Marseilles, long synonymous with urban anarchy, economic bankruptcy and social tension, is hard at work on its renaissance. Three very different urban development projects have turned France's oldest city into an intriguing architectural laboratory, a 'melting pot' of conflicting approaches to urban development. The metropolis aspires to occupy a pivotal economic and cultural position between Europe and the Mediterranean region. Can the city where Europe and Africa meet do this and still retain its own unique character?

Marseilles intrigues with its complexity: different building forms, periods and cultures collide within narrow spaces. Motorways raised above the city offer breathtaking views of a confusion of village centres, docklands, beaches, rundown flats, unspoilt bays and industrial areas. The agglomeration is car-orientated: roads whiz through tunnels beneath the old harbour ('vieux port'), linking the north, Estaque, once the village of Cezanne and Braque, later of heavy industries, with southern villages like Callelongue situated on the white rocky bays of the Calanques which is part of the extensive natural areas that lie within the city limits. The second largest city in France, with a population of 800,000 and a surface area of 240 square kilometres, Marseilles is an agglomeration of villages that can still be recognized by the small squares which structure the postwar housing estates. The geological characteristics of this spot impose limitations on building, wedged as it is inside an amphitheatre of limestone mountains opening only to the sea. The long coastal strip is divided into a northern and a southern half by the Vieux Port, around which the historic centre unfolds. To the north, industrial docks and working-class neighbourhoods. To the south, coastal boulevards, hotels, residential estates as well as the legendary football stadium and popular beaches, public spaces that provoke intercity migrations and blur the picture of poor versus prosperous territories.

Cut off from the hinterland, Marseilles was for a long time dependent on the sea, a sort of autonomous city state, accessible to everyone who arrived from the Grand Bleu. The Greek Protis, founder of Massilia in 600 BC, was at once the first immigrant. The harbour has long acted as a sort of integration machine: in 1850 ten per cent of the population was of foreign extraction, by 1910 the figure had already risen to twenty per cent.*1 This unique sociological laboratory absorbs foreigners to the rhythm of Mediterranean conflicts: Armenians from Turkey, Jews, Italians and Spaniards fleeing Fascist regimes, Africans in the wake of decolonization and civil wars, Lebanese. In the past decade, Algerian Muslims driven out by the dirty war between the military regime and extremist Islamic terrorism which has already cost more than 100,00 lives and which, though outside our Western fortress and thus beyond our concern, has an immediate impact on the population of Marseilles. Thierry Fabre, editor-in-chief of the review La pensée de Midi,*2 comments that 'Marseilles, with its cosmopolitan population, is a "seismograph": the slightest politico-cultural quake in the Mediterranean is echoed here'.

All these different ethnic groups came together in a chaotic urban landscape that spontaneously took on shape to suit the needs of the waterfront extensions, industries and housing shortage - an architectural anarchy which is claimed in its totality as Marseilles' only monument. But between 1975 and 1990, this melting-pot came under pressure from an economic crisis: unemployment, urban impoverishment, declining population, political extremism.

The local, regional and national governments recently launched three different projects aimed at bringing about a renaissance of the city. In the field of spatial planning they are intended to introduce structure into the spontaneously evolved fabric of the city, with its poor population, but without disturbing the delicate social balance. In economic terms they represent the transition from a working-class and port city that 'skipped the entire twentieth century', to an international business platform with tertiary services, high-tech industries, scientific research and culture.

The historic centre: Projet Centre Ville

One of the paradoxes of Marseilles is that while it has grown poorer and its population has declined during the last few decades, the rest of the metropolis, which includes Fos, Aix-en-Provence and the Ciotat, has flourished, with new industries and activities. One of the inversions of Marseilles is that, while elsewhere inner cities became ghettos for the rich, the centre of Marseilles is rundown and one out of every three homes is empty. This city has no periphery; its 'poor suburbs' are situated in the centre which is now being renovated courtesy of the Projet Centre Ville.

In 1995 Jean Claude Gaudin was elected mayor of the city and, Liberal or not, he broke with the traditional urban laisser aller. For the first time, urban development plans were incorporated in a 'Schema de Coherence'*3 and they are being implemented by the property developer Marseille Amenagement. Its director Charles Boumendil: 'We implement the projects, but the role of Marseille Amenagement is also educational, residents participate in the development of the city, that is an achievement.' The aim of Projet Centre Ville, which is renovating 350 hectares in the old neighbourhoods with a budget of 460 million euros, is to draw new groups of residents, students and young households to these neighbourhoods, and to give the city centre the public and commercial functions of a genuine centre.

An example of the approach is the hilltop neighbourhood of Le Panier. It is the last remnant of the old city which was largely destroyed by German troops - after the population had been deported -using charges of dynamite in 1943. For a long time there was no government in this impoverished neighbourhood with its steep stairs and narrow alleys. Now the dilapidated homes are being renovated and what heritage there is, is being made accessible to visitors - such as the oval seventeenth-century Vieille-Charité. Right in front of it, the Place des Pistoles, designed by scenographer Alain Goestchy and architect Pierre Barisan, offers a magnificent descent over several levels. The reorganization of the public realm really is a priority: streets and squares are being redesigned for pedestrians and new trams and extended metro lines are planned.

Landscape architect Bernard Huet (who designed the Pare de Bercy in Paris) has laid out the Parc du 26e Centenaire on the site of the old Prado railway station. The renovation of the quays of the Vieux Port was of major symbolic importance; in Thierry Fabre's words, 'like a piece of domesticated sea, it forms a central square in the city and functions as its real heart'.

New public buildings, like the new Faculty of Law in the main street of La Canabière, are supposed to attract users, and thus consumers. A little further on, a large public library is being built on the Cours Belsunce to a design by Adrien Fainsilber (Cité des Sciences, Paris). Fainsilber refers overtly to the past with his 'authentic' Provencal building: the facade incorporates a monument in the collective memory, the entrance of the Alcazar, the former concert hall where for a century Marseilles' night life flourished. The renovation of entire districts is made possible by the legal methods of coercion the French administration has at its disposal.*4 For example, rundown neighbourhoods like Belsunce and Le Panier have been declared protected heritage by the State, a move that guarantees the preservation of historical quality.*5

House prices in Marseilles have sky-rocketed since the recent opening of a TGV rail link with Paris. The city centre, which is traditionally a refuge for the poorest sectors of the population and the most recently arrived immigrants, owes its character to the colourful markets and covered souk, the marché du soleil, that lend the neighbourhoods a North African atmosphere. Conflicts between groups with irreconcilable interests - minimal rents for minimal housing for the one, a modern centre with a commercial function for the other - are inevitable. The Projet Centre Ville will attract tourists, consumers and users, but mayor Jean Claude Gaudin will also have to explain where that cosmopolitan community, which constitutes the soul of the city centre but which will not be able to withstand the economic pressure, is supposed to turn.

The industrial port the Euroméditerrané operation

The second project, 'Euroméditerranée', confers the new functions of international business centre, residential neighbourhood, cultural and recreational area on the economically languishing waterfront. This gigantic project, which commenced in 1995, is to receive private and public investments totalling three billion euros over a ten-year period. The stated ambition of this Opération d'Intérêt Nationale (OIN, Operation in the National Interest),*6 is to turn Marseilles into the business platform between Europe and the consumers of the Mediterranean region. A 300-hectare area, extending from the docks to beyond the St. Charles station, corresponding to the nineteenth-century urban expansion, is being thoroughly revamped. Is Euromed another of those grands travaux with which the nation's engineers bypass the demands of the residents, the free market and architectural quality? That is not so certain - this project may become the exception in the history of French state-directed urbanism.

All the same, it started as usual. When the national government designated Marseilles for economic reorientation towards the South in 1990, architects were consulted for the redesign of neighbourhoods housing 28,000 people, over thirty per cent of them unemployed. That did not stop Ignasi de Solà-Morales from planning a second Défense of tower blocks to wind its way through the neighbourhoods, and Antoine Grumbach also came up with a model directly inspired by the Parisian business district. Aldo Rossi's analysis, however, anticipated the ultimate Euromed strategy. He was the only one to recognize the expressive force, the heterogeneous character, and specific quality of the spontaneously arisen urban texture, and he warned: 'Marseilles must be tackled in the details ... a grand gesture that unites the neighbourhoods is not a good solution'.*7 But in the event it took a devastating government audit, which in 1998 called Euromed a 'real estate operation without economic strategy', before a new management was appointed with new methods and targets. Since then, attracting international business activity has gone hand in hand with developing culture, tourism, higher education and renovating homes and public areas.

A team of architects, urban designers and economists implements the projects in consultation with the local authority, the port authority and the residents. The Euromed motto is eloquent in this respect: to build a city on the city with the city. Headed by urbanist Gilles Sensini, who emphasizes that 'this working-class city consists of an extraordinary accumulation and diversity of building forms and landscapes', offices, rail and road tunnels, museums, schools and homes are being built on a large scale in impoverished neighbourhoods. Thus Euromed has become in extremis an urban master programme, whose utopian character also generates its dynamism. It is also significant that it was the Mediterranean chaos of Marseilles which managed to halt the French urban development 'rouleau compresseur', obliging it to adopt other methods.

A lot of office space is being obtained by the reuse of industrial ruins. For instance, Euromed chose the 1860s Les Docks building as its office. This dock-side architecture imported from London, more than three hundred metres long and six storeys high, was part of an earlier Parisian initiative to develop Marseilles by way of new a transshipment system. As more companies have taken up residence in Les Docks since the 1990s, this 'horizontal tower block' has been restored bay by bay. The ground floor is now a pedestrian walkway, with bars, shops and pools. Further to the north the Alenc grain silo (1927) has been saved from demolition to be converted into a concert hall. The Rizières Franco-Indochinese warehouse, symbol of colonial history was empty for a long time until a telecom operator moved in. The young architects Anne Lèvy and Nicolas Magnan restored the building and were also responsible for housing the Centre for Art Restoration (CICRP) in one of numerous warehouses of the former Sieta tobacco factory located behind the central station in the Belle de Mai district. This 120,000 square metre complex is the largest inner city industrial ruin in France. Because of their central location, such warehouses would have become a lucrative real estate operation anywhere else in the world, but Euromed - the state - is not the free market. Squatted since 1992 and used as studios, theatres and a circus, the warehouses were run by the Système Friche Théâtre, chaired by Jean Nouvel. About one quarter of the space in the factory has now been definitely allocated to artists and performers, while cultural institutions and audiovisual firms will occupy the rest of the space.

Cultural and recreational functions are planned at the southern point of the Euromed zone, adjacent to the coast. The Parisian Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, for example, will be transferred to the five-centuries-old Saint-Jean fortress. The museum, due to open in 2007, forms part of the projected Cité de la Méditerranée which will consist of a long coastal strip reclaimed from the port containing recreational, cultural and scientific facilities. As a result, the inhabitants of Marseilles-Nord, located on a stretch of coast occupied by industrial docks, will finally acquire an opening to the sea. The implementation of this programme will be awarded to the winner of a contest between Yves Lion, Bernard Tschumi and Claude Vasconi. At this point the motorway, currently a Meccano-like structure suspended above the city, will go underground into two expensive tunnels. The writer Jean-Claude Izzo, who died last year, condemned the demolition of these viaducts, which offer powerful panoramas of the city: 'Marseilles is a port with a "dirty" history, but politicians dream of a "clean" city...'.

To improve the link between the waterfront and the city, the Haussmannian Rue de République, which cuts through the urban tissue like an alien body, will be renovated. Thousands of families were evacuated in 1860 for the construction of this 'Parisian' street. Nowhere was the Haussmannian ideology of the straight line and the perfect perspective, derived from the academic theory of painting, so at odds with its surroundings as in this Mediterranean chaos. Now this shadowless artery is to be transformed by means of the renovation of the largely empty homes, the planting of trees and the construction of a tram line.

The ultimate aim of the project is the creation of tens of thousands of jobs plus a million square metres of office space, public services and homes. For a long time it was the port that guaranteed the prosperity of Marseilles, and it is not for nothing that Euroméditerranée chose this location again: the sea and the port still organize the city and determine its look - it may not guarantee the success of an economic renaissance, but it has already brought a good deal of vitality to what were isolated and rundown neighbourhoods.

Northern districts: GPV

But the future of the agglomeration as a coherent urban and social space will depend less on Euromed and much more on the Grand Projet pour la Ville (GPV).*9 The GPV field of operations covers no less than fifty square kilometres in the northern district where 220,000 people live. This docklands area north of the Euromed project and the hills crammed with flats in the northeast are the outcome of spontaneous urbanization and ad hoc construction. Apartment complexes, warehouses, restaurants, factories stand alongside dilapidated villas, hypermarkets, shunting yards, village centres and offices. It is an area whose urban and social character is capable of upsetting many urban development and sociological certainties. The Grand Projet, a joint venture with several partners, including local, regional and national government, is an urgent urban social and economic catch-up exercise aimed at reducing the 'social fracture' between the poor north and the rich south. The director of the project, Roger Dechaux: 'Marseilles cannot do without these neighbourhoods because this is where the young population lives that it needs. The Grand Projet pour la Ville is no mere local cleaning-up programme; the development of the entire region is riding on its success'. These quartiers nords are not suburbs; some of them are situated at walking distance from the city centre. A quarter of the city population lives there, much of it below the poverty line. Françoise Verna, a newspaper journalist with La Marseillaise: 'A district like Bassens has 75 per cent unemployment. People live there in dilapidated postwar emergency housing. Illiteracy and other problems are tackled by the residents themselves; there is a social do-it-yourself mentality that has a unique, century-long tradition in these multi-ethnic neighbourhoods with a dense network of associations'.

Typical of many locations, the old village centre of Saint Mauront was cut in two by the construction of the A7 motorway in 1980. Unimaginably neglected flats, with names that ring hollow today, like Maison Blanche or Belle Vue, determine the landscape. They are in the hands of private 'sleep merchants' who make money out of these slums by renting them out to immigrants. Hitherto the political will to intervene here has always been lacking but the Grand Projet is prepared to declare the defaulting owners bankrupt and to renovate the flats where possible. The credibility of the GPV as an energetic and reliable urban player obviously depends on that promise to intervene in complexes like Belle Vue.

When the population of Marseilles doubled in the post-war decades, the empty space between the villages was filled in at breakneck speed, intersected by motorways and railway lines, infrastructures which, since they have no access or exit lanes or stations, also haughtily ignore the new residential areas they divided. The project aims to make the old village centres sub-centres for public services and commercial centres again, thereby making good use of a historical network to organize the straggling, more modern chaos. These districts will be reconnected to the rest of the agglomeration by linking them to the existing road and rail network and by setting up public transport.

An investment that will pay for itself, predicts Roger Dechaux: 'The fortunate paradox of this area is that, besides a concentration of bottlenecks, it also has an enormous economic and social potential'. This 'integrative strategy' of the GPV must provide for more diversity by attracting new categories of residents to a more varied range of housing, by developing new economic activities in the neighbourhoods. Because of the strategic location of North Marseilles within the agglomeration, and because a lot of inexpensive land is available there, many companies are setting up shop there. This has been made especially attractive by the establishment of a tax-free zone (Zone Franche Urbaine), which has resulted in a spectacular increase in local jobs. The purely urban development interventions are now concentrated on a number of urgent locations, such as the village of Estaque, where the last slums of the city are situated.

The area is traditionally characterized by a combination of housing and work functions. The Arnavaux industrial site which is to be developed by the Grand Projet was always the biggest industrial zone in a city where many firms are still located in residential neighbourhoods. Architect Gorrine Vezzoni was asked to give the area a more distinctive character. Using tall, rocket-like sculptures, which by night indicate the route through the vast sea of warehouses like beacons, she has given the area clearly demarcated borders within the residential neighbourhoods. The design of the Plan d'Aou plateau illustrates the mixed method of the Grand Projet: the construction of the enormous Grand Littoral shopping centre was only accepted by the neighbourhood because the jobs went to the locals. This was accompanied by the construction of the Parc du Belvédère de Séon, the first park in North Marseilles.

The Grand Projet differs from the Euromed project, which mainly creates jobs for those with a high level of education, because it first and foremost enables the local population to benefit from the economic activity created in the zone. This broad approach to urbanism, economics and social action bears a strong resemblance to previously heard calls for more state intervention: recommendations such as those contained in Richard Rogers' Towards an Urban Renaissance have been applied in Marseilles for years. Besides 'introducing new activities and residential groups', the GPV approach is based on recognition and acceptance of an urban heritage. In a vulnerable zone that is a stranger to urban planning, academic principles of organization or, even worse, the desire to make grand architectural gestures, are irrevocably doomed to failure.

Architectural representation

That is no superfluous observation, given the French premier's recently announced plan to wipe blocks of flats from the landscape with dynamite.*10 Electoral rhetoric aimed at those who will never live in these neighbourhoods, no doubt, but behind the dream of blowing up urban heritage there clearly lies the will to give the architectural representation of poverty short shrift.

Marseilles: the sum of 'architectural representations' of groups that coexist within a single narrow space. That possibility of representation, territorial identity, makes the city what it is: a diverse, chaotic, human and intensely livable landscape. It is the result of a sort of urban expressionism that also offers a realistic picture of what a multi-cultural, multi-religious community can and cannot be. The numerous ethnic groups live together here in anything but idyllic harmony. They share common space. The city is a place of 'frottement', of friction, contact, where people only get to know the 'other' because the other cannot be avoided. This inner city contact is guaranteed because Marseilles is not a place which excludes - unlike the luxury ghetto of Paris and its suburbs - but a city that includes: all urban, social and ethnic forms are incorporated here tel quel.

But there is also an ambition that transcends the success of what has been achieved on a small scale in Marseilles, as an extrapolation of its model: the ambition to be a bridge, an economic and cultural interface between Europe and its Mediterranean continuum. Whether this dream can be realized or not depends on what kind of place Europe is going to become: a place that excludes and banishes to the periphery, or one of inclusion and interchange. It is a cultural choice and it seems to have been made already. As a 'secure fortress', focused on its continental centre of gravity, Europe is beginning to look like a gigantic 'blown-up Switzerland' in every respect. An alternative to segregation is the kind of interpenetration of rich and poor, periphery and centre, north and south, that can be seen on a small scale in Marseilles. What might 'suburbs' the size of countries, 'ghettos' the size of half a continent, look like? That too is a simple mental operation of extrapolation.

Notes
*1. For 150 years Marseilles depended on immigration for its population growth. See Andre Donzel, l'Experience de la cité, Anthropos, 1998, pp. 7-9.
*2. La Pensée de Midi, Actes Sud, published in Marseilles, follows developments in the Mediterranean, regarded as a homogeneous, indivisible cultural entity.
*3. Marseille 2015, un projet pour Marseille à l’échelle européenne: Schéma de Cohérence, November 1997, Agam/Ville de Marseilles, 128 pp.
*4. Such as OPAH (Opération Programmée d'Amélioration de 1'Habitat), which renovates rented property by providing the owners with a subsidy, DUP (Déclaration d'utilité publique), which defines work to be carried out and authorizes expropriation when renovation is not carried out, or PRI (Périmètre de Restauration Immobilière), which defines a zone within which renovation or demolition can be made compulsory.
*5. ZPPAUP (Zone de Protection du Patrimoine Architectural, Urbain et Paysager) enables the restoration of neighbourhoods as urban heritage.
*6. The best known of the three such operations that France has had so far is La Défense.
*7. Marseille Euroméditerannée, un nouvel imaginaire de ville, Editions Villes et Territoires, Paris, 1994, p. 18.
*8. The new name of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, that has been waiting in the Bois de Boulogne for its first visitor for years.
*9. GPVs are operative in fifty neighbourhoods in France. The GPV is the continuation of the Grand Projet Urbain (GPU) which was tested in Marseilles and eleven other locations in 1994. See GPV - les grands projets de la ville, Editions DIV, Paris, December 2000.
*10. Plan announced during the Comité Interministerial des Villes (CIV) of 1 October 2001. It aims to 'clear up' 15,000 homes a year. Operations of this kind demonstrated the negative consequences for the residents concerned (such as the removal of a physical 'aide-memoire' for the reconstruction of their own history).


Euroméditerranée has introduced a 'selection by competition' system in Marseilles and generated a lot of building activity. Does this mean that an 'architectural school' has emerged in the city of Le Corbusier's Cité radieuse and William Alsop's Hotel Départemental? The main thing uniting graduates of the local Academie Lumigny is urban commitment - a logical reaction to a complex urban and social environment. Architects adopt unequivocal positions. Light years away from the interchangeable papier glace projects aimed at the ever glossier happy-few magazines, three architectural practices demand a concrete role within the 'cité': Corinne Vezzoni, Mathieu Poitevin & Pascal Raynaud and Rémy Marciano.

Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône
Architect: Corinne Vezzoni
Location: Marseilles harbour zone, Euroméditerranée project
Cost: 30 million euros
Area: 28,000 m2

'This building is a step in the direction of a different future for the harbour. I wanted to make it as tall and compact as possible so that it signals the entrance to the city, affirms its identity. It has two faces: a hard, closed one and a soft, open side, just like the location. The hermetic, cast-concrete archive building shields the library, which is open towards the neighbourhood, from wind, sun and motorway.' Corinne Vezzoni

Fifteen metres from the traffic racing past on the motorway, Corinne Vezzoni was responsible for designing a dual programme consisting of municipal archives and a library, the first 'cultural' building in the Euroméditerranée zone. Two contradictory functions in one volume: conservation versus consultation. The archives are protected inside a hermetically sealed round concrete 'shell' located inside the transparent, rectangular volume of the seven-storey library. The bright Mediterranean light is filtered through a double glass skin with a white synthetic textile core. By telescoping the two functions, Vezzoni was able to leave half the site free for a public reading garden in a neighbourhood devoid of greenery. The new building and a monumental grain silo together form a broad portal to the harbour zone, between which the two loops of the A55 wind in and out of the city.

Colleges Renoir & Rostand
Architects: Mathieu Poitevin & Pascal Raynaud (ART'M Architecture)
Location: Malpasse, North Marseilles, G.P.V. zone
Cost: 10.35 million euros
Area: 13,000m2
Completion: 1998

'We don't make 'object' buildings but react to the reality of a strong landscape with interlocking forms. Urban development in Marseilles is characterized by accumulation, sedimentation, recycling. And a soft, organic, almost ephemeral form of architecture. Our schools bear that out, we simply used what was already there.' Pascal Raynaud

On a desolate site, in a hollow overlooked by hill-top apartment blocks, exposed to the mistral and the sun, and right below the elongated Malpassé apartment block, Pascal Raynaud and Mathieu Poitevin built two high schools with living quarters for the teachers. They responded to the reality of dilapidated modernist apartment buildings with two parallel modernist blocks on pilotis. The bamboo canes placed in front of the elevation protect it from the mineral-laden air, and impart rhythm to the sunburnt facades. The yellow-orange concrete wall, saturated with metal oxides, is an echo of the traditional stone walls (banceaus) that are a feature of the surrounding countryside. It links the two schools, forming a light-hearted street where pupils can meet one another. A building strong enough to heal a wounded location, to suddenly reveal the raw beauty of the reddish-brown facade of the apartment block further up the hill. No false promises, no provocation, no cynicism. Sincerity - the determination to be reconciled with a reality that can no longer be denied.

Gymnase Ruffi
Architect: Rémy Marciano
Consultant: ART'M Architecture (Poitevin & Raynaud)
Marseilles Harbour zone, Euroméditerannée project
Cost: 1.5 million euros
Area: 1394m2
Completion: 2001

'Architecture is a scenario for the stories that residents experience around and inside a building. Marseilles has come up with its own architecture, the architectural equivalent of visual art's 'Art Brut'. This sports hall speaks of the harbour's working-class past and is simultaneously an indictment of the 'Provencal regionalism' that afflicts our architecture and falsifies our history.' Rémy Marciano

In the harbour, beside a church and between apartment buildings and industrial hangars, stands 'Gymnase Ruffi', a municipal sports hall designed as a defence of values by Rémy Marciano. It was the first Euroméditerranée project building to be completed. Leaning against imperforate walls of concrete panels all varnished differently, are three interlocking plexiglas volumes. Already looking like a derelict factory, the building pays tribute to the industrial past of its harbour location, to the tradition of hastily erected workshops of corrugated plate and concrete. At night the roof brings illumination to the dark neighbourhood. Marciano's project has been comprehensively criticized. Local politicians are currently agitating for the outer walls to be rendered in pink crépi.

© Steven Wassenaar