Co-evolutive Resilience: The Hidden Identity of Phoenicia

Abstract

Finiq is the biggest town in its municipality and has served as an administrative center for various years. Most of the dwellings are placed during the 1990-2000 decade, referring to the previous and the current maps. Because of massive emigration trends in the past, there are many abandoned and unfinished houses. The uninhabited villages that have been abandoned in recent decades make up a serious problem, which is all too common in many Balkan countries. As a result, various buildings are semi-finished and in a degraded state, both architectural and structural. Also, on top of the hill of Finiq, there is an archeological site of the old Phoenicia city. It serves as the main touristic attraction for the town, along with the bucolic scene of the countryside. By analyzing the territory of Finiq we figured out that there is a hidden identity of the urban structure. As the town lays morphologically on the strip, it fragmentises from the second and third row of buildings, showing a “missed typological block”. On the other hand, it shows the creation of spontaneous empty spaces, that suggest this hidden spirit of the town, created imaginatively by connecting them. The simple disposal of each building to the nearest one creates what Franco Purini calls the “border distance”, a distance that, like in Michelangelo’s fresco, creates a necessary situation for one to feel the magnetic force of attraction or repulsion between the two bodies. The space where this magnetic force is exerted is the key point from which to draw the hidden spirit of Finiq. It is precisely the shape of that space that will determine the rules for the evolution of the town's identity. We will analyze in this paper how this space "between" can “co-evolve” if the institutions and the people who live there find a common language to reinvent a new but existing architecture of the place. As spotted in the analysis, we can confirm that there is an identity in Finiq. A “hidden spirit” lies in empty and fragmented spaces. It’s a millennial town, therefore something stronger than the constructions exists there. The resilience of the context’s form, space, and time coexist in lost identity, which we can strongly expose by intervening surgically. the co-evolution of these public spaces must start from precise rules which, through the careful analysis of the architect and urban planner, must be able to direct the inevitable spontaneity of the place’s history, without having a drastic top- down effect.