Introduction Algiers is the capital and largest city of Algeria. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea and in the north-central portion of Algeria.
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 . • It became the site of a multitude of colonial experiments, ranging over the course of 132 years. • Algiers is a complex and confused city that is experiencing constant transformations at the administrative, political, social and economic levels.
Historic development •
The settlement was founded by the Arab Zirid dynasty in the 10 century and named al-Jaza'ir ("the islands") in reference to the islands facing the waterfront.
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The urban structure of Algiers, dominated by its short, crooked neighborhood streets, is a hallmark of the "Islamic city"—a problematic construction by European
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historians. Janet Abu-Lughod, the most convincing critic of this concept, has argued, nevertheless, that Islam shaped social, political, and legal institutions, and through them, the cities. She pointed out that gender segregation was the most important issue, and by encouraging it, Islam structured the urban space and divided places and functions.
• To put it schematically, in the "traditional Islamic city," public spaces, hence s treets, belonged to men, and domestic spaces to women.
The development of algiers has 2 phases of its urban growth and tranformation, the colonial period (1830-1962) and the post colonial period (1962 to present day). Within the broader colonial urban history of Algiers, five distinct periods may be identified: (a) 1830–1840: military planning (b) 1840–1880: the birth of the European city (c) 1880–1914: extramural expansion and urban growth (d) 1914–1945: transformation between the two world wars and rural migration (e) 1945–1962: housing shortage and bidonvilles
1830-1840 Military Planning • Use of pre-colonial structures for accommodation and logistical purposes . • The troops occupied the Casbah, forts, batteries, and many houses near the ramparts as well as several mosques. Outside the walls, the funduks (inns and warehouses) and palaces were converted into military bases. • As a military city, Algiers needed: -wide roads and large squares for the rapid circulation of troops. -road construction within the walled city. • The three main pre-colonial streets of Bab Azzoun, Bab el Oued and Rue Bab el Ghazira (renamed Rue de la Marine) were widened. • The transformed streets were lined with three storey-arcaded buildings, built for the new European immigrants.
• The term casbah refers to the ancient core of Algiers, the triangular-shaped town carved into the hills facing the Mediterranean. • 1- casbah • 2- marine quarter The road connecting Bab el-Oued to Bab Azzoun divided Algiers into two zones, in accordance with André Raymond's notion of "public" and "private" cities: the upper (private) city, called al-Gabal or "the mountain," and the lower (public) city, called alWata or "the plains."The lower part developed as an administrative, military, and commercial quarter
(1) Boulevard Gambetta (2) Boulevard de la Victoire (3) Boulevard Vallée,
(4) Rues Randon and Marengo (5) Rue Bab el-Oued (6) Rue d'Orléans (7) Rue de la Marine (8)Place du Gouvernement It is carved by demolishing a small mosque and a series of Commercial structures. regular street network with two main arteries which connects 7 and 5
(9) Place de Chartres (10) Rue Bab Azzoun (11) Rue de Chartres (12) Rue de la Lyre.
Place du Gouvernement, c. 1835
Al-Jadid Mosque In the same period, a large square, Place d’Armes (initially called Place Royale then Place du Gouvernement), was created at the meeting point of the three streets (Rue Bab Azzoun, Rue Bab el Oued and Rue de la Marine).
The Place du Gouvernement, -one side of which opened to the sea, was erected as the focal point of the whole spatial organization of the new square. -A rectangular shape and was framed by threestorey, arcaded buildings. -It reflected urban design principles developed in France during the eighteenth century for the planning of the Places Royales: a square connecting long axes and so giving a sense of space and openness.
•By 1839, 15,000 Europeans (French, Italians, Spanish and Maltese) were concentrated in the lower part of the city. •Between 1830 and 1840, 20,000 Algerians left the city and were replaced by the same number of Europeans. •The newcomers occupied traditional houses,houses were destroyed and replaced by blocks of housing. •Plot after plot and block after block, a system of secondary streets was created. •The façades, widely opened onto the streets, and the extension of dead-end streets to serve and link the blocks. •A new system based on continuity and the opening of streets interrupted by open spaces was superimposed.
Rue Bab Azzoun
The enlargement of Bab Azzoun, Bab elOued, and Marine streets did not involve such drastic demolitions. Adhering to preexisting patterns, they followed an irregular route but were widened to 8 meters to allow for two carriages to pass .
1840-1880: Birth of European City • In 1840 the process of development of the city began with the creation of a new urban fabric that was no longer superimposed or reclaimed from the preexisting urban fabric. • In 1841, the colonial administration established a development plan to allow the expansion of the city. •To accommodate the new European city, the construction of new fortifications started in 1841 and was completed by 1848.
• By 1849, the old Turkish fortifications were ‘replaced by new ones, enclosing an area three times larger than the one occupied by the old town’. • In 1850, the creation of the Place Bresson (today Port Said Square) on the site of two small old squares, Place de Garamantes and Place de Bourneau, bridged the physical gap between the old city and the new European quarter.
•In the south of the medina, the less sloping sites along the coast were reserved for the army. Higher up, a new residential and administrative quarter, the Quartier d’Isly, developed. Two unequal urban structures separated by a large artery, the Rue d’Isly, characterized the physiognomy of the new quarter: (a) A low and large part in which streets crossed each other at right angles round a square, the Place d’Isly; (b) Beyond the Rue d’Isly, streets were sinuous bending into a broken slope. •The medina of Algiers was clearly separated into two distinct parts by the Rue Bab Azzoun, the Place du Gouvernement and the Rue Bab el Oued. •The first part consisted of : Governor’s Palace, courthouse, theatre and various public buildings. The quarter formed by the Place du Gouvernement, the Rue Bab el Oued and the coast, had a more regular pattern than the rest of the old city. •The second part: the slopped district, El Djabel (mountain), where the indigenous residential quarters terraced up to the citadel.
Plan by Charles Delaroche, 1848 which doubled the size of Algiers by new fortifications and a modern settlement with wide arteries and squares in the European quarter
•The Boulevard Front de Mer, later called de la Republique, was lined with buildings characterized by regular façades with arcades at the ground floor and, above, three or four storeys with French windows opening onto continuous balconies. The horizontal cutting of the façades on the Boulevard de la Republique emphasized the monumentality of the architectural composition, reflecting homeland trends. Most significant was the project of Chausseriau designed in 1858. Chausseriau’s ideal of the new city was based upon hygiene, comfort and aesthetic. To achieve his aims, he proposed a city plan for 60,000 inhabitants with large axes, numerous gardens, fountains and squares. Medium-rise buildings provided with spacious galleries framed the streets and open spaces.
Plan of Cité Bugeaud, Bab el-Oued Quarter, c. 1845.
Several projects in the 1850s called for the extension of Algiers outside its fortifications toward the south. Chassériau's "Napoléonville" from 1858 proposed to sever the European settlement completely from the Muslim town and to settle sixty thousand Europeans in twostory houses filling an orthogonal grid in Mustafa
Charles-Fréderick Chassériau, plau for Napoléonville, 1858.
1880-1914: Extramural expansion and Urban growth • In 1881, the population of Algiers was distributed as follows: 46,482 inhabitants in the old city; 6,061 in Bab el Oued; 13,050 in the Quartier d’Isly, and 12,279 in Mustapha. • The development of the city originally took place towards the zone situated south of the old core, rather than the northern part where Bab el Oued quarter was of • The main focus was the creation of the commercial centre of Algiers. The limited importance. development of the port and the construction of the railway station, harbour
and warehouses.
• The image of the city changed. Gradually, old buildings with plain façades were pulled down and replaced by new ones incorporating balconies and bowwindows. • The main hindrance, fortifications and military zones, which stood in the way of the physical integration of the intramural city and the new quarters, were finally removed Between 1880 and 1914 the city burgeoned, stretching southwards along the sea.
1914–1945: Transformations between the Two World Wars and Rural Migration By beginning of the 12th century, Algiers’ urban structure was almost in its final form, characterized by a sharp dichotomy between the medina and the new European quarters. In 1930 , a Plan d’Urbanisme (general development plan) for any city of more than 10,000 inhabitants was formed. The first Plans d’Urbanismes showed a transition from the alignment planning of the nineteenth century to the zoning of the twentieth century. Two major phenomena characterized the period preceding the Second World War: (a) The appearance of ‘modern’ architecture in Algiers. (b) (b) The emergence of the first social housing in Algeria.
LE CORBUSIER PLANS(1930)
In his proposals, known as the Plan Obus, Le Corbusier conceived four main elements ‘orchestrated into a sculptural whole’; (a) A monumental skyscraper for a new business centre intended to regulate the scale of the city; (b) A structure of concave and convex apartment buildings, on the model of l’Unite d’Habitation to be built for the middle class; (c) An elevated roadway running north-south above the medina; (d) A serpentine viaduct for working classes, running along the bay, and providing walkways; and (e) Shops. Sketches of skyscrapers indicate the cities along the axis, proposing to unify the greater France through a new architecture and urbanism
Le Corbusier's Obus A plan, 1932
Curvilinear viaduct along the waterfront connected husseindey to st. Eugène Master plan ignored the existing city by and large and superimposed a new system. A curvilinear viaduct along the waterfront connected Hussein-Dey to St. Eugène, emphasizing the linear development of the city and reinterpreting the corniche in the Prost plan
REDEVELOPMENT OF QUARTIER DE LA MARINE The Marine Quarter, entirely demolished and transformed into a cité d'affaires , reflects a conceptual similarity to zone A of the Prost plan. Yet the scale is radically different, as Le Corbusier's scheme is dominated by high-rises. The housing blocks of Fortl'Empereur on the hills, intended for the middle and upper classes, can be seen as the equivalent to the zoning of the heights of Mustafa for upper-class residences by Prost and his colleagues. The last major element of the plan, the elevated highway that connected the housing on the hills of Fort-l'Empereur with the business center in the Marine Quarter, addressed the much-debated problem of linking the coast to the heights—a problem that Prost and his colleagues had attempted to resolve by means of underground transportation.
Rooftops of the Casbah Sketch by Charles Brouty, 1933
• The rooftops of the casbah functioned as an alternative public realm that extended over the entire city. • It is used visit other homes without having to use the streets. • In contrast to the interiorized court and the relatively contrived rooms, the rooftops opened up to the city, to the sea, to the world
Nineteenth-century view of Algiers from the sea
When the French occupied Algiers in 1830, they found a dense, fortified town, nestled against steep green hills facing the Mediterranean
• The city was crowded with monuments and public buildings, criss-crossed by an efficient street network, well maintained, and cosmopolitan. • However, the urban image owed its uniqueness and integrity to the residences, collectively an impressive mass of white, cubical structures that had evolved incrementally.
Aerial view of the arcades and the Boulevar d de l'ImpĂŠratrice, 1933. the boulevard
a series of high arches recalling a bridge
ramps
harbor level
changing scale of the arches supporting the ramps
Le Corbusier, project for Algiers, photomontage, 1933
Residential areas on the hills
Bridge over the casbah
The business center
Marine Quarter formed a bridge over the casbah, transforming the sanitary greenbelt into an air band and reversing the horizontality of the former into a vertical element
Le Corbusier, project for Algiers, photomontage, 1933
Residential areas on the hills
Bridge over the casbah
The business center
Marine Quarter formed a bridge over the casbah, transforming the sanitary greenbelt into an air band and reversing the horizontality of the former into a vertical element
1945-1962: Housing Shortage and Bidonvilles •
The year 1954 was a key date in the history of Algiers. An earthquake hit Orleanville (today Chelef) destroying the city, ironically acting as a catalyst for a new approach just as had the bombing in Europe. • The ‘population explosion’ was chiefly the result of massive migration from the countryside, strongly felt after the war. The first newcomers settled in the medina, ‘filling the funduks and wakalas (dormitories for itinerant merchants and travellers in the early days) and then piling up in the existing structures’. • Squatter settlements, which 12 developed primarily on the periphery of the big cities and in some cases reached the heart of modern quarters, were known as bidonvilles (shantytowns). • The first concerned the construction of new quarters for Europeans resembling the big housing estates in the outskirts of French cities, though the green spaces and the different facilities originally planned were never realized. • The second operation was associated with the creation of cités de recasement for Algerians, in which even minimal facilities required were not conceived – no asphalt for roads and footways, no facing for façades and an area of just 30 to 35 m2 for any dwelling.
The Squatter House
The squatter house was the response of new immigrants from the countryside to the housing shortage in urban centers. As such it displayed not only the economic, but also the socio-cultural realities of these populations in flux. The squatter house was qualified by Roland Simounet as a "traditional" house type with valuable lessons for architects and planners in the early 1950s—two decades before the publication of John Turner's influential book Housing by People(London, 1976), based on the same premise. The inclusion of squatter settlements into the French discourse on housing has a history that goes back to the 1930s, to the first bidonvilles in Algiers. . In Algiers 41.5 percent of the native population lived in squatter settlements. The residents of the bidonvilles had ceased to belong to rural society, but they were not integrated into the urban realm either.
Tony Socard, plan for the Marine Quarter, 1935
Al-Jadid mosque institutional complex Al-Kabir mosques
Socard's plan aimed to destroy the quarter entirely with the exception of the two historic mosques; their asymmetrical relationship, which betrayed the essence of Beaux-Arts urban design, would be "corrected" with landscaping
area covered in the 1948 regional plan.
Schematic plan showing the area occupied by Algiers in 1930.
simple confort quarter, VIEW OF MARKET SQUARE, 1957
center is planted with palm trees Rectangular space low brick arcade
cross-vaulted units
Spatial development of Algiers during the colonial period: 1830-1962
Street view in upper casbah -Narrow, irregular, often with dead ends, -accommodated the introverted lifestyle -the use of gates to close off a neighborhood in the evenings to ensure its safety
French quarters
casbah
Aerial view from 1935, showing the juncture of the casbah (on the right) and the French quarters (on the left).
VIEW OF ALGIERS CENTRE