“Peace through sewers”, or the Mediterranean unity as an urban, geopolitical and environmental utopia (1950s1990s)

This paper examines the geopolitical dimensions of technical utopias, looking at the emergence in the 1970s of transnational circulations of municipal environmental policies in the Mediterranean region, and their relationship with visions and projects of regional political integration. Here, we study Mediterranean municipal movements which, bringing together urban planners, engineers, local elected officials, and political activists, developed the idea that the spread of urban technical progress, particularly in terms of sanitation, would prove capable of “saving” the Mediterranean from both ecological and political collapse, in a region divided by colonization, the Cold War, and the conflict in the Middle East. The paper traces the political origins of this utopia, which emerged from anti-colonialists and third-worldists movements that, from the 1950s onwards, sought to make municipalities a central part of the renewal of post-colonial regional relations. From the 1970s onwards, the focus shifted to environmental issues and sanitation, without abandoning the desire to contribute to peace and democratization in the region. However, this utopia remained asymmetrical, driven primarily by a few French, Italian, and Spanish actors.