Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Christian hermits alike. They also made them bulwarks for religious and political re-
sistance, as well as reservoirs of past customs, of traditional
genres de vie
. As such,
Mediterranean high places are becoming valuable resources for tourist consump-
tion; objects of nostalgia for lost natural 'otherness' and a lost past 'otherness' -
in other words, for authenticity. But nonetheless, they remain places of limited re-
sources and high ecological fragility. Since the beginning of the twentieth century,
their residents have been abandoning mountains for lowland cities and villages, al-
though at different rates and time periods around the Mediterranean Basin.
Nowadays, however, we are witnessing a reverse - albeit partial - flow back to
mountain communities, to the rural family hearth, to the ancestral home, to old
villages slowly turning into either lucrative winter resorts or thriving, quaint, 'tra-
ditional' second-home communities for well-off urbanites. There exist, of course, a
series of symbolic Mediterranean mountain geographies, ranging from cultural im-
ages for tourist consumption to problem-ridden peripheries for the local populations
to national or family hearths for the rest of the population, constructed in the col-
lective imagination with an orientation towards a historical - or ahistorical, for that
matter - past. According to this latter imaginary, during most of the year, mountains
are perceived as essentially uninhabited landscapes, while during holidays and es-
pecially during the summer, they come alive again to cater to the recreational needs
of urbanites and other tourists. For all of the above reasons, these landscapes need to
be preserved and managed in sustainable ways that are appropriate, both temporally
and spatially, to the needs of modern society, without compromising the natural and
cultural inheritance that makes up the uniqueness of contemporary Mediterranean
mountain geographies.
References
References marked as bold are key references.
Bernbaum, E. (1997)
Sacred Mountains of the World
. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Braudel, F. (1995)
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
,
vol. 1. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Braudel, F. (2000) La terra. In: Braudel, F. (ed.),
Il Mediterraneo: lo spazio, la storia, gli uomini,
le tradizioni
. Milano: Bompiani, pp. 11-30.
Coccossis, H. and Tsartas, P. (2001) Sustainable Tourism Development and the Environment [in
Greek]. Athens: Kritiki.
Cosgrove, D. and della Dora, V. (eds) (2009)
High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains,
Ice and Science
. London: IB Tauris.
Debarbieux, B. (1998) The mountain in the city: social uses and transformations of a natural
landform in urban space.
Ecumene
5:399-431.
Debarbieux, B. (2004) The symbolic order of objects and the frame of geographical action: an
analysis of the modes and the effects of categorisation of the geographical world as applied to
the mountains in the west.
GeoJournal
60:397-405.
Debarbieux, B. (2008) Linking mountain identities throughout the world: the experiences of
Swiss communities.
Cultural Geographies
15:497-517.
