopolitan] (6) and add ‘une ambiance animée et colorée’ [an animated and colourful atmosphere] (16). Meanwhile, the same document also refers to the unpleasant odours and noise caused by these businesses: ‘livraisons, odeurs, bruits des frigorifiques, dégradation de l’occupation sociale’ [deliveries, smells, noise of cooling units and dilapidation of the social space] (16), ‘les rues sont sales et peu valorisées’ [the streets are dirty and not promoted] (18).

For the current tourist gaze, however, the Marché and its surrounds still remain a cause for celebration of the ‘gritty’ – of the sights, sounds and smells of everyday life in its most elemental sense (Tep, 2018). On our visit in spring, 2019, there has been a noticeable clean-up of methods of rubbish disposal and a repaving of the open market area, and although some nearby buildings are still in need of repair, the sensory landscape of the market and adjacent streets is beguiling. The following account is typical:

On the corner of Rue d’Aubagne, one can see a Tunisian leblebi soup store. An Ivorian snack bar sells alocco fish with grilled plantain – and nearby is Marseille’s last ricotta cheese creamery. . . . A young boy warns ‘yalla!’ as he weaves his bike down the street, fishing rod in one hand. The roar of scooters and the calls of hawkers render the street a maelstrom of multiculturalism, a 21st-century Babel where one could conceivably order lunch in English, Spanish, Arabic or French. (Rutherford, 2018)

Here, as we read this description and actually walk the length of the street, the sounds, smells and imagined tastes produce a sensual cacophony, a ‘mailstrom’, a swirl of movement, that transports us beyond the visual. Nevertheless, in spite of our ‘feeling’ this full-on performance of ‘raw’ and ‘authentic’ multiculturalism, the back streets appear to be the site of a creeping renaissance of ‘style’.

Recently, an account of Noailles’ burgeoning specialty shops appeared in the New York Times, claiming that ‘a crop of independent businesses’ is ‘turning the neighborhood into one of the port city’s most enthralling places to explore’ (Tep, 2018), along the lines of Richard Florida’s account of ‘creative cities’ (Florida, 2005). Of course, who benefits from the neighbourhood’s fashionable hipster-style revivals is still cause for debate (Daïkha, 2018; see also Heldke, 2003; Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Martin, 2014, 1879–1881). Questions on the gentrification of the Noailles area have also placed the spotlight on the precarious living conditions of some of the local residents who find themselves in dilapidated housing adjacent to the urban changes taking place in the area. For instance, in 2018, two buildings in rue d’Aubagne collapsed fatally killing some of its residents, triggering commemorations and action highlighting the long-standing vulnerable conditions of some of the people living in the Noailles precinct (Kerboua, 2020). Meanwhile, it is worth our following a trail to a couple of businesses near the Marché to discern the varying ways in which nostalgic references are employed and, perhaps, to define an interstitial space between Appadurai’s (1997: 78) implied ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nostalgia, between his ‘real’ and ‘false’ (in other words, nostalgia based on actual experience and memories and that which is imaginary and lacking deep-rooted connection).

Maison Empereur in rue des Récolettes adjacent to the Marché has the distinction of being the oldest hardware store in France, the current owner is a seventh-generation member of the family responsible for the enterprise’s establishment. Now occupying several handsome buildings, and spreading across a range of rooms of varying shapes and sizes and on differing levels with these connected by twisting staircases, the emporium ‘displays a mesmerizing range of goods’ from buffalo-hide hammers to elaborate jelly moulds (Tep, 2018). Many of the items too, we find, are displayed in ways that invite consumers to indulge all their senses–to relish opportunities to handle these as artefacts, feeling the sharpness of a blade or smelling the tantalising, earthy scent of leather. It is almost too much to take in in one visit but well worth the effort of exploring by locals and visitors alike. The overall effect is a self-conscious referencing of a noble history of local trading from 1827. Specific examples of this deliberate referencing include a miniature museum of the company’s account books and a promotional newspaper, in facsimile form, that outlines Maison Empereur’s family tree and lists goods for sale at various points in the store’s history.

While it is possible to view Maison Empereur’s finely-tuned performance as a cynical act of museum-style marketing, we could also argue that this is an ‘authentic’ local business, promoting goods (even if in a more ‘dressed up’ and period-conscious fashion) in ways which French customers might recognise and even connect with their own remembering. For non-French tourists even, it is possible to strike a remembering chord, for example, a heavy glass lemon squeezer is the exact replica of that used in the 1950s kitchen of Jean Duruz’s Australian childhood. Memory, imagination, touch and sight are all at play here. Nostalgia then is hardly ersatz, and as defined by Appadurai, fixed or empty, for, even in unfamiliar locations, as travellers we seek moments of connection. In such moments, shades of Boym’s (2001: 49–50) ‘reflective nostalgia’ concentrating on the plasticity of memory and culture (in contrast to ‘restorative nostalgia’ as a fixed ‘national past and future’) might be glimpsed.

In contrast to Maison Empereur, just a few steps away on rue d’Aubagne, we find a recently established business, called Epicerie L’Idéal, open since 2016. This tiny épicerie fine [delicatessen, traiteur] is the project and passion of Julia Sammut, whom we are fortunate to meet and, in casual conversation, discover its story: Forsaking a long career in food journalism in Paris, Sammut returned to Marseille where her Tunisian grandfather first landed in the 1940s and worked on the port’s docks (see also Bizalion, 2016; Brunetti, 2016). The opening of Epicerie L’Idéal’s doors has become Sammut’s moment of epiphany, a project of tribute to her ancestral home. According to The New York Times, a walk through the spaces of Epicerie L’Idéal is an overwhelming sensory experience with ‘wooden shelves brimming with mostly French and Italian gourmet items such as pungent colatura [Italian fish sauce] . . . jars of artichoke pate . . . buttery, soft, rosy pink pastrami and crisp cabbage slaw’ (Tep, 2018). As we trawl the shelves ourselves, we can only agree. Throughout, rustic wooden boxes, baskets and handwritten labels in sepia inks add to the épicerie’s farmyard/market square ambiance. And again, comforting cooking smells and sounds drift from the épicerie’s tiny kitchen. While we chat with other customers at communal tables, these sounds and smells remind us all of delicious meals from our travels, the tastes of trattorias, cafés and street stalls of our own ‘pasts’. The sensory landscapes here, in fact, might evoke what Delia Falconer (2006: 6) describes as a particularly modern form of yearning for the ‘exotic’ in the face of late capitalism’s performance of urban landscapes vested in routinization, blandness, emptiness and tight urban controls.

The obvious question to ask here is whether Epicerie L’Idéal is simply riding the gentrification wave of purveying upmarket products ‘not accessible to the average wallet’ (Daïkha, 2018) and perhaps in direct contradiction to the nearby Marché des Capucins, with its cheaper fresh fruit and vegetables and decidedly Mediterranean/Arab flavour? However, Epicerie L’Idéal’s roots appear longer and more tangled than a simple account of ‘blow-in’ opportunism might suggest. Sammut herself has a long family history in the food industry, with her parents’ and sister’s restaurant/hotel operating not far from Marseille. Again, Sammut has a family tree that could look typical of many ‘mixed’ origins Marseillais, as she describes herself as being of French, Sicilian, Tunisian, Maltese and Jewish descent. In terms of her sense of legitimate belonging, Sammut says of the Noailles neighbourhood: ‘It’s my origins, my life that brings me here. . . . I would never have owned a grocery store anywhere other than here’ (cited in Daïkha, 2018). Furthermore, the contents of the shelves (which Sammut claims as ‘her life’) and the ingredients of dishes prepared in Epicerie’s in-house café represent, at times, a close relationship with neighbouring providores and local/regional providers, as well as determination to make products from elsewhere in Europe and Asia available in the ‘local’. So, an analysis of the operations of nostalgia here looks more complex than straightforward celebrations or denigration of la Provence éternelle (de la Pradelle, 2006) or even of la Méditerranée, as a marketing tool, though it is this, and more. Attention to the fine grain of Sammut’s embodied attachment to place and ‘biographical’ shelf-stocking provides a more provocative and nuanced reading of how nostalgia operates, and the interstitial spaces between ‘authentic’ and ‘faux’ – the spaces for looking, touching, smelling, tasting and reflective remembering – that it might open up.

In fact, nostalgia in all of our Marseille examples – Marché des Capucins, Maison Emperer and Epicerie L’Idéal – might be cast as ‘sticky’ in Ahmed’s (2004: 4) sense of the word, as feelings of nostalgia draw on the contradictory tensions that gentrification produces. The sentimental desire to preserve the open-air market as an icon of tradition is not necessarily in competition with nearby smart businesses, selectively re-inventing traditions as they seize the opportunities that gentrification affords. At the same time, ‘upscaling’ the neighbourhood obviously threatens housing and food affordability and most probably results in ‘the departure of precarious populations’ (Daïkha, 2018). Admittedly, this contradiction is not easily resolved, but as in our Barcelona example, there is some hope that a form of ‘embedded’, even limited, local action with a sense of personal heritage might, at least, prevent or slow the speed of wholesale neighbourhood re-development.

As a concluding note to this section, our examples of creative enterprise indicate that urban space is not simply a blank canvas on which to write development aspirations but a complex mapping of networks, meanings of community local attachments and feelings. As well, our argument appears to have broadened Boym’s conception of ‘reflective nostalgia’ beyond its defining categories. In the process, we have aimed to reflect on nostalgia itself, as well as taking into account its reflective qualities – reflections of everyday practices as ‘mixed’ and diverse, as ‘ways of operating or doing things’ and not ‘merely [as] obscure background of social activity’ (de Certeau 1988: xi). But yet again, a city can be performed in different ways. In the final section, we explore Genova as a site of the uncanny, where the emotional disorientation evoked by the more-than-human challenges us to reconsider anthropocentric interpretations of the Mediterranean as a lived environment.

Genova: more-than-human kinship past and present

This section is based on different sources as well as field notes taken on various occasions, including a walk across Genova in 2019.

It is a sunny winter morning when I leave the train station at Piazza Principe and begin my walk down towards Via Balbi. I like to begin my walks by slowly venturing down this street when I visit Genova. Via Balbi can be extremely busy at peak hours, and it is certainly busy today: very heavy car traffic, motorbikes zooming past, a few bikes. I cross the road. Several layers of noise surround passers-by at any time of the day here. A hive of shops, cafés, university buildings, people walking fast from and to the nearby station, looking distractedly around them: all of this contributes to making me feel at home, helps me to regain my place in this land, remember and feel connected again. While I walk down towards Piazza della Nunziata, I see groups of students begin to populate historic palazzi [mansions] and libraries. So many layers of passages traverse these constructions, all intersecting in the rays of morning sun over the white marble. Buildings of the Facoltà di Lettere [Faculty of Arts] are distributed here and there across this street. I remember when I was a student myself, in Pavia, not far from here, I would take a train to Genova and spend whole days at the library studying the early works of Giorgio Caproni, a famous Italian poet who spent part of his life in the city. Caproni is one of many voices that have poetically celebrated Genova, a city so central to the history of Italian literature that is sometimes alluded to as città della poesia [city of poetry]. Nothing has made me feel more connected to this land than poetry; through the words of others that have inhabited Genova, I have learnt much about myself.

Visiting Genova is now an essential part of my routine during my short trips from Australia to Italy. I was born not far from here, and yet, a researcher working in Sydney for more than 10 years now, I have very few occasions to pass through. Still, Genova feels familiar, and I quickly realise that it still has the power to take me home somehow. The city is for me a tool, a prism – a sort of talisman that allows for a somewhat accelerated encounter with my past. I used to say vaguely that being in Genova allows me to reconnect with my Mediterranean identity, although I have never really thought about what this truly means, intellectually, physically and emotionally. I am trying to direct my mind towards these emotional entanglements today, while I walk across these streets.

I think about these trajectories when, suddenly, I am immersed in the saliscendi [ups-and-downs] of the centro storico [historical centre]. A knot of caruggi [narrow lanes] opens up in front of me, inviting me in, ready to swallow me, to make me feel at home. And then, as in a supernatural vision, a sudden light appears, strong and welcome: the sea, announced by the smell of water and frittura [fried fish], by the noise of cups of espresso on the tables under the porticos. The soft sound of quiet waves is heard now. I approach the old port area: more people, more noise; old baroque buildings and new hotels seem to blend past and present, sitting as idiosyncratic parts of the same, long, spatial discourse. The yellow, pink and white of palazzi, squares, benches, street lamps, docks, water. The sea seems to enter the city here; water and land mirror each other and eventually intersect. I turn towards the aquarium when I am blown over by a typical Genovese gust of vento [wind]: cold, stinging and familiar at the same time. ‘My verse is born in symbiosis with the wind’, Caproni said more than half a century ago, explaining some of the peculiar qualities of this Genovese wind. Seabirds are all over the area, unscathed. While wandering with no particular direction in mind towards the docks, I start to think about the visible and invisible balances that govern this city. Poetry born with the wind; the centrality of the land. Sea, mountains, buildings and streets. Birds and sea life, rocks, trees and humans, all converging here: an accelerated, more-than-human landscape; a powerful intersection.

Employing the term ‘more-than-human’ in this kind of analysis means, first of all, recognising the co-determining roles that human and non-human beings play in the shaping of space and place and in defining urban identities alike (see Vanni and Crosby, 2020). This relational shaping happens within and beyond Genova. Yet, the proximity of the port city to water, and the range of human activities that happen therein, makes it an accelerated site of more-than-human relations. Elaborating on a work by Noel Castree (2003), Wendy Steele, Ian Wiesel and Cecily Mallera (2019) argue that ‘embracing our common role in the collective more-than-human urban story works to reconfigure cities as mutually constitutive/hybrid/networked, rather than separate, binary and oppositional’ (p. 411). This approach, centred on relations, echoes the notion of kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’ (Sahlins, 2011) – a mutuality of being that opens before my eyes this morning in Genova.

Co-constructing the city with elements and non-human actors creates a trajectory of kinship that re-asserts itself in this space in the present, despite contingent changes. It is a trajectory I now feel I am part of. I think about Genova through the centuries and Genova now, and I think about its peculiarity and relationality. How has this trajectory of kinship changed over time? More questions come to my mind. What is distinctive about Genova? What makes this city stand out? How is it connected to other Mediterranean port cities? I think that going back to its history might help me. Genova holds a special position within the geographic and sociocultural landscapes of Italy. It is located within national borders, and yet – enclosed as it is by mountains and sea – it resists them. This peculiar positioning has shaped its political, linguistic and socio-cultural trajectory across the centuries (see Assereto, 2003). This is why thinking of Genova only in a ‘national’ framework is limiting, while an exploration of translational connections can uncover interesting trajectories.

We could, for instance, think about Genova in ecoregional terms, so as to prioritise an ecocentric perspective in our walk around the city. Ecoregional approaches provide a frame of reference that resists both national and centre–periphery frameworks and builds, instead, on fluidity and interconnectedness of places (see Gosetti and Finch-Race, 2019). Looking at Genova from an ecoregional perspective also allows me to retrace a common thread shared with Barcelona and Marseille – as well as other Mediterranean ports, such as Naples and Alexandria – based on continuity of life: biomes and realms, habitats and species, waters and lands which open across Mediterranean shores. Valentina Gosetti and Daniel Finch-Race (2019) have applied ecoregional frameworks to the study of French and francophone cultural productions, demonstrating that the notion is extremely productive for cultural inquiry. They adopt Olson’s definition of ecoregions as ‘relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species’ (Olson et al., 2001: 933). Likewise, an ecoregional perspective animates my material and literary walk across Genova’s past and present and the tensions I find and foreground therein.

As in many other Mediterranean port cities, Genova’s port, one of the biggest in the Mediterranean, has been a key space for the development of the city. The porto antico [ancient harbour] has today completely abandoned its industrial function, which has been relocated to the west of the city (El Menchawy, 2008: 118). The historical harbour, as in other port cities, has become one of Genova’s major tourist attractions (Puncuh, 2003). The urban regeneration of the city was a massive undertaking, including the complete redevelopment of the waterfront as well as major interventions in the centro storico (see El Menchawy, 2008). The restructuring process, led by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano, formally began in 1992 and culminated in 2004, when Genova was elected European Capital of Culture. On the whole, this process followed the trajectories of other port cities, such as Barcelona and Marseille, and involved the restoration of architectural heritage as well as the construction of a series of new buildings, with the objective of reshaping the cityscape, developing productive connections with the sea, increasing tourism and supporting the city in facing a series of major challenges towards modernization (see El Menchawy, 2008; Gastaldi, 2005). The restructuring included the construction or transformation of several buildings, some of which are now iconic, including the Acquario [aquarium], the Biosfera [biosphere], the bigo [a structure with elevators that directly overlooks the water] and the Galata Museo del Mare [Galata Museum of the Sea], the largest maritime museum in the Mediterannean area (see Gastaldi, 2010).

The renewal generated a marked increase in tourists and short-term travellers, who have visited Genova in large numbers over the past three decades (see Gazzola et al., 2014) and who repeatedly occupy this space. As in Barcelona and Marseille, the process of urban regeneration has generated a series of emotional and sensorial trajectories, which, I argue, also involve the more-than-human balances within the cityscape: a further layer of relations lying atop the existing layers, which impacts the human and non-human co-becoming across the city.

More-than-human entanglements are prominent in port cities. If port cities can be considered cities on the edge, then the waterfront area of the port can be conceptualised as an edge within the edge and as a site of increased more-than-human contact due to the simultaneous presence of the water and intense human activity. This contact with water is not just visual but also profoundly material, and it produces a site where human and non-human bodies continuously dwell, interact and co-determine themselves. As mentioned above, more-than-human entanglements are active forces in shaping place, community and emotions, within and beyond Genova. Ilaria Vanni (2016) argues that in the city, ‘plants, bacteria, virus and animals pop up, altering the order of epistemological, as well as ecological, systems. Objects leave their cultural frames, travel, reconfigure in new assemblages and start a chain of effects’ (p. 3). Due to their distinctive relation with edges, port cities are places where these dynamics emerge with particular force. I realise now that I am immersed in a privileged point of view from which to analyse these dynamics.

As I walk in the Porto Antico my attention is captured by two buildings: the now-iconic Acquario and the Biosfera. These are among the most popular tourist attractions of the area, and they were built as part of the regeneration project. The aquarium is the biggest of its kind in Europe and is extremely popular with both tourists and locals (see Roth, 2018). The birth of a dolphin in captivity here in 2014, for instance, was followed by national television and celebrated all over the country. I still remember seeing this story covered on Italian television, in the evening, just as I remember my first visit to the aquarium as a child. I remember the people’s jubilant reaction to the dolphin’s birth, I recall an image of hands on the glass and the dolphins swimming close. Running educational programmes and collaborating with universities and scientific centres, the aquarium is always the first point of call for everything related to sea life in the surrounding area. It is a place where species of different ecosystems – including fishes, reptiles and sea mammals, totalling around 15,000 animals – dwell in captivity. The water for the animals is taken directly from the adjacent sea, which creates a bond with Indigenous sea life. I think about sea life dwelling inside and outside.

The Biosfera has a rather spectacular appearance. It is a sphere made entirely of glass, which appears to arise from the encounter between land and water: a supernatural, miracle-like construction that inhabits and embodies the edges of the city. It contains around 150 species of sub-tropical flora and fauna, including non-Indigenous turtles, fish, butterflies and birds. On the whole, the Acquario and Biosfera have introduced into the landscape of the city a significant number of non-Indigenous animal and plant species, which are now an important part of the city’s cultural and social ecology as well as of its identity, but which are, also, separated by the rest of life in this space I am visiting now.

Walking on the docks near the building I cannot avoid thinking again about the sea life: outside and inside. The presence of captivity of plants and animals impacts more-than-human entanglements within this area, introducing an element of pressure to the emotional trajectories which crisscross this scene. This presence produces new spaces, new sites, new interactions, new relations and new tensions alike. The complex emotional response generated by this particular intersection – love and captivity, belonging and separation, inside and outside – leaves me with an uncanny, eerie feeling. The uncanny here defines a short circuit, a response that blurs the boundaries between near and far, subject and alterity. In literature, it is commonly related to unease, discomfort or surprise. Nicholas Royle (2003) suggests that it is connected to ‘an experience of the threshold, liminality, margins, borders’ (vii), while Marinelli and Ricatti (2013: 7) identify it as the ‘emotional reaction to something that is, at the same time, familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely’. The more I explore these emotional geographies, the more I think of the uncanny to define the feeling that pervades me; a feeling that complicates the trajectories of more-than-human kinship that shape this city. It is a balance mobilised in-depth by the urban regeneration, the new more-than-human trajectories that the latter brings about and the emotional fields of tension that they foreground.

When I leave the aquarium, I think about my desire to bridge past and present while I walk in Genova. Inside and outside, longing and belonging, captivity and freedom. I then think about what the Genovese more-than-human must have looked like before the restructuring in this area. As usual, I resort to poetry, a domain to which I often turn to find answers. Representations of more-than-human kinship in Genova emerge in several poems dedicated to the city during, for instance, the past century. I dig into my memory to explore a few of them.

I think first of all about Caproni’s (1998: 172) poem Litania [Litany], a long verse which is a praise to the city, metonymically alluded to through a long series of frames and pictures, which was written before the regeneration. Litania is a montage in itself, being a long polysensory walk, populated by human and non-human actors which co-occur to define a more-than-human body: a belonging. I find there some more clues on the balances and rhythms that regulate the life of the city, and on the emotional trajectories that they generate. The first line of the poem sets an address to the city that is then repeated obsessively, across the whole body of the verse: ‘Genova mia città intera.| Geranio. Polveriera’ [Genova my whole city.| Geranium. Powder keg]. The dialogue with the city also occurs on a more profound level, that of rhythm, which is central to the process of meaning-making in poetry. The rhythm of this poem mimetically incarnates the sound of waters (‘Genova d’acquamarina,| aerea, turchina’ [Genova of sea water,| aerial, turquoise]), the fast pace of mercantile and commercial exchanges (‘Genova di Caricamento.| Di Voltri. Di sgomento’ [Genova of Caricamento.| Of Voltri. Of dismay]), and the extreme verticality that characterises the city (‘Genova verticale,| vertigine, aria, scale’ [Genova vertical city,| vertigo, air, stairs]). The extended form of the poem also embodies the city’s ‘vertical’ nature. Lines extensively foreground the presence of non-human animals and plants, and the city itself is alluded to as a bird (see, for instance, ‘Genova dell’Acquasola, dolcissima, usignola’ [Genova of Acquasola,| sweetheart, nightingale]). On the whole, Litania allows more-than-human kinship to emerge as a foundational element of Genova’s emotional landscapes. Kinship is configured through images that evoke affect, solidarity, reciprocity, materiality and organic articulation of encounters between human and non-human. Andrea Malaguti (2017) has rightly pointed out that in this poem Genova is ‘identified through all its possible attributions, which are nothing else than its particular components (. . .) To each of the chosen aspects of Genova, there is a corresponding close element (an example) or an immediately distant one (such as an emotional reaction, or a memory of the subject)’ (p. 123).

As such, the poem reflects not only more-than-human interconnections but also emotional and sensorial responses to them. Malaguti (2017: 123) also points out that the total absence of verbs in the poem makes the relationship between author and city transitive, direct and somehow unmediated, allowing the verse to take the actual form of a horizontal more-than-human dialogue. An absence of verbs, a transitivity – which is what I feel watching sea and city combine, in the present, multi-layered, more-than-human landscape of Genova, across its water and wind, across its changes and passages.

Conclusion

Mediterranean port cities are united by their geographic proximity, their relationship to the mythic Mediterranean Sea, to age-old trajectories of trade, mobility, migration, flows and crusades. They are also united in their dwindling global geopolitical importance. The Mediterranean, however, is a diverse region, spanning from Spain and Morocco in the west, to Syria, Lebanon and Israel in the east. The case studies in this article can thus tell us only so much about the region as a whole, instead focussing on three key cities in three of southern Europe’s most powerful and influential nation-states. Yet, despite the small-scale of the present study, and our approach of reading Mediterranean port cities through montage, this study has juxtaposed diverse sites to begin reading the emotional trajectories which crisscross Barcelona, Marseille and Genova, and which are conditioned by each city’s national, historical and regional context.

Barcelona, with its current ethno-nationalist struggle against the Spanish state, as well as its successful branding as a tourist mecca, is atypical in the Mediterranean region. Consequently, hope emerges as a particularly resonant emotion to overcome multivalent crises, whether they be political, economic or psychosocial. As a case study, Barcelona underscores how port cities not only mirror constituent historical narratives but also are forced to negotiate the push and pull from multiscalar pressures, whether it be from the state and nation, Europe, or global capital. Marseille is also a unique case study because of its national reputation as a gritty, crime-ridden city. It is not surprising that nostalgia is the underlining emotional response of a city that seeks to reimagine its place within the French nation. Marseille is also a compelling case study because it challenges traditional understandings of nostalgia. The port city of Marseille is situated at the crossroads between complex narratives of the city and hence the emotional response of the city is not merely a return to a lost past, but instead a deeply reflective meditation on how nostalgia can be fostered to map out new networks of relationality and community. Finally, Genova’s unique geographic position has allowed it to turn towards the sea, reimagining the port city as being part of a wider ecoregion. Yet, the tension that arises between the human and the more-than-human as a part of the regeneration may generate emotional responses that complicate this landscape. As a case study, it points to how we must always consider the relationship between urban structures and the natural environment, as that relationship is deeply embedded in the cultural production of a city.

Referring back to Davidson et al.’s (2007) contention that the significance of places lies in their emotional associations and interactions and is thus integral to how they are imagined, the case studies of Barcelona, Marseille, and Genova underline how emotions are performed in specific spaces. The city itself becomes the space where emotion is manifested. As such, emotional responses are productive, allowing for a reimagining of the city in its current moment and its future potential that extends beyond migrant narratives, urban renewal and local tensions to include how emotional responses and relations such as hope, nostalgia and kinship allow us to understand the local responses of a city’s population to its own narratives. And, to come full circle, the shifting presence of the Mediterranean Sea itself for each of these cities is a fluidity that unites yet ruptures their stories. These stories, with points of continuity, intersection and distinctiveness intimate, for the 21st century, a mix of complexity, abrasiveness and resistance and, hopefully, some productive ways to live together. Furthermore, a close reading of emotional economies across these cities in all their fragmentation might suggest alternative approaches to researching relations of affect, place meanings and everyday practices. And here, the sea as a motif – of movement, diverse communities, human/non-human interactions, re-imagined identities and ways of feeling – remains at the heart of our reflections.