Mediterranean Bastards
A Biopolitical Project for a Tropicalising Sea
P. Bernardini (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
L.M. Calabrese – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
D.A. Sepulveda Carmona – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Climate change is transforming the Mediterranean Sea, pushing it toward increasingly tropical conditions. This process entails challenges and risks whose intrinsic complexity spans natural and cultural dimensions, as well as the lives of human and more-than-human inhabitants. It raises questions about forms of cooperation and inclusive politics that have yet to be established.
Starting from a working hypothesis that recognises Mediterranean eco-regions as biopolitical subjects, this thesis first seeks to understand the Adriatic eco-region as an entity - mapping its body through the combined lens of its biophysical and cultural dimensions, identifying five operative transects, the Bastards, and understanding the risks brought by tropicalisation to them.
Using the Adriatic eco-region and the Po/North Adriatic transect as a laboratory, the research proposes Padania Tropicale - a transformative framework that envisions pathways of co-evolutionary transformation alongside the new conditions brought by climate change, rather than the protection of a "natural" order oriented exclusively toward human productive activities.
The thesis concludes with a methodological reflection on the biopolitical dimension of spatial planning, exploring how eco-regions and transects can operate as devices for spatialising the Rights of Nature and for building governance frameworks grounded in a co-evolutionary stewardship between humans and nature. A reflection that is still open by necessity, but sincere in its ambition to seed further research and design at the scale of the Mediterranean basin.