Ricerc@Sapienza

After the end of the Second World War several European States projected throughout the extended Mediterranean, ¿ with the political and strategic backup of the United Nations, Development Cooperation, Ford Foundations,¿ to support the social and economic modernization of less developed countries and former colonies, from North Africa to Iran. The most promising or prestigious professional and architectural-engineering firms opened their local offices in those countries to design and implement development plans, infrastructures, public buildings, neighbourhoods. Most of these programs were soon joined by private entrepreneurial initiatives. These prominent public-private economic and political network of synergies have been scarcely explored as a whole while they are neglected proofs of how the States actively shaped and created markets and steered innovative changes. In recent years some of these projects have been the subject of curatorial researches, publications and exhibitions especially focused on the work of solo architects or of complex cultural phenomenons as Mediterranean modernism, Post-colonial Urbanism. There is a lack of in-depth analysis to measure comprehensively the impact of European architectural and urban culture in shaping and inventing the collective identity in the extended Mediterranean. The proposal intends to reconstruct a half-century picture of a proactive cross-disciplinary constellation of European technical and intellectual skills, spread in the Mediterranean. This will provide unpredicted interpretations compared with the mainstream architectural historiography of the twentieth century. Throughout a European digital collection, the research will document a hybridised cultural legacy and explore the future role that Europe could play for the next reconstructions of territories in the Near and Middle East, and in Africa tackling the balance between urbanization and human survival enhancing urban quality and avoiding past mistakes.