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Located between Marseille and Barcelona, Montpellier is one of the most attractive cities of the Mediterranean coast. It has more than 460,000 inhabitants and grows by 7,500 more inhabitants every year. This is largely due to its positive image and its freshly constructed neighbourhoods "Antigone" and "Port‐Marianne." From the late 1970s, the municipality's strategy was to organise the urban sprawl to the east and then towards the sea in the south of the city. The Lez, a small coastal river, well known for its spectacular flash floods, was the spine of this new urban growth. Internationally renowned architects and planners have been recruited to build these new "green" neighbourhoods (in French "éco‐quartiers") located on lands that used to be flooded regularly. This urban policy is largely due to the Montpellier's former mayor Georges Frêche and his deputy, the geographer Raymond Dugrand. The "urban planning" concept, or "urban design" projects, have largely been used by the local experts and officials to describe this development, but seem to be misused in this case. It has being mostly a political city‐project, still having the same objective as more than 30 years ago: to turn Montpellier towards the seaside. This paper will return to the strategy used at that time and, in retrospect, all the interrogations that have followed in terms of sustainable development and flood risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediterranean port cities share a number of trajectories that reveal their constitutive interconnectedness. Among the more recent is the process of urban regeneration that many of these cities have undergone over the last two decades. Several studies have analysed the implications of urban renewal from a socio-economic and urban planning perspective. However, the intersection between diverse urban restructuring processes and the emotions that crisscross these cities is still largely underexplored. This article aims to begin filling this gap by identifying possible emotional responses that mirror local concerns in three port cities located on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. More specifically, the article investigates Barcelona in light of the hope that emerges when a city is in crisis, Marseille and the nostalgia that is mobilised to reimagine the city's national consciousness and Genova with regard to an uncanny feeling when more-than-human balances are altered. Drawing from different disciplines, including ethnography, media, archival and literary analysis, this article argues that emotional trajectories are significant aspects to consider in the urban renewal processes of distinctive spaces like port cities because they allow us to comprehend some of the local reactions to urban transformations and gentrification that go beyond understanding economic and branding strategies in a post-industrial space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports two urban floods in France: the September 2000 flood at the city of Marseille caused by heavy rainfall, and the November 2008 flood in Oullins induced by the Yzeron River overflow. A two-dimensional (2D) depth-averaged model was used to simulate flood hazard and to investigate the uncertainty associated to the forcing inputs. Using a rainfall simulator, several distributions of rainfall inputs over the whole domain were produced for the event of September 2000 in Marseille. Results showed these latter distributions changed the average peak water depth more than other input parameters. The Yzeron River water elevation was the main source of uncertainty in the case of Oullins, but the flow pattern in the floodplain was also influenced by the method representing the urban areas. For both cases, average uncertainty remains high (up to 20% for peak water depth or velocity) and local uncertainty is almost much higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Capital of Culture 2013 is the last link in the chain of a 30-year regeneration policy for Marseille. However, despite the fact that Marseille is the core city of the application, Marseille Provence 2013 actually gathers 130 communes. The main objective of the article is to discuss the ground roots and the challenges of the application for the city and its urban area. The paradoxes faced by Marseille Provence 2013 as well as how the bid fits in with the overall regeneration strategy of Marseille and how it rests on non-traditional cultural facilities are analysed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive cities enhance the interaction between culture and regeneration which can contribute to economic development and social renewal, which in turn furthers comprehensive redevelopment. It is a question not only of boosting the economies of culture, but also of producing new economies, emanating from cultural capital which is understood as an expression of place identity. Creativity is found not only in the typical characteristics of the entrepreneurial spirit, but also in the dissemination of behaviour that is favourable to cultural exchange and the enhancement of lifestyle diversity. Therefore new urban policies should be considered. The experience of creative cities shows two types of creative clusters: cultural clusters which are created around activities such as fine art, music, cinema, architecture and design, and whose initiation is encouraged and planned by local government; and clusters of cultural events ranging from great events to local recreational and cultural events. This paper aims to show that new urban policies are able to stimulate sustainable urban regeneration and innovation by examining the case study of waterfront regeneration in Marseille Euroméditerranée. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written as a small tribute to David Frisby’s inspiring, pioneering work on Critical Theory and the modern cityscape, this essay explores a number of feuilletons and other textual fragments in which the cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer expresses his enduring fascination with the French port of Marseilles. It is suggested that this city has a two-fold significance for him: firstly, in the vibrancy of its street-life, Marseilles is an exemplary, indeed inspirational, instance of the cinematic qualities of modern urban environments. It is to Marseilles that Kracauer’s 1960 Theory of Film is indebted not only for its first formulation but also for its central motif of the quotidian ‘flow of life’ to which the film camera must attend. Secondly, this seedy city constitutes the preeminent site of ‘promiscuous modernity’, understood here in two senses: not only as an environment of explicit sexuality and sexual activity/exchange, but also one that is ‘for mixing’ – that is to say, open and inviting to the most eclectic and outré elements. This notion of promiscuity as the continuous co-presence and curious contiguity of heterogeneous populations and incongruous objects also has its filmic aspect – as Kracauer observes elsewhere, such surreal juxtapositions are also to be found off-set in the costumes and props of the film studio. In its fusion of everyday urban energies and extraordinary eccentricities, the cinematic city of Marseilles takes on a dreamlike quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sensible heat flux estimated by Large Aperture Scintillometry (LAS) has been tested against the more traditional eddy covariance technique over Marseille city centre, a reasonably homogeneous surface. Over the 3 week test period fluxes were found to be similar, yet less noisy for the LAS due to the spatial integration. No systematic bias between the estimates was found as a function of wind direction, indicating the homogeneity of the site. Sensitivity analysis of the required aerodynamic parameters shows that careful attention must be paid to the displacement height along the measurement path. Spatial variability of surface sensible heat flux is studied via a second LAS measurement path over the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violent destruction of urban centers during World War II seemed to redefine a given city's history following the unequivocal chronological division between "before" and "after." Through the analysis of the postwar rebuilding of Marseille's historic center, I argue that the temporalities of reconstruction must be understood instead as an ongoing process through which visions of the past and present are projected and re-created in relation to a desired future. By examining the material and ideological relationship between archaeological excavations and urban planning strategies in the reconstruction of Marseille's Vieux-Port, I propose that the focus of the reconstruction was effectively displaced from the traumatic wartime events that had necessitated its rebuilding to the resurrection of Marseilles mythic ancient past. As articulated by archaeologist Fernand Benoît and architecte-urbaniste André-Pierre Hardy, the recovery of the city's ancient traces was less a literal unearthing than phantasmatic projections mapped onto remarkably fragmentary artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]