Registering the Mediterranean Gradient: A Journey Along the Ebro River (Iberian Peninsula)

The research presented in this article originated within the ‘MedWays’ Research Project, an international research cluster of the Beniamino Segre Interdisciplinary Liceo Centre at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy) and the University of Trento (Italy). Following the invitation from MedWays, we responded to the Mediterranean topic with a research project (titled: ‘Mediterranean Sections’) conceived as a journey and, at the same time, as a collage. Our work gave rise to a representation of the forms of inhabiting the land–water interface of the Iberian Peninsula’s Ebro River, narrated in graphic and chromatic registers. From the urban, architectural, and landscape-oriented points of view, we considered how to probe the specifically Mediterranean nature of a river that feeds the sea of this name. Using resources afforded by the Web, we assembled plans, sections, and sets of views into Mediterranean Sections—representations that travel the length of the river from its mouth to its source, from city to city, and field to field. Sectioning the river through units of length that serve as ‘measures’, we fix photograms by which to explore the variation of what we call the ‘Mediterranean gradient’ of the Ebro River. Beyond the simple geographical sense, we understand the ‘gradient’ as what this river gives and receives from its Mediterranean identity, with consideration of how this translates in terms of its forms. This article is one further step in this research. Using cross sections of the river, this work aims to construct photograms in sequences in which we can read the particular ‘rhythm’ of the fluvial landscape of the Ebro River. As was the case with the earlier Mediterranean Sections work, our notion of ‘measure’ is taken with reference to fields, urban blocks, and mobility infrastructures, documenting their variation as they develop along the river. Our visual register is sequentially elaborated in plan and in section, depicting the forms by which the Ebro’s land–water interface is inhabited. These forms combine into the essence of its ‘specific rhythm’ (what we have termed the ‘Mediterranean gradient’) and provide the basis for its territorial project, which starts from the appreciation and preservation of its relationship with the (visible and invisible) water flowing across the territory.