Introduction
Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830. From 1830 until its independence in 1962, Algeria remained the most important, the most cherished, the most invested in, and the most problematic of all French territories outre-mer . Intricately entangled in every aspect of the French empire-building process, Algeria also endured an unmatched longevity as a French colony. It became the site of a multitude of colonial experiments, ranging over the course of 132 years from early militaristic and assimilationist tactics to softer associationist policies to a modern ironfisted rule. Algiers, the major urban and administrative center of the colonizing activity, was the colonial city par excellence, the terrain of many battles—cultural, political, military, urban, architectural.[1]
This book is a detailed look at Algiers as the site of colonial policies, based on an understanding that architecture and urban forms are key players in definitions of culture and identity.[2] My focus on architectural and urban spheres allows for an investigation of the cultural dimension of empire building. For colonialism not only involved economics and politics but also was a cultural phenomenon. In Eric Hobsbawm's words, "The conquest of the globe by its 'developed' minority transformed images, ideas and aspirations, both by force and institutions, by example, and by social transformation."[3] For Edward Said, the cultural sphere is a main actor in the "processes of imperialism" which occur "by predisposition, by the authority of recognizable cultural formations, by continuing consolidation within education, literature, and the visual and musical arts." Culture is a crucial element in the power struc-
ture of the colonial condition, because "the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire. " Culture enables the formation of this idea.[4]
Architecture and urbanism have an obvious advantage over other cultural formations in shedding light on social relations and power structures: they constitute an essential part of the human experience and their experiential qualities make them accessible to everybody. They express cultural values, but they are also firmly grounded in material and daily life. Their connection to the everyday world is so substantial that they can never transcend or be divorced from worldly associations—a phenomenon often observed in other cultural and artistic formations. The everyday life of the colonial order occurred in the public and private spaces of Algiers, the metaphorical and the practical, the confrontational and the compromising clashing as people (colonized and colonizer) went about their routine activities. Because architecture and urban forms frame all human activity, and because the particular evolution of Algiers under French rule was so dramatic, the physical city kept its residents constantly aware of political conditions and power relations.
My analysis of Algiers evolves around two general themes: urban form and urban process. I subscribe to Spiro Kostof's approach to studying cities—that is, to an architectural historian's urban history. Unlike social historians, architectural historians place their emphasis on the "physical frame of things" and the "spatial characteristics of the city." They focus on urban form in a historical perspective, looking for specific intents.[5]
In its broader manifestation, the form of a city is determined by its "image." Kevin Lynch defined "imageability" as "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer." This "legibility," Lynch argued, plays a social role as well, because it embodies elements that lead to the emergence of collective memories and symbols.[6] Yet even the clearest and sharpest of urban images evokes different readings, recalling Henri Lefebvre's probing question: "To what extent may a space be read or decoded?"[7] Granted that the French colonial city is characterized by a powerful visual character that culminates in the contrasting images of the European and indigenous quarters (Fig. 1), consider the following passages.
Frantz Fanon, the passionate critic of French colonialism, drew the image of the generic colonial city:
Figure 1.
Aerial view from 1935, showing the juncture of the casbah (on the right) and the
French quarters (on the left). The intersection is marked by Boulevard Gambetta
(now Ourida Meddad), the Grand Theater, and Place d'Aristide Briand (now
Square Port Said).
The settler's town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are paved with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and hardly thought about. The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers' town is a town of white people, of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved
of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.[8]
Le Corbusier, the foremost modernist architect, focused on the same duality, with specific reference to Algiers:
Seen from the sea, European Algiers is nothing but crumbling walls and devastated nature, the whole a sullied blot. We have seen the agglomeration, the juxtaposition of dwelling units one on top of the other, one next to the other, randomly, enclosing the inhabitant in stone ramparts and roughcast, folding over him the walls, blocking the horizons, hiding all natural spectacles, and making people live, in Algiers of Africa, like anywhere on the continent; very poorly. Europeans did not exploit the fortune offered to them. . . .
The casbah of Algiers [in contrast] made the site: it gave the name of White Algiers to this glittering entity, that welcomes, at dawn, the boats that arrive at the harbor. Inscribed in the site, it is irrefutable. It is in consonance with nature, because from every house, from the terrace—and these terraces add on to each other like a magic and gigantic staircase descending to the sea—one sees the space, the sea.
Le Corbusier concluded, elsewhere, that "the 'civilized' live like rats in holes," whereas "the 'barbarians' live in solitude, in well-being."[9]
The same urban image, then, has the potential to signify different messages. Because a form—even a seemingly crystalline one—can be viewed from a myriad of perspectives, focusing on physical aspects alone does not allow for a meaningful analysis of the city. As Lefebvre insists, spaces are read according to the specific codes developed at specific historic periods and under specific conditions.[10] While the colonial city embodied for Fanon everything that was problematic in colonial occupation, the duality he despised because of its unegalitarianism and hegemony, which left the native inhabitants in miserable conditions, is reversed by Le Corbusier; in his interpretation, it is the European who lives in unacceptable spaces, while the natives enjoy a decent town that is spacious and embraces nature. The two visions can be attributed to historic conditions and to particular agendas. Fanon's piece was written at a time marked by liberation movements in colonies and in particular the Algerian War, whereas Le Corbusier made his observations in the 1930s in a seemingly subdued Algiers, where the colonizer could choose to overlook colonial conflicts. Fanon's goal was to display the horrors of
colonialism in support of resistance struggles; Le Corbusier's critique, in contrast, centered on the promotion of his own projects for Algiers.
To look at such shifting readings becomes crucial in the urban historian's quest to begin to reveal the multitude of meanings associated with forms and spaces. The historian thus borrows a research tool from sociology: triangulation. In Janet Abu-Lughod's words, triangulation is based on the understanding that "there is no archimedean point outside the system from which to view historic reality."[11] This new dimension in the writing of urban history is intertwined with the study of the "urban process" that embodies the intricate interaction of social, economic, political, technical, cultural, and artistic forces that bring the form about and give dynamism to the city through time.[12] Lefebvre proposes that, to avoid the "trap of treating space as space 'in itself"' (not an uncommon trend among architectural historians and critics), the urban historian must look at the "production of space and the social relations inherent to it" and uncover social relationships. This involves not chronologically fixed urban forms, but the "long history of space" and "accounts for both representational spaces and representations of space, but above all for their interrelationships and their links to social practice."[13] Moreover, as Hobsbawm observed, cities reflect great social transformations better than any institution.[14] We gain a broader understanding of colonialism—a determining force in the history of the modern era that brought about one of the most important transformations in the world order—through the analysis of its cities.
The dual structure of the colonial city described by Fanon and Le Corbusier, the unlikely partners of this introduction, is a fragment of the broad discourse of colonialism which accommodates the exercise of colonial power by an "articulation of forms of difference." Separation plays an important part in defining otherness and allows for a critical distance needed for surveillance.[15] Racial, cultural, and historical otherness constituted the main paradigm that dominated all building activity in Algiers during the French occupation, and spatial separation in the most concrete sense reinforced the difference.
Behind the clear message conveyed by the image of dual cities at first sight, however, hide more complicated implications. As argued by Homi Bhabha and others, the colonial relationship is not symmetrically antagonistic, due to the ambivalence in the positioning of the colonized and the colonizer. Ambivalence is connected to "hybridity," in which the other's original is rewritten but also transformed through misread-
ings and incongruities, resulting in something different.[16] The architecture of colonialism reveals levels of ambivalence and hybridity while persistently maintaining the overriding theme of difference.
Architecture and urbanism in the colonial context should thus be viewed among the practices that make up the colonial discourse. My argument here is based on an expansion of Peter Hulme's definition of colonial discourse as "an ensemble of linguistically based practices unified by their common deployment of colonial relationships."[17] To Hulme's repertoire, which ranges from bureaucratic documents to romantic novels, I would like to add architecture, whose expression is also coded by linguistic conventions, albeit visual and spatial ones. As different practices in the discourse complemented each other and culminated in an interconnected knowledge of the colony, I expand my study of Algiers with references to other fields of knowledge following an interdisciplinary approach. My goal is to gain a better understanding of architectural and urban forms by situating them in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. I rely particularly on ethnography, because as a discipline historically entangled in the politics of colonialism (an association explained by Michel Leiris in a memorable article in 1950[18] ) ethnography played a major role in defining the sociocultural characteristics of the "Algerian" society as well as its spatial parameters. These definitions, in turn, were instrumental in shaping colonial designs.[19]
This book examines two related topics: urbanism and housing design. I study the city-building activities carried out in Algiers under French rule and the large housing projects (grands ensembles ) designed and constructed by the colonial administration for exclusive use by Algerians. The chronology is framed by the French occupation from 1830 to 1962. I extend briefly beyond these dates in both directions by references to the historic development of the precolonial city and to some issues of the postcolonial period.[20]
Algiers occupies an exceptional place in the history of French colonial urbanism. As a city with already several centuries of history and as pioneer outpost of what would grow into a huge colonial empire, it posited unforeseen problems for French invaders, who were not equipped with the urbanistic tools to meet Algiers's challenges. Yet by the 1830s, the French were experienced modern city builders who had developed impressive large-scale renovation plans and whose incremental interventions since the early seventeenth century had changed the faces of several cities at home, particularly Paris. While this expertise came in handy,
the presence of powerful local urban forms and a well-coded Muslim urban culture, in addition to the complex topography of the site, complicated the task of French technocrats in Algiers. The city became the trial-and-error case of French colonial urbanism, and the mistakes made there were used as lessons in other colonies. Compared with the carefully orchestrated urban design practices in cities colonized later by the French, the case of Algiers stands out in its irregular processes, as well as the resulting "chaos" so feverishly criticized by the French themselves throughout their tenure. Even though the colonial administration managed to use urban design for establishing and expressing power and control over the local population, the output was always fragmented and the policies never matched the all-encompassing and meticulously calculated interventions in other colonies, most notably Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey's Morocco.
From the 1930s on, urban design in Algiers became associated with large housing projects. Paralleling the dual structure of the city that was well in place by then, the colonial policies kept the housing built for Algerians separate from the housing projects that sheltered Europeans. The separation was not only physical, but also highlighted by architectural difference in various attempts to synthesize the collective housing typologies with socioculturally loaded elements deemed appropriate to represent and accommodate Algerians. The "traditional" Algerian house, as already studied by ethnographers and architects, written about by travelers, and replicated in artistic productions, constituted a major resource in identifying the most "characteristic" pieces.
Chapter 1 describes the old city. After surveying the precolonial history of the casbah, as old Algiers is commonly called, and analyzing its spatial characteristics on the eve of the French occupation, I introduce its treatment in colonial discourse, which crystallized in the development of a "myth of the casbah." The bulk of the chapter then deals with interventions to the upper and the lower casbah (the Marine Quarter)—operations fluctuating among ruthless carving and piercing into the existing fabric, attempts to preserve its romantic authenticity, and benign neglect. Chapter 2 traces the urban development of Algiers and the insistent struggle of the colonial administration to turn it into a modern French city. I analyze a selection of executed projects as well as proposals that remained on paper, my view being that eventually both contributed to the shape of Algiers. Among the unexecuted projects are Le Corbusier's renowned schemes, widely studied by architectural his-
torians as masterpieces of modernism, but systematically abstracted from their context. Situating them within the history of urban planning in Algiers casts new light on their exaggerated originality.
With my analysis of city building in Algiers, I hope to contribute to filling a major lacuna in urban histories of modernism, which center routinely on Europe and North America. Yet, linked to the colonial expansions, some of the most challenging experiments of city building in the era covered here happened in other parts of the world—a phenomenon that has begun to receive attention only recently.[21] It is also noteworthy that urban planning operations designed and carried out in French colonial cities, especially in Algiers, were closely linked to their counterparts in France. Many issues regarding city planning had interconnected histories in Algeria and France. Among them were historic preservation, problems of îlots insalubres (unsanitary districts), the poorly housed populations (mal-logés ), building of large housing projects (grands ensembles ) in immediate suburbs, policies regarding the shantytowns (bidonpilles )—topics of the following chapters. While the métropole /colonial paradigm held true for other French possessions, Algeria's special status made its relationship to France much more arduous than was the case for other colonies.
After drawing the broader framework in the first two chapters, I turn to housing, which received unprecedented priority as part of the reforms introduced in Algeria to celebrate the centennial of the occupation, in 1930. During this time the indispensability of colonies formed the core of political debates. Albert Sarrault, the former governor of Indochina and minister of colonies, stated: "Henceforth, the European edifice rests on colonial pilotis ." Left on its own, Europe would not have the resources to feed itself and would collapse economically without primary materials and labor from the colonies and their "vast exterior markets."[22] The much-publicized centennial was exploited to disseminate the importance of colonies and to develop further the notion of la plus grande France , an "imperial French doctrine," and a "colonial consciousness." It was also utilized to consolidate Algeria's ties to France. Algeria was presented as an integral part of the "France of one million inhabitants" that extended over five continents.[23] A government official elaborated this notion: "Here [in Algeria] there is truly a new France . . . [its] people have but one desire, one ambition: to be intimately fused with the Mother Country."[24] The celebrations were multifaceted, varying from sumptuous military parades to an impressive range of publications on different aspects of the country, from cultural
and artistic exhibitions to ambitious projects to renovate the cities of Algeria and provide decent housing.[25]
Before looking at the actual housing projects built by the French for the Algerians, I trace the definition of the parameters that served as sociocultural guidelines for architects. Chapter 3 discusses the idea of a "traditional Algerian house" constructed by the colonial discourse, specifically by ethnographers and architects, but also by artists and photographers. Because domestic space in colonial discourse on Algeria is interlaced with Algerian women, understanding and explaining women's social condition and their daily life patterns were considered essential. Although this "construction" process began in the late ninteenth century, it reached a critical moment in the 1930s.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the provision of housing for the indigenous people of Algiers and cover the period between 1930 and 1962, the former date corresponding to the first projects built by the French for the Algerians. Chapter 4 analyzes the general policies regarding housing, developed from the knowledge accumulated over the years of French rule in Algeria. Chapter 5 surveys a cross-section of grands ensembles , examining how the sociocultural structures and life patterns of the Algerian people (as described and codified in various fields of knowledge) were interpreted to fit into these massive structures. I deliberately do not elaborate at length on certain themes that constitute the essence of most studies on housing, such as quantitative issues, ownership patterns, management structures, and agencies. I focus instead on architectural and sociocultural aspects, in keeping with the underlying theme of the book that architecture is a cultural formation.
The Epilogue ties together the material presented in individual chapters and bridges the colonial and postcolonial eras. I suggest that many issues discussed in this book did not end with the French rule but persisted into independent Algeria—in a transformed framework. If the complexity of the present-day situation cautions against drawing quick parallels and conclusions, it also heightens the importance of understanding the entangled nature of the colonial and postcolonial situation in Algeria.