Migrant Marseille: Architectures Of Social Segregation And Urban Inclusivity

by Marc Angélil, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

At 9 AM on November 5, 2018, a pair of buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people hailing from Algeria, the Comoros, France, Italy, and Tunisia. This devastating toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social struggle. Divided along ethnicity and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from problematic governance, a lack of housing-stock maintenance, a constant influx of migrants, widespread privatization of services, and rapid, profit-driven, and destructive post-industrial urbanization.

Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity examines this complex city through a series of case studies of its built environment, from Le Corbusier’s iconic Cité Radieuse to La Castellane, the impoverished public housing project that is the birthplace of football star Zinedine Zidane. The essays, photographs, and drawings illustrate the impact of migration on space, architecture, and territory. Migrant Marseille tells of an urban reality in which migration is present at every turn, and offers tactics and strategies to support social and spatial integration.

Genres: Architecture

282 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Basel · Rating 3 out of 5]

For centuries, the city of Marseille was, and will always be, known as a hub of people passing by from different parts of the world. It's a true cosmopolitan city where only by walking through its neighborhoods do we understand it. Such a flux of people didn't only influence its cultural aspect, but also its architecture. From different migrations to decolonization , the landscapes of the city changed. This book is a good study of the people hugely impacted its architecture. From the construction of huge building structures and the shifts between its neighborhoods, migration, as the book shows, is a phenomenon the changes the city. In the case of Marseille, it ended up creating cities within the city. Population rarely mix in some areas, and segregation is a real thing. The book did a good job in showing this, and even though it helps, you don't have to be an architect to understand the changing landscape that the book tries to present.