1st Mediterranean Region Conference

The Conference through photographs

Fouad Maazouz

Close of the RehabiMed Conference

RehabiMed has been three years of intensive work, meetings, encounters, debates, missions, creation of contents… Like Braudel’s Mediterranean, RehabiMed has been a thousand things at once: not just one project but a whole succession. Not a single encounter, but countless intersecting encounters. Not one debate, but a multiple, prolific, enthusiastic debate.

The complexity of the problem

In his opening address, Sami Naïr referred to the political, social, economic and cultural complexity of our sea of seas. Naïr presented a series of structural problems in the face of which we might think we can do little with our modest rehabilitation work. Yet this is not the case; by means of rehabilitation, we are touching the heart of the issue, because we are dealing with the quality of life of a large spectrum of the population and our shared cultural identity.

There is no need to stress the physical, social, economic, cultural and environmental problems that affect traditional Mediterranean architecture. To differing degrees, according to the place and the time, in every country we find phenomena that affect it directly: demographic pressure; growing poverty; loss of social and cultural identity; lack of infrastructures and public facilities; conversion of living fabric into museums; property speculation; gentrification; tertiarization; abandonment; degradation; obsolescence… All this represents the weakness and the opportunity, the threat and the strength of our traditional architecture. What ultimately happens to it depends on us and on how we manage its evolution and transformation.

Towards a new housing policy

In the course of these three years of intensive work, we have realized that if we hope to achieve the challenge that RehabiMed set itself—to promote rehabilitation activity as a factor of sustainable development—we have to convince our political representatives and demand that they make rehabilitation part of their housing policies. This commitment has to form part of a new framework of governability in which the public sector is based on private initiative and civil society, and in which citizen participation plays a vital role.

The papers presented at the Conference were both numerous and excellent in quality, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. Their contents were very varied, as required by a multidisciplinary view of rehabilitation, and covered every stage of the RehabiMed Method. Their greatest asset was their intimate association with the reality of each place. Whether proceeding from the university, government or professional world, all highlighted the need to strengthen the role of civil society as the driving force behind change and renovation in rehabilitation policies. Another aspect to emerge strongly was the key role of training for professionals; whether in the technical or the management sphere, whether artisans or architects and engineers, they must all constitute collectives of specialists in addressing and managing built heritage.

RehabiMed today and tomorrow

Since it began, RehabiMed has been a project with precise objectives and clearly defined actions. RehabiMed is now coming to an end with the completion of the scheduled actions, but its objectives can only be achieved in the mid- and the long-term. RehabiMed has become an international referent for many politicians and professionals, and constitutes an extremely valuable body of knowledge and experience, and a network of experts that is unique in the Mediterranean and in the world.

Many participants in the Conference expressed their determination and commitment to helping RehabiMed continue its mission of spreading the rehabilitation message throughout the Mediterranean. Many seeds already sown have borne fruit, and many others will do so in the future. For all of these reasons, RehabiMed as a project may have ended, but as an idea and a commitment it must continue. We now have to apply ourselves to combining the hard work and skills we have shared over the last three years, and that is why we are going to create a RehabiMed Association to bring together everyone concerned and to develop in accordance with our efforts. The aim is not to create new structures but to coordinate the thousands of initiatives we have seen in the last few days and to provide a meeting point and a resource centre to collect and publicize the information and bring experts together to launch new rehabilitation projects.

In the new framework of governability I refer to above, the RehabiMed Association must bring together administrations, universities, companies, professionals and everyone interested in rehabilitation. Each individual has a part to play in promoting RehabiMed’s humanitarian and heritage-based objective. Together, we will continue RehabiMed in the form of regional and bilateral projects, demonstrating the vast capacity of an alliance that has emerged from civil society, where conflicts that seem to be irresolvable by political means are minimized by our shared daily work, side by side.

Espai de cooperació | Ciutat i territori | Edificis

Espai de cooperació