Léopold Lambert – Lisbon on October 26, 2017
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The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is currently organizing a design competition for architecture students in the United States and Canada in partnership of the steel lobby represented here by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). As usual, in this kind of partnerships, the lobby’s product does not solely constitute the main element that is required to be used in the designed projects, it is also ‘generously’ promoted by the ACSA in a paragraph entitled “Advantages of Steel” that ratifies the ambiguity between the neutrality they are expected to manifest in a brief not explicitly characterized as an ad space and the sponsorship of a material lobby. Although there would be a lot to write about these practices, the subject of this article is elsewhere.

The Opportunity: challenges architecture students to create a more humanitarian design of a Detention Center by emphasizing family and community rather than isolation. Steel offers great benefits in this endeavor, as it allows for longer spans and more creative light filled spaces.

These two lines of brief are then followed by an online page describing the specifics of the competition. The first sentence is eloquent: “The Steel Competition seeks to understand the potential of an architecture of alterity by positioning a third-space between difference and the same by redefining ICE, or an Immigration and Custom Enforcement Facility to create a more Humanitarian Design of a Detention Center” (my emphasis). Language is important and the idea of creating a position that would neither be “different” or “the same” appears as a symptom of what Orwell calls “newspeak” in 1984 (1949): the encompassing of all truth discourses in one sentence to deactivate language’s signification and enforce the status quo.

When one reads further, the language of humanitarism begins to appear. We learn that 65.3 millions of people are currently displaced worldwide, and that “according to the UNHCR statistics, one person for every 113 is currently displaced from their communities because of conflict, resulting in the largest number of asylum-seekers looking for a better, safer life than ever recorded in history.” The next sentence then set the tone: “For the asylum-seeker or immigrant, the in-between grey area is where the question is being addressed: does this person or family have jurisdiction to be on another countries soil?” Besides the inaccurate use of the term “jurisdiction” here (perhaps it was decided that using the word “rights” would have mobilized an imaginary of social struggles that would have not served the brief), we understand that despite the tragic reality that the figures just described, the hospitality of displaced people in countries that appear in the brief as independent in the reasons that triggered these displacements cannot be implemented, hence the need for the existence of detention centers. The last sentence of the brief finishes to crystallize the newspeak call for projects: “How can we look at the design of a Detention Center—a nonplace that exists between immigrant and citizenship, or difference and the same—as a way to architecturally humanize displacement?”

It is important to understand that the extreme ambiguity of language here (“a nonplace […] between […] difference and the same,” “architecturally humanize displacement”) is less due to the poor writing skills of the brief’s authors and much more about the way the packaging of the information is made to erase the complicity of architects with the program itself and made them feel instead as humanitarian workers, whose role is not to question the structure in which they operate, but rather propose a punctual help to those who experience its violence. The terms of structure should however invite us to think otherwise, as this term belongs to the lexical field known of architects. However, if we do not limit the definition of architects to the narrow understanding of a diploma-sanctioned profession, but rather extend it to all actors whose technical expertise in terms of space organization is mobilized to materialize the spatial order we call a building, we can see how political programs of this kind could not be implemented (durably) without their contribution.

Architects’ general capacity for outrage is a somehow laudable one, and we’ve seen it when the American Institute of Architects (AIA) only waited a few hours after the current US President’s election to declare its will to work in concert with his administration (see past article), or when architects were consulted to build the rest (many seem to forget that a third of it already exists!) of the militarized border wall between the US and Mexico; yet, the formulation of the outrage is at least as important than the outrage itself. Too often, this formulation occupies the space Western ideology leaves on purpose to its own critique in order to gain more legitimacy, and therefore ultimately reinforces that against what it claims to be fighting. As always when it comes to the architects’ contribution to carceral facilities, the question should be less about whether or not they should accept such commissions than to examine the ways through which architecture is almost always exclusively materializing the social order in which the carceral condition is not simply a part but also an unsurpassable dimension.

But this competition does not just allow us to wonder about architects’ responsibility in the enforcement of this social order; it also inadvertently allows us to ponder on what is humanitarianism. The very notion of “humanitarian Detention Center” that constitutes the explicit program of this competition could indeed appear to many as a contradiction in itself, a detention center being, by definition, at odds with the notion of humanitarianism. I however would like to insist that not only there is no contradiction contained in the association of these terms, but that the latter even expresses the core of Western militarized humanism. Humanitarianism does not consists in a political struggle against the violence of its structures. Rather, it claims to embody an apolitical position that mitigate this violence when, in fact, it makes this violence disappear from regimes of visibility, legitimizes it, and ultimately reinforces these structures to which it is fully part of. What these considerations for architects and humanitarians only leave as tenable option, is their contribution to the dismantlement of the social order and its violence that they materialize. In this regard, solidarity with political movements that aim at abolishing all forms of carceral institutions constitutes a good start.

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Léopold Lambert – Rotterdam on November 3, 2017

The competition organized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) sponsored by the steel lobby that proposed to architecture students to design a “humanitarian detention center” as described in the previous post of this blog has been cancelled a couple of days ago. Although we live in times when each victory should be acknowledged and somehow celebrated, those of us who voiced their outrage should not rest on the satisfying comfort of a very minor achievement considering the ubiquity of the policing and carceral system to which architects fully contribute and spatially materialize. This text is however not another of my many semi-abstract essays about architecture’s violence but, rather, an emotional (tearful, really) call to mobilize against a much more embodied situation than one of a fictitious architecture competition. This morning, I indeed receive a message from Imran Mohammad, a 23-year old contributor to the magazine, who has been in detention in the Australian detention center on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for the last four years, after having fled the genocide of Rohingya by the Myanmar army and having been detained in Indonesia for two years. Following the current dire situation of the camp, I had asked him (stupidly not fathoming the gravity of the situation) how were things there. I reproduce his poignant response here:

Hi dear Leopold,
I have not moved to the new facilities yet, I am still with the others in the old original centre. Everything is horrifying here, it is a drastic situation. We have no power, no water and no food. I don’t check my phone all the time, it is extremely hard to recharge as there are only a few solar chargers in the centre. 
Lots of love.
Imran

One of the two Australian centers on foreign soil (the other one being on Nauru. cf. Alison Mountz, “Australia’s Enforcement Archipelago” in The Funambulist 9 Islands), the Manus camp had been ruled in April 2016 by the Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court as breaching the constitution’s right to personal liberty and was therefore illegal and should be closed. A legal settlement “was reached on the provision that the Australian government denied any and all liability for the mistreatment and false imprisonment of people on Manus Island” (B. Doherty & C. Wahlquist, June 2017).

The definitive closure of the camp occurred this Wednesday (November 1, 2017), when the Australian security guards left the premises, and that water, food and electricity supplies were cut off. The former detainees were ‘offered’ by the Australian authorities to relocate to another facility in Lorengau, Manus’ main town. 600 refugees however refused to do so (see the powerful video of their pledge to stay in the camp until being offered dignified and safe conditions of life), emphasizing the absence of any guarantee of security to protect them against the attacks of some of the locals, as it has happened in the past (including from the Papua New Guinea armed forces themselves who shot at the camp in April 2017), and underlining the absolute denial of rights they are experiencing. They have consequently appropriated the space of the camp in a radical inversion of architecture’s violence, from the highest architectural crime that containment and incarceration constitute to the use of the same walls to defend themselves against potential attackers. We should however not romanticize this appropriation: the situation, described as “horrifying” by Imran, is the only tenable option in the drastically limited agency given to refugees, while calling for a dignifying relocation to a “safe society.” The digging of a well and toilets, the collect of water in empty trash containers and of tree fruits for food, or the use of solar cells to charge cell phones to keep communication outside of the camp and the island, are not to be commented as the manifestation of ingenuity or creativity that certain people patronizingly describe in their fascination for self-constructed or appropriated neighborhoods around the world: they constitute instead the mere efforts for survival against state violence, be it implemented through border control, policing, incarceration, or the abandonment of people in a place of extreme vulnerability after forcefully displacing them there.

The feeling of utter powerlessness regarding the fate of the Manus survivors experienced 14,000 kilometers from them should not blind us from European and American responsibility on the matter. The drastic anti-immigration policies implemented by the Australian State, whose violence is only equated by the ones deployed on Aborigene lives, were not created in a vacuum. They emerge from the structures of European settler colonialism, both in its management of populations and borders, and although the detention camps of Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island implement particularly extreme and deadly conditions in the enforcement of these policies due to their remote situations, the global political programs of border militarization and incarceration are what is at stake here. As for the very reasons that leave very little choice to people but to flee from the places where they live, they are often direct or indirect consequences to past and recent histories of European and American colonialism and imperialism. There is therefore a crucial need to participate to the political struggle against the racialized inequality regarding rights to movement and safety in general, and to formulate in particular an unequivocal statement of solidarity with Manus refugees and the activist support networks in Australia (and perhaps in Papua New Guinea) organized to support them and amplify their voice.

I would like to thank another contributor to The Funambulist, Michelle Bui, who gathers and propagates information and actions in relation to Manus, and who introduced me to Imran. For much more incarnated account on the situation, you can read the texts written daily by Behrouz Boochani for The Guardian or other texts written by refugees themselves, like Imran or Shamindan Kanapadhi.

The post The Struggle of the Left-to-Die Refugees in the Detention Camp of Manus Island appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 10, 2017
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The New York Times’ radical reasonableness offers us a clear vision of the ways one can continuously adapt its position to the political context as to be in position of respectful negotiation with the status quo. On Tuesday (November 8, 2017), the newspaper published an article entitled “Eight Ways to Build a Border Wall” that presents the eight prototypes recently built on the southern United States national border which mark the beginning of the construction promised by the current president. The article unapologetically associates veneer drone footage to comparative shots of the prototypes with titles such as “Concrete or No Concrete,” “Opaque or Transparent,” or “Tube or No Tube?” that we would more eagerly associate with a kitchen-customizing multiple-choice form on a home improvement website, than with a serious examination of the political instrumentalization of architecture’s violence. In presenting a wall project it opposed during the 2016 presidential campaign in the sensational form of a commercial brochure with which US citizens are invited to shop, the NYT brings a tremendous legitimacy to this political project. Rather than examining the very ideological and societal axioms of such a project or insisting on the shattering fact that 10,000 people died attempting to cross this border (killed by heat stroke, dehydration, or by US militias), this article instead analyzes exclusively the “how” of the Wall in the usual adjustment to the new status quo.

The NYT is, of course, not the only newspaper in the world that holds such a position of continuous readjustment to what they like to think as “the center.” Europe itself counts many equivalents that contributed to the political shift that has seen left-wing political parties of these last twenty years ponder how to solve the “immigration problem,” a question drafted and imposed by right-wing movements that succeeded to impose their invariable axiom — “there is an immigration problem” — without being challenged in its core. In a state like the US, built on settler colonialism and that currently provides very little in terms of welfare for the bodies present on its territory, we can be candidly surprised that such a political axiom would be so ubiquitously accepted. And yet, the current US president has been elected after having particularly pushed forward one of the most literalist aspects of his program, which happens to be an architectural project: the materialization and militarization of a line on a map (a concept inherent to the settler colonial politics practiced on both sides of it) that represents a border with the state of Mexico fixed in this location only since 1884. Something that was rarely mentioned during the 2016 US presidential campaign was that the wall that would militarize the border was not a new idea and already existed over 1,000 kilometers of border after the Georges W. Bush administration undertook its construction in 2006.

Back then, the NYT had proposed to thirteen architects to take part in a “reflection” on the design of this wall reported under the name “A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs” (in 2008, I had already written about it in an article entitled admittedly-not-so-subtly “How Far Can the Bullshit Go?”). Some architecture offices had declined the offer because “they felt it was purely a political issue,” but others, such as renowned Californian architect, Eric Owen Moss, had answered the call and proceeded to propose an architectural design for this “more beautiful” wall. In his report of the challenge in the NYT (June 18, 2006), William L. Hamilton had written the following: “Eric Owen Moss, an architect in Los Angeles, was more specific with his border as beacon of light. In his design, a strolling, landscaped arcade of lighted glass columns would invite a social exchange in the evening, much like the “paseo,” popular in Hispanic culture. ‘Make something between cultures, which leads to a third,’ Mr. Moss said. ‘Celebrate the amalgamation of the two’.”

It is easy to critique Moss’ position, his romanticist and essentialist rhetoric, and his office’s grotesque design. Similarly, the title of the challenge itself (whether it was introduced to architects under this name or not) has the capacity to mobilize a wide outrage for its radical candidness — in March 2016, during the US presidential campaign, a proposal for a design competition, entitled more soberly “Build the Border Wall?” and its relay in the mainstream architecture platform Archdaily, had triggered (legitimately) infuriated reactions from a certain amount of architects. Of course, beauty has the potential to normalize violent architectures and, in this regard, one can think of the (true or fictitious) story graffiti-artist Banksy told about his experience of painting on the Israeli Apartheid Wall: when an old Palestinian man allegedly told him that he was making the Wall beautiful, Banksy thanked him, to what the old man replied: “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.” Yet, we should not emphasize the importance of beauty’s normalizing capacities; after all, the architectures of the Israeli apartheid are unanimously recognized as ugly, but such a qualification never compromised their existence.

We nevertheless ought to focus on the other projects sent as a response to the NYT design challenge to realize that the most problematic characteristics of such a call are less to be found in the transformation of the wall from ugly to beautiful, than in its transformation from inert to productive. In his report, Hamilton had written, “Four of the five who submitted designs proposed making the boundary a point of innovative integration, not traditional division — something that could be seen, from both sides, as a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier.” From James Corner’s “solar energy-collecting strip that would produce what he described as a ‘productive, sustainable enterprise zone’ that attracted industry from the north and created employment for the south” to Calvin Tsao’s “enterprise zone […] as a series of small, developing cities,” we can see how the productivity and usefulness are regarded as mitigating the violence of the border when, in fact, they make it more durable by creating new dependencies on its existence. They also reproduce the North/South exploitative relationships at a local scale involving a border porosity for some (as well as goods and capitals) while making it impermeable for others as Alex Rivera potently illustrates in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer about the maquiladoras of a near future.

After having written my not-so-subtle article in 2008, I remember subsequently debating about this question with US architect and professor Ronald Rael, who, back then, was already engaged in the research work that has been recently published in the form of a book entitled Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (University of California Press, 2017). Although Rael’s approach to the wall is drastically more complex and critical than the capitalist and technocratic “solutions” offered by the architects cited above, part of his design hypotheses regarding the Wall are also attempting to make it more productive, as well as to “institutionalize through models and drawings, events that are already occurring on the wall” (source). In an interview given for another NYT article, he aptly expresses the contradiction in which he finds himself: “[Rael] makes the argument that we should view the nearly 700 miles of wall as an opportunity for economic and social development along the border — while at the same time encouraging its conceptual and physical dismantling” (Allison Arieff for the New York Times, March 10, 2017). This contradiction is the same than the one analyzed by Eyal Weizman in “The Best of All Possible Walls” (The Least of All Possible Evils, Verso, 2011) when he describes the legal action of some Palestinian lawyers and activists in the Israeli High Court of Justice in Jerusalem arguing for alternative routes for the Israeli Apartheid Wall during its construction in 2004. Weizman’s entire book is dedicated to what he calls “humanitarian violence” in its subtitle: “Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.” We can try to define this violence as the consequence of actions undertaken in an effort to mitigate a given violence but, in their compromising negotiation with that it claims to be fighting against, ends up bringing a greater legitimacy and inertia to it than if these actions had not been initiated in the first place.

The NYT’s editorial line could not be more at odds with this concept and, as such, provides one of its most illustrative examples. It is however important to observe that the fundamental difference between the NYT’s positioning and that of the Palestinian lawyers and activists that Weizman describes in their legal attempts to slightly divert the Apartheid Wall’s route in order to locally save the access of farmers to their fields and the junction of houses with the rest of Palestinian towns, is to be found in the fact that Palestinians are the first concerned by the Wall and, as such, have a legitimacy to recognize the inertia of the status quo and negotiate with it even if it brings more weight to it. On the contrary, the NYT represents the interests of a significant part of the US establishment that can afford to live with the political program of the current president when they do not benefit from it one way or another. Its negotiation with this political reality can therefore not act as the catalyst for reform that it would like to embody; on the contrary, it rather produces the profound and durable legitimization of it.

The post The New York Times and the U.S. Border Wall: A Love Story appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 18, 2017
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The screen tells us that it is 12:43pm. Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert are hanging out on the small playground of the Cité des Muguets in Chanteloup-les-Vignes (distant northwestern Paris banlieue). Their trivial conversation is interrupted by a voice coming from the car that entered the background on a higher level. “Sirs, sirs!” says the voice. “Hello sirs, it’s for the TV!” says a white female journalist from the window of her car, while her colleague has the entire upper part of the body out from the backseat window, filming the whole scene while his body remains inside the car. “Did you participate to the riots last night? Did you break something? Burnt some cars?” she continues.

– Saïd: “Hey Madam, do we look like thugs to you, or what?”
– Journalist: “Ah no, I never said…”
– Vinz: “Oh yeah? What do we look to you Madam?”
– Jounalist: “Oh, nothing, I just…”
– Hubert: “Why don’t you get off from the car? We’re not in Thoiry here!”

The tone quickly escalates and the young characters of Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic 1995 film, La Haine (written with Saïd Taghmaoui), are caught on tape insulting and throwing a stone at the TV crew — the view through the camera is the only shot from we have as spectator of the journalists’ point of view — a footage that, without doubt, would be used in a televised show that evening, deprived of the context of its production and the reason of their insults. “What’s Thoiry?” ask Vinz later. As Hubert then explains, it is a zoo (only 15 kilometers away from Chanteloup-les-Vignes) that one visits in cars — the full name of the zoo is “Safari Zoo of Thoiry.”

On November 7, 2017, a 27-year-old Black male resident of the Cité du Val Fourré in Mantes-la-Jolie (25 kilometer further West of Chanteloup-les-Vignes) was arrested by the police and handcuffed to a truck radiator in his transfer to the police station (see the photographic series about banlieue police stations to see a picture of it). His hand and arm were severely burnt from the heat and when screaming his pain, the police officers only responded with racist slurs. This news would have gone unnoticed from the French press, like so many other instances of racist police violence; yet, the young man filed a complaint for “acts of police violence with a racist dimension,” which forced most of French media to write about it. In order to illustrate their articles, a certain amount chose generic images of unrecognizable police officers; others, however, wanted to situate their articles and undertook to either photograph the Val Fourré, or use some from their stocks. These pictures strike for their remoteness from the social housing neighborhood. Some are taken from a few dozen meters outside of it (L’Humanité, Le Parisien) with practically no one visible on them, others are as far as a dozen kilometers (Evasion FM). All (to the slight exception perhaps of L’Humanité) convey the point of view of a hidden sniper in a war zone that reminds of the scene of La Haine that opens this text.

In January 2015, a few days after the assassinations of Charlie Hebdo journalists and the antisemitic murders of four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris, Fox News described how in eight areas of the French capital, shariah law was applied making of these neighborhood “no-go” zones for any non-Muslim person, including the police themselves. It did not take long for the quasi totality of the French press and politicians to be balanced between laughter and outrage at such allegations. Parisians who reside, work or pass by these areas every day deemed “ridiculous” that professional journalists could lie so bluntly.

However, if one pays attention to the limits of these areas designated by Fox News, one can recognize the contours of what used to be officially defined as “Sensitive Urban Zones” by the French government between 1996 and 2014, the overwhelming majority of which being outside the Paris municipality area, in the banlieues (see map on the right). Although designated as areas in which the French state intends to dedicate prioritized funds to improve the conditions of life of their residents (for further explanations, read the recently published article about them by Tanvi Misra), the “prioritization” that one can only observe on the ground is manifested by the police deployment and violence against these residents, most of whom are racialized subjects of a society that never undertook the decolonization of its structures — the police being the manifestation of one of their sharpest dimensions.

On the contrary of the laughter and outrage that Fox News harvested on this side of the ocean, the way the quasi-totality French press (admittedly, with a varying degree of deliberateness) characterizes the banlieues on a daily basis does not seem to be questioned nor challenged by the predominantly white viewers who never or rarely set foot in any of these neighborhoods. In May 2016, the magazine version of Le Figaro, one of the three main national newspapers, published a reportage entitled “Molenbeek sur-Seine: In Saint-Denis, Daily Islamism.” Beyond its demagogic and insulting use of the name of the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek (see past article) and the blatant lies that the articles has to offer (debunked one by one in a brilliant counter-investigation led by Sihame Assbague and Widad Ketfi), one can see that the imaginary conveyed by the cover of the magazine (visible in an important amount of newspaper kiosks of France the week of publication) is one of antagonist contrast between Christianity (i.e. whiteness) with the background embodied by the Saint-Denis basilica, and Islam, manifested here by two women wearing dark hijabs that many readers will associate to burqas, banned in French public space since 2012. It does not take a PhD in photographic analysis to realize that the parallel lines of the basilica facades indicate that the photograph was taken from great distance with a narrow-angle lens, which brings us back to the comparison of press photographers with military snipers.

One year later (May 2017), the newspaper Le Parisien published a similar reportage using the language of investigation, designating the Paris neighborhood of La Chapelle as a no-go zone (admittedly, it does not use that word) for women, because of the presence in the public space of an important amount of men (“groups of dozens of men on their own, illegal vendors, drug dealers, migrants and smugglers”). Here again, beyond the femonationalist (see the podcast interview with Sara Farris) demagogy that motivates the use of what is presented as a consensus in France (the equal right to the city for both men and women) to present a racist narrative, one can focus on the press’ stigmatization of areas of the city where white bodies find themselves in minority. The fact that La Chapelle is situated within the Paris municipality (and therefore is known and experienced by more middle-class white citizens that banlieue municipalities would) and that many of the racialized bodies that use its space can be perceived through a humanitarian narrative (many are East African asylum seekers, unhelped and policed by the authorities) may explain why counter-narratives to the one presented by the press were easier to emerge in this case — one must however acknowledge Leïla Khouiel and Nassira el Moaddem’s hard work of to present a clear counter-investigation.

The “No-Go Zone” imaginary cannot emerge by itself; it needs to be fed every day of images and commentaries that insist on the dangerous otherness that the residents of the depicted areas constitute. The violence that these images suggest or show deprived from any context, constitutes a spectacular smokescreen used to hide the deeper violence in relation to these neighborhood: the social and racial segregation that they materialize and the colonial continuum that this segregation reveal. What would happen if journalists would get off their car and leave their ‘sniper’ equipment? One cannot know for sure and there is no doubt that territorialized stigmatization would require more to be dismantled, but what’s more certain is that the press’ visual production could no longer create so easily imaginaries of zoos or warzones.

Addendum: In the case that it was not clear already, I use the term of “stigmatization” here, not merely to refer to territories and populations that would be considered poorly by the rest of society through this process but, rather, to insist that such characterization is what contributes to a continuity of colonial structures and the legitimization of police violence deployed against them.

The post Producing the “No-Go Zones” Imaginary: The Paris Banlieues and the Journalistic Gaze appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on January 10, 2018
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On January 1, 2018, Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was indicted by the Israeli military court of Ofer (occupied West Bank) where she has been detained since her abduction by the Israeli army on December 19. Many things have already been written about her and it did not take long before she became a symbol of Palestinian resistance. If we exclude the numerous malevolent characterization of her person, and only consider the benevolent ones, we can see how some of them are problematic in what they silently imply. The insistence on her age (16 years old), the fact that she is a woman, or much worse that she’s fair-skin and blonde can become harmful when it suggests an idea of innocence that other Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli military prisons would not share. Similarly, the narratives that insisted on the fact that Ahed Tamimi’s cousin had just been shot a rubber bullet in the head before she slapped an Israeli soldier, or that she had actually been slapped first by him are important insofar that they remind instances of the violence of the apartheid and the occupation that the Tamimi family endures (that’s what this article is about); yet, they offer a problematic plea when/if they insists on this information to suggest, here again, her innocence. Ahed Tamimi is not innocent. She is not innocent of what the Israeli court accuses her, and she is not innocent in the way we might commonly say that a child is innocent. The Israeli apartheid has striped and continues to stripe any form of innocence that one could expect a child to be entitled to as we have powerlessly witnessed in the most dreadful hours of the 2014 Israeli bombardments on Gaza and the killing of three Palestinian children on the beach (see past article).

It is therefore important to let the appropriate and legitimate voices talk about her person and we others can dedicate our efforts describing and challenging what she is fighting against. Her village, Nabi Saleh, home of over 500 Palestinian residents, is situated two dozens of kilometers North-West of Ramallah in the West Bank. After the 1995 application of the Oslo Accords (signed eight years before Ahed Tamimi was born), Nabi Saleh was placed in the intermediary zone between Area A (18% of the West Bank organized in “islands”) in which the Palestinian Authority gained a theoretical autonomy — the Second Intifada among other events proved that there was, of course, no territory beyond the Israeli army’s control — and Area C (61% of the West Bank), where the Israeli occupation army exercises a continuous sovereign power. Situated in Area B, Nabi Saleh is therefore under the Palestinian Authority sovereignty for civil matters, and under a joint Israeli army-Palestinian Authority police force sovereignty for so-called “security.” The village is thus one out of many for which the Oslo Accords changed virtually nothing for their residents who have keep seeing Israeli soldiers entering their neighborhoods or even their homes — in this regard, a photo showing Israeli soldiers inside the Tamimi’s house has circulated in that matter; because I could not track down its date and source I did not wish to include it, but you can see it here — ever since the invasion of the Jordanian-ruled West Bank in 1967 by the Israeli army (see past article).

A particularity of Nabi Saleh consists in its proximity with the Israeli settlement of Halamish, where over 1,500 settlers live, despite the violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention that the existence of such a civil infrastructure on occupied territory embodies (see the other map towards the end of the article). Between them, the Road 465 that circulates exclusively in Area C and allow the optimized circulation of Israeli vehicles from Tel Aviv, as well as the gigantic US-built Nahshonim military base situated on the immediate west part of the Green Line, to settlements situated between Ramallah and Nablus. Although the access to this road is authorized to Palestinian cars on ‘normal’ days (a small part of it links Birzeit to the new town of Rawabi), the road is regularly patrolled by Israeli army vehicles and its passage through the Apartheid Wall is sanctioned by the Rantis military checkpoint that grants access only to cars bearing a yellow plate (the Israeli license color) with all passengers presenting either an Israeli passport or a work permit, the latter being potentially denied at the discretion of the soldiers.

(top) the two obstructable and heavily controlled roads leading to Nabi Saleh. (bottom) Road 465 and the Israeli settlement of Halamish.

Nabi Saleh is connected to Road 465 by two 100-meter-long and 400-meter-long small roads. Their worn-out asphalt strongly contrasts with the well-maintained one used by Israeli vehicles. But, more importantly than their material state, these two short paths that used to link the villagers to Birzeit University, Ramallah, and the rest of the south West Bank are monitored by an Israeli military watchtower and blocked by concrete and stone blocks. Despite the road being accessible a couple of hundreds of meters away from its limits, Nabi Saleh, as well as other nearby villages’ residents therefore have to head North to Salfit in order to drive back “down” to go South when they want to go to other parts of the West Bank, multiplying distances and transportation time that are already important.

Travel comparison of a similar trip Nabi Saleh-Ramallah for a Palestinian car and the Israeli settlements of Halamish and Psagot by an Israeli car. (note that the duration for the Palestinian car assumes that checkpoints are ‘unmanned’ at the time)

Between 2010 and 2016, the Nabi Saleh villagers and people standing in solidarity with them organized weekly protests — similarly to the village of Bil’in further south-west in the West Bank — against the land expropriation that the Israeli settlement enacted and, more generally, the conditions of the occupation. On December 9, 2011, Mustafa Tamimi, Ahed’s cousin, was killed during one of these protests by an Israeli soldier who deliberately shot him a tear gas canister in the face. Several other Palestinian protesters were killed since 2011, 50 were permanently disabled and 300 other were wounded. The day before Ahed Tamimi slapped an Israeli soldier right outside her family’s house — that’s what motivated her abduction by the Israeli army — her cousin Mohammad had been shot at point blank with a so-called “rubber bullet” in the head by an Israeli soldier suppressing another protest. He spent 72 hours in a medically-inducted coma and woke up disfigured.

One can see how Ahed Tamimi, her family, and the village of Nabi Saleh are less Palestinian symbols for the exceptionalism they would embody, than for what they share with all Palestinian people, families and villages/towns whose lives are (partially) characterized by their daily experience of the Israeli apartheid and their forms of coping or resistance to it. Ironically, when the Tamimi family members and other Nabi Saleh residents drive to Ramallah, they have to pass by another symbol, albeit a very different one: the new Palestinian town of Rawabi, the paradigmatic embodiment of the Palestinian Authority’s dream of a state they can rule on, despite the exclusionary violence that their diminished and selfish vision implies against refugees, Gaza residents and, to a lesser degree, Palestinians living in Israel as well as members of the diaspora (read more in past article). Rawabi incarnates also a drastic social segregation between the Palestinian bourgeoisie that, for some of them, acquired wealth through various forms of negotiation with the apartheid — although we should be careful to insist that no negotiation of the kind could fully undo the status of colonized — while others, like the Tamimis and other residents of Nabi Saleh simply refused any sort of negotiation, regardless of how even more precarious it would make their lives. Consequently, when we say “Free Ahed Tamimi!” we do not request or negotiate her liberation based on any idea of innocence; instead, we affirm that, despite being detained in jailed, she (like all other Palestinian political prisoners) is in fact free, since her refusal to negotiate better apartheid conditions makes the entire military-judicial apparatus deployed around her null at a symbolic level. That may be part of what strikes us in the videos of her slap and of the other confrontations she had with Israeli soldiers: what we call “courage” is nothing else the full experience of this freedom that humiliates the humiliating state apparatus, that surprises the “most-prepared army,” and, eventually, that decolonizes the colonized.

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Léopold Lambert – Philadelphia on February 19, 2018
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Tomorrow, Tuesday 20th February, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) will host a lecture by current Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Besides the fact that inviting such a figure of the political establishment is problematic for the personal agenda necessarily carried by a sitting mayor engaged in a “lecture tour,” as well as for the total absence of a need to hear more from hyper-mediatized personalities who already accumulate hours and hours of interventions on mass-media, we should be particularly outraged at this invitation of Emanuel in an architecture institution. It is ironic to think that, at a time when Steve Bannon, Eric Trump or Milo Yiannopoulos are invited to discuss their fascist ideology on United States’ campuses, Harvard’s department of architecture may have imagined that inviting Emanuel, a member of the Democratic Party and former Chief of Staff of President Obama, constituted a bold political positioning against the current state of U.S. politics. Emanuel’s politics are however an embodiment of the status quo and its violence against Black and Brown bodies in the U.S..

The fact that the city of Chicago is currently being sued by a class-action undertaken by Black Lives Matter activists calling for a court oversight of the Chicago police could have been an indication of the insult that this invitation constitutes for all of those who dedicate their energy struggling against structural racism in U.S. cities. Instead, the lecture’s brief uncritically reproduces a text most-likely sent by Emanuel’s public-relation office, which mentions the mayor’s “achievements” for the city of Chicago — as well as the fact that “he is married to Amy Rule, and [that] they have three children” for some reason that are difficult to understand! — as a comparison with the page featuring his February 12 UCLA lecture brief attests (see below).

The passage of this brief highlighted above mentions Emanuel’s “comprehensive public safety strategy” and his “smarter policing strategies.” One has to appreciate the extent of the uncontested hypocrisy that such a statement represents. The “smarter policing strategies” evoked here do not seem to account for what a report of the U.S. Department of Justice itself has called a “‘pattern and practice’ of unconstitutional abuses, including the use of excessive force, especially against people of color” (Mother Jones, 2017). In 2015, massive protests had also demanded Emanuel’s resignation as investigations had established that a video of Black teenager Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a white police officer on October 20, 2014 had been deliberately hidden from the public by the mayor’s office while Emanuel was running for reelection, as Bernard Harcourt explains in this New York Times article.

Admittedly, Emanuel did not transformed the Chicago Police Department into the enforcement force of structural racism it currently is. Using the most extreme instance of its brutal recent history, between 1972 and 1991, the CPD has tortured over a hundred Black men in the West Chicago Homan Square facility, as The Guardian revealed in 2015. However, he brought and still brings his contribution to this history; most recently in projecting the creation of a $95 million new police academy in the Black neighborhood of West Garfield Park, not far from Homan Square, which continues to be used by the CPD, despite the atrocities committed in it. Activists gathered under the slogan “No Cop Academy” are currently organizing against the construction of this facility and advocating for the re-attribution of its funds to the local communities of Chicago.

This police academy project, just like the various forms of displacement of low-income Black and Brown populations of Chicago (in particular in the South) caused by a municipally-encouraged gentrification, should particularly resonate to architecture students and architects for their profession’s complicity with such programs. As such, Emanuel’s lecture in an architecture education institution is not simply to be considered as political propaganda for a potential run at the Presidency in 2020 (his insistence on how his model for Chicago should be extended to the rest of the U.S. is a strong hint for it), but rather as the normalization of various forms of municipal racist structures and the recruitment of architects in this project. Given the lack of acute politicization that architects often manifest and their disproportionate demographics (91% of registered architects in the U.S. are white when 28% of this country’s population is not), chances are that they will be easily seduced by a discourse that will introduce itself as the alternative to the current U.S. administration, when it is in fact its more reasonable version.

A letter signed by the Harvard Urban Planning Organization, the GSD African American Student Union, as well as a certain amount of personalities related to the GSD or not is currently circulating. It does not miss the opportunity to remind the future role students will play in municipal politics: “As future and current designers, urban planners, policy-makers, organizers, and educators, we cannot disregard the people who are in danger because of Rahm Emanuel’s administration.” We can only hope that the signatories will manage to be heard by the students and faculty who will attend the infamous lecture as some have succeeded to do during the February 12 lecture in UCLA.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on May 21, 2018
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Article originally written in 2016 for an architecture book (hence the pedagogical tone to describe the space of the French colonial continuum) that was never published. 

In January 1, 2016, the “Grand Paris,” (Greater Paris Authority) became an official governance entity. Despite the exclusions of key banlieue (suburbs) municipalities from its territory and the many foreseeable issues that will emerge from it, the creation of the Grand Paris affords the opportunity to rethink the territoriality of the city, in particular the social and racial segregation that the Northern and Eastern banlieues have been materializing since the 1950s. Allocating these segregated spaces to its working class, in particular the one formed by racialized populations, most of whom are former colonized people or their descendants, the French State has since then maintained the banlieue population in a state of subcitizenry, often materialized and enforced through their architecture. One of the things that the fragmented governance of municipalities over a greater authority however enabled is the high local decisional degree (see such an agency in the article/map about the distribution of social housing in the Greater Paris). This is particularly the case of the so-called “banlieues rouges” (red suburbs); these multiple towns of North and South Paris that have been repeatedly electing a communist mayor during the second half of the 20^th century. Ivry-sur-Seine, a 60,000-inhabitant municipality situated on the immediate South-East periphery of Paris municipality, is one of these “banlieues rouges.” Since the end of the Nazi occupation, its residents have indeed consistently elected mayors members of the French Communist Party.

One of the particularities of such municipalities is to bring a significant emphasis on social and affordable housing to accommodate their population, often in situation of economic precariousness. The large residential complex situated at the very center of Ivry-sur-Seine’s town was partially thought through this agenda in a municipality that counts 38% of its total housing as social one — since 2000, a piece of legislation forces municipalities of more than 3,000 inhabitants to count at least 20% of social housing on its territory before the same legislation was updated in 2013 to bring this percentage to 25% before 2025. Although the most radical elements of Ivry’s architecture (social housing and co-property) are well-known to be the design of architect Jean Renaudie (1925-1981), the patriarchal history of architecture often forgets the fact that none of this architectural project would have been possible without the continuous work of Renée Gailhoustet (1929- ), first as the architect of the towers Raspail, Lénine, and Spinoza (1963-1970), then as the architect-in-chief of the town, in charge of the master plan of the 105-hectare complex, who asked Renaudie to design three of the ten buildings involved — the seven others being designed by Gailhoustet herself. Such a common omission attests of the struggle that female architects had (and continue to have) to undertake in order to see their work recognized to the same degree than their male counterparts.

Admittedly, the three architectures designed by Renaudie in collaboration with Gailhoustet strike for their audacity: the buildings Danielle Casanova, Jeanne Hachette, and Jean-Baptiste Clément, named respectively after a Communist resistant to the Nazi occupation during WWII, a 16^th-century French heroin, and a member of the 1871 Paris Commune. The multiplicity of sharp angles, the bare concrete, and the complexity of both public and private sections strongly contribute to the uniqueness of produced spaces advocated by Renaudie. The reception of this aesthetic is somehow ambiguous: opinions of the residents and neighbors often diverge but many seem to attribute a certain sense of ugliness to the complex, while members of the so-called “creative class” appreciate its complexity. This led the population of the co-property to switch from a ‘regular’ low middle class to young families of designers and architects, which foresees a gentrifying process exceeding the limits of Paris municipality. All however appreciate the fact that no apartment has an alter ego. In the case of the Casanova building, this uniqueness strongly contrasts with the typical plans of banlieue social housing that tends to repeat dozens of times the same simplistic layout.

This notion of plan is interesting to investigate since the buildings designed by Renaudie are resolutely insisting on the creative complexity of their planar layout, while the others, designed by Gailhoustet seem to have brought a more intense emphasis on their sections. Consequently, the Renaudie buildings have a labyrinthine quality, while the connection between the various floors are often more simple. On the contrary, Gailhoustet’s buildings involve a more ‘rational’ plan but take advantage of the multiple changes of levels to produce uniqueness. In both cases, the limits between semi-public and private spaces, in particular the generously planted gardens, are significantly blurred, thus allowing the city to penetrate within the residential complex.

The ground of the complex is one its important components in both its continuity and discontinuity. While the ground of the street permeates at time within the buildings through either interior or exterior stairs or slopes, distributing each floor through semi-public pathways, the discontinued ground of the terraces and rooftops made of a cultivable earth allow small and mid-size trees and vegetation to contrast with the concrete through their breathing porosity. As such, the complex radically differentiates itself from the model of that time: the podium. One kilometer north of the complex, the residential tower neighborhood of Les Olympiades in Paris’s 13^th arrondissement, built during the same years than the Ivry complex, used such a paradigm and organized itself around a large internal podium. The complexity of the Ivry layout strongly contrasts with such a simplistic typology. It is as if each triangle of its ground corresponded to fragments of a larger podium that acquired their autonomy and, with it, a difference of height. Furthermore, this fragmentation of the ground allows natural light to penetrate in the lower floors where such a thing is usually impossible under a large podium.

The flat ground of the Place Voltaire is also worth noticing. This octagon square is the negative space formed by the buildings designed by Renaudie, as well as the more recent library bearing the name of poet Antonin Artaud who died and was buried in Ivry in 1948. This public space is simultaneously a meeting point for children and teenagers chatting, playing football or doing a one-wheeler on their scooters, as well as a passage for the residents to access the subway station. It is the core of the residential complex and, by extension, of the city center as the City Hall plaza nearby seems more dedicated to a contemplation of the heritage building of the City Hall than to gather residents in a practice of the polis.

The Ivry-sur-Seine residential complex has also been instrumental beyond its territorial limits. After the end of the operation, Gaihoustet was commissioned with ten additional projects, including eight in the Paris banlieues. Her residential project in the city center of the charismatic city of Saint Denis (north banlieue) in particular, strikes for its numerous similarities with Ivry. Similarly, Renaudie’s methods demonstrated in Ivry, were later applied on other large scale residential projects, in particular in the context of large residential complexes in Givors and Saint-Martin-d’Hères in the South of France. Although their aesthetics is clearly identifiable, both architects’ projects manifest the uniqueness of each (public, semi-public, and private) space created through their architecture as demonstrated in Ivry. Built in spaces essentialized by Parisians as insecure and generic, such uniqueness comes as an additional affirmation that the banlieues are the actual site of creation in French cities, contrasting with the authoritarian and militarized, repetitive and frozen urban schemes such as the Hausmannian one in Paris.

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (2014-2018) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on June 17, 2018
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This article, like a few others, is the report of walk done this morning in Nanterre around the location of two of the Algerian shantytowns that the northwestern Paris banlieue has hosted in the early 1960s. In visiting their past location and their direct environments, we encountered four commemorative plates related to France’s colonial history, which are more descriptive through what they keep shut rather than through what they say.

The first one was found on the former location of the largest shanty town in Nanterre: La Folie. No trace is left of what was the home of 10,000 people and one of the key site of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) towards the end of the Revolution (1954-1962). The Hauts-de-Seine Prefecture, situated in part on the former self-built town, even gathers an important amount of police vehicles that recalls the police harassment that most its inhabitants were experiencing on a daily basis. Stuck between the prefecture and an insurance company headquarters, a small piece of vacant land suggests the absence of memorialization of La Folie shantytown.

This is where we encounter the first commemorative plate. Situated next to a staircase next to the insurance company building, this is where one would expect to find a trash can. The granite plate (of reasonable proportion, one has to admit) reads: “To the memory of the numerous Algerians killed in the bloody suppression of the October 17, 1961 pacific demonstration.” Here again, the silence is louder than the words uttered. The fact that many of the Algerians killed during the massacre of October 1961 (see the extensive article about this historical episode in past article) were living in this very space cannot be guessed based on the surroundings of the plate. The language also fits with the French State’s description of this event, reluctantly acknowledged decades after the massacre: the amount of Algerians killed is to be left unknown (historians have estimated between 200 and 300 of them) and, more importantly, the perpetrators are not to be cited. Charles De Gaulle as President, Michel Debré as Prime Minister, Roger Frey as Minister of the Interior, and the infamous Maurice Papon as prefect of police of Paris in charge of annihilating the FLN in the French capital are not cited, nor are the thousands of police officers mobilized to suppress the pacific demonstrations of Algerians in Paris gathered against Papon’s implementation of a curfew on their sole persons during the state of emergency. In France, the designation of responsibilities on commemorative plates is relatively new. Only in the 1990s did plates start to incorporate the active complicity of the French police to the arrest and deportation of the 76,000 Jews during the Nazi occupation. When it comes to colonial and slavery crimes, those responsible are never pointed.

The second plate is located about 50 meters further, also on the location of the former shanty town. This one incorporates the names of all the people it means to commemorate. However, these names are not those of Algerians living in La Folie. They are instead names of French soldiers from Nanterre killed in the colonial wars in Morocco, Tunisia and, of course, Algeria between 1952 and 1962. Only the study of historical aerial photographs allows to understand that this monument is situated at what used to be the very core of the self-built town of La Folie. While the names of each (drafted for most of them) French soldiers who died fighting for France to keep its colonial grasp in North Africa is celebrated, the lives of Algerians who inhabited this site and, for some of them, were massacred by the colonial order in the streets of Paris, are invisibilized.

The third plate takes us to the site of another shanty town, located along the Seine River at the northwestern limit of Nanterre. Here again, visitors and residents are given no clue that this park, situated between a highway and a residential neighborhood, contains an extremely telling political geology when it comes to the territorial management of colonial and ‘postcolonial’ populations. The plate is indeed small and discreetly situated in a small street between two recently built residential buildings; however, its content was produced in dialogue with former residents, which gives it a much more expressive memorialization. It reads “The “White City” is the name that was given to the transit quarter Gutenberg by its residents. Erected in 1971, the 200 housing units shared between 16 buildings situated where the highway currently is, hosted 182 families, all coming from the Nanterre shantytowns. Although the duration of the transit quarters was scheduled to be between 3 to 5 years, the white city were for its residents a space of shared life, irrigated by human warmth, as well as a fraternity and solidarity spirit at all times.” The plate also shows a photograph of the “White City,” but not of the shantytown that the transit quarters replaced.

This set of historical aerial photographs offers an understanding of the political geology of this small piece of Nanterre territory: in 1960, the shantytown was standing in a relatively rural area. No latter than two years later, a transit quarter called André-Loucet was built in its immediate vicinity. In 1966, we can see the construction of a permanent social housing complex that still exist today under the name “Cité Komarov” (after the Sovietic cosmonaut, as it was often the case in communist municipalities). In 1971, the transit quarters Gutenberg, or White City is built while the shanty town has been destroyed. The two transit quarters, although designed to exist only for a few years to host the shantytown residents, can be seen to exist until the mid 1980s, i.e. respectively twenty years and fifteen years after their construction. Although the thermal conditions of these buildings were certainly better than the self-built houses of the shantytown, the transit quarters are characterized by the absolute lack of urban quality and the optimization of a policing of space contrasting with the labyinthine urbanism of the shantytown. This is however where important contributions to French antiracism activists occurred in the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Mogniss H. Abdallah’s 2012 Rengainez, on arrive!). Finally, the infrastructure (first a railroad bridge in the late 1970s and a highway bridge in the late 1990s) and the construction of a park in the 2010s achieve to dissimulate the past existence of the shantytown and the transit quarters.

On our way back to the train station, we encounter a middle school and, on its fence a fourth plate that reads “To the memory of ABDENNBI GUEMIAH, Victim of intolerance when he was 19 years old, former student of the André Doucet middle school.” Anyone not familiar with the history of the neighborhood could not possibly guess what this plate is referring to. Abdennbi Guemiah was a resident of the White City and local antiracist activist. On October 23, 1982, he was shot and killed by a neighbor with a hunting gun, like several other Arab and Black youths have in the 1980s. In 2014, a street in Nanterre is named after him, but here again, the terminology of “victim” and “intolerance” is invoked, rather than the one of murder and racism. As for the three first plates, commemoration here is made through a deafening silence.

All photographs by Léopold Lambert (June 2018) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on July 9, 2018
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Yesterday, Sunday 8th July 2018, the architecture collective Adresse and the political organization La Révolution est en marche (The Revolution In Action, a name as a commentary to President Macron’s political party, La République en marche) led by activist Hadama Traoré were gathering a few dozens of residents of Aulnay-sous-Bois (northeastern Paris banlieue municipality), as well as their supporters to present the architectural project they designed as an alternative to the planned demolition of a building known by many in Seine-Saint-Denis: the “Galion.” Built in the 1960s and adopting a longitudinal architecture bridging over a street, it is the most charismatic building of the cité des 3000 that was aimed to host the workers of the Citroën factory nearby, and was recently the site of several demonstrations to demand that truth be made in the death of local 24-year-old Tunisian French, Yacine, whose family suspected the police to have disguised the evidence of its responsibility. Almost a year later, graffiti reading “Vérité Pour Yacine” (Truth for Yacine) and posters calling for mobilisation are still plethora in the 3000, including on the walls of the Galion itself.

Its colonial name notwithstanding, the Galion is a building that constituted for many years the commercial center of not only Aulnay but also of the neighboring municipalities — a friend from La Courneuve present yesterday was telling me that she would often come with her family to do groceries on Sunday afternoons like yesterday’s — as well as the homes of 180 families who were living in the social housing units of the upper floors and who have been evicted and rehoused in the recent years. Aulnay is currently the site of deep territorial modifications as part of the “Grand Paris” project: the construction of a new subway line a few dozens of meters from the Galion and, like for many other banlieue municipalities, a transformation of housing that develops various forms of gentrification. The destruction of the Galion is a fundamental part of this policy; hence the importance of the fight led by Hadama Traoré to have it renovated and transformed for Aulnay’s current inhabitants, rather than destroyed to make room for new wealthier ones, attracted by the future proximity with the subway.

Traoré has therefore asked for the help of young architects (Selim Zouaoui, Karima Lebsir, as well as a few others) who grew up in the banlieues and were recently trained in architecture schools in Paris before forming the collective Adresse, which aims to work on a range of banlieue architectural projects in collaboration with current residents. They therefore presented their proposition for the Galion project yesterday, along with the artists with whom they collaborate (Joel Degbo, Nathalie Muchamad, and two others, absent yesterday) in order to work with the residents and neighbors’ plural memories linked with the Galion. Intrigued locals as well as relatives, friends, and supporters of Traoré thus gathered and listened to an introduction of the project from the perspective of political activism (Traoré), architecture (Zouaoui) and art (Degbo & Muchamad).

At that point, it ought to be strongly noted that architectural projects that claim to collaborate with local residents are to be always considered with high suspicion. More often than not, this revival of a trend born in the 1970s (whose clear failures and dangers seem to have been gone unnoticed by many architects since then), constitutes a way for outsider architects or artists (often paid by local municipalities that favor a simulacrum of politics) to construct the illusion of legitimacy while the inhabitants’ interests are put in the background, if considered at all. This often comes from the idea that architects have of themselves: their education oriented around the aim of “problem-solving” — something I regularly rant against — often combined with the privilege of their person within society — in the West, architects remain overwhelmingly white and from middle or upper-class backgrounds — makes up for projects that, at best, produce nothing and, at worst, participate to the processes of racial and social exclusion that gentrification and the colonial management of territory constitute.

Although a collective like Adresse and their collaborators should always remain cautious of such a risk — architecture being a discipline that enables the exercise of power, the legitimacy for one to practice it can never be total — their positioning strongly contrasts with the one adopted by those described above: their incarnated knowledge of the banlieues is natural and internalized as they grew up and continue to live in them for some — such knowledge incites them more to humbleness than arrogance — and their close collaboration with and for the political organization of La Révolution est en marche makes it impossible for them to adopt the usual apolitical attitude of architects who positively refuse to see the antagonist relationship of power between the authorities (municipalities, regions, the state, etc.) and predominantly-racialized residents living in economically precarious conditions. The discourse itself is resolutely different: when Zouaoui declares “it is our memories that are being destroyed when they destroy our buildings as they do everywhere” (quoted from memory), it is far from a universal “us” that he is mobilizing but, instead, one that gathers the multitude of banlieue residents whose families were once colonial subjects of a country whose political representatives and dominant population (“they”) have since never ceased to impose their side of this historical relation, while denying or obliterating subaltern narratives. This collaboration, on the contrary of many others, could therefore establish an important precedent whose effects would go far beyond the narrow range of the discipline of architecture: one that would actually prove effective against the dominant political and urban segregative and dispossessing project to which so many of Adresse‘s fellow architects take part.

All following photographs by Léopold Lambert (July 8, 2018) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Yugawara on August 9, 2018
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I recently traveled to Algeria to do some researches for my next book dedicated to the space of the French state of emergency; I am hoping to write a few of these non-rigorous articles about it soon but, in the meantime, I would like to write a short piece about a national liberation struggle against the French colonial empire we usually evoke less often than the Algerian Revolution: the Moroccan liberation struggle. One moment of this struggle is of particular importance when evoking the relationship between colonialism and architecture, in particular when comparing it with the strategies adopted by the successive French governments in Algeria in the years that will follow this specific moment. The event considered here consists in two days of strike and protests organized by the Moroccan worker union confederation (UGSCM) and the main Moroccan nationalist party (Istiqlal) in December 1952, described precisely by Jim House in an essay entitled “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale?” (The Impossible Control of a Colonial City?”, Genèses vol. 86, 2012). Although this article is partially motivated by the attempt to translate some components of House’s depiction of the 1952 strike (what the first part of this article is dedicated to), it also finds its motive in the absence in his paper of consideration for the massive urban transformation that the colonial authorities were undertaking at that time. This, as well as what it tells us about architects’ responsibilities in the colonial counter-revolution, will therefore make for the second part of this article.

An Anti-Colonial Event in Casablanca’s Carrières Centrales ///

On December 5, 1952, Tunisian nationalist and union member Ferhat Hached is assassinated in a plot that seems to involve the French colonial authorities in Tunisia. As a transnational response, the Moroccan UGSCM and the Istiqlal organize a general strike in Morocco on December 7. This strike finds its core in the shantytown of the Carrières Centrales (now Hay Mohammadi) in Casablanca where over 130,000 colonized people reside. Some of them moved here from rural areas of the country; others were displaced in 1938 from the city center after a typhoid epidemic was used by the authorities as a pretext to destroy smaller shantytowns adjacent to the “European quarters” and expel their residents outside of what were then the city limits. The massive shantytown that therefore exists in the beginning of the 1950s is considered by the French authorities as a political threat to the colonial order — we will see in the second part in what the subsequent counter-revolutionary strategy consisted. Consequently, a specific suppression plan has been created to respond to any anti-colonial movement in the Carrières Centrales: in addition to the French and Moroccan (the latter being under the orders of the makhzen) police officers, the colonial authorities have imagined several layers of military reinforcements such as Moroccan or Senegalese tirailleurs (infantrymen), goums (Berbere military units), and other branches of the colonial army.

The strike originally organized by the Istiqlal is called a “mouse strike.” It consists in simply refusing to leave home to go to work. In the evening of December 7 however, town criers circulates in the shanty town to declare that the strike is forbidden and that everyone will have to open their shops like any regular day. Moments later, the police open fire on residents who were throwing stones at them in response to the interdiction. Demonstrators gather in front of the local police station; some are shot and killed. Police officers then undertake to search the shantytown and enters systematically into the houses, while nationalist activists are arrested. The next day, settlers who live close by are evacuated and more shot are fire by the police in the neighborhood, killing in particular a 15 year-old boy who was digging a trench inside his house to protect his family. In the afternoon of December 8, a massive march is organized, leaving the Moroccan poor neighborhoods and heading to the city center, towards the Union House, where a meeting is scheduled. When later describing the events, the French press evoke the “attempt to invade the European city.” The police fires and kill at least 14 people in the march. Many others are arrested. Some are released in small numbers among a crowd of settlers who proceed to assault them. Meanwhile, important military reinforcements are called to circumscribes poor Moroccan neighborhoods. Scout planes fly at low altitude above these neighborhoods in an effort that has as much to do with surveillance than it has with intimidation. Similarly, light tanks and machine guns parade around the Carrières Centrales. Within the neighborhood itself, the Moroccan police force residents to open their shops and destroy those that remain close, in what prefigures the French response to the FLN-organized general strike in Algeria five years later.

During the days that follow, thousands of police officers and soldiers are deployed in Moroccan neighborhoods, and 1206 people are judged guilty of harming the state orders by the colonial courts. Some of the arrested protesters are tortured by electricity in police stations — here again prefiguring the following years of the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). 51 French union members, close from the Moroccan Nationalist movement are also deported back to France. As it is often the case with colonial massacres (the state having a strong interest to prevent the archive to exist), the number of protesters killed during these days of suppression remain unclear, but is believed to be between 100 and 300. (Jim House, “L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale?“, 2012).

Architects and the Counter-Revolution ///

As mentioned above, the information provided by Jim House in his essay are extremely valuable, but also miss to mention how the Carrières Centrales were simultaneously the site of a drastic urban transformation that remains today well-known in the history of architecture. The political and historical account therefore fails to involve architecture and, unsurprisingly, most of the architectural account fails to involve the violence of colonialism or does so with too little insistence. During his tenure as director of the Morocco Department of Urban Planning (1946 to 1952) French architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard designed a master plan for the Carrières Centrales, along with his collective, whose name, GAMMA for Groupe d’Architectes Modernes Marocains (Group of Moroccan Modern Architects), deceives about which kind of architects were involved (“Moroccan” here means French and Western in Morocco, such as Shadrach Woods or Georges Candilis).

As mentioned above, this master plan and its recognizable 8×8 meter grid, as well as his (more or less orientalist) attempts to adapt it to the Moroccan population, belongs to the canonical history of architecture. In the rare occasions that the political context of this project is mentioned (not ‘simply’ the French colonial order in Morocco, but also the suppression of the Moroccan Nationalist movement), such a context is understood as the background of the project, rather than its very essence. This is, in my opinion, a fundamental dimension to understand, not simply the role of architecture here; not even only the relationship that architecture maintains with colonialism, but even more broadly, the very function of architecture in its crystallization and enforcement of political orders (and, in a very few occasions perhaps, disorders).

In other words, we should not simply be struck by the fact that the 1952 massacre happened while the urban transformation of the shanty town was happening — if anyone knows of any photographs that would show the strike in relation to the construction site, please contact me! — we should consider this transformation as the colonial effort to shut the anti-colonial movement down, as it will later be the case in Algeria in the late 1950s with the construction of massive housing complexes by the French authorities as the second counter-revolutionary wave (after and simultaneously with the legal and military one) against the anti-colonial Revolution. Of course, the project itself is not in response to the 1952 strike but, rather, it constitutes a preemptive response to such a political struggle. Affirming this is not a proposal to reread history through the prism of a colonial conspiracy involving architects and urban planners at every level of military and administrative decisions. I have not personally read of any account involving Ecochard and the military regarding the counter-revolutionary characteristics of his urban design and do not know if any exist — nor did I for Fernand Pouillon in Algiers a few years later. However, the degree of intentionality manifested by architects when it comes to participating to the colonial order is secondary when the clients consist precisely in the guardians of such an order, and that architects consist in members of the settler society. Furthermore, through its extreme valuing of rationality, modern architecture, perhaps more than any others, embody the ideal spatial paradigm when it comes to population control (see this 2014 article about Brasilia for instance) and the framing of most aspects of the daily life of its residents. The various modernist housing complexes built by the French colonial authorities in Morocco and Algeria should therefore be seen at both political and operative levels for what they are: architectural counter-revolutionary weapons.

Architecture and the Anti-Colonial Revolution /// 

As expressed countless times on The Funambulist, I am convinced that architecture has a propensity to embody the colonial order. Its intrinsic violence easily materializes the walls that the colonial state necessitate to sustain itself, and nothing is easier than to extrude a line traced a map where borders are colonial constructions. A part of me still believes that an anti-colonial design can be achieved if somehow one accepts to embrace such an intrinsic violence in favor of an anti-colonial agenda. Nevertheless, the relationship between architecture and the anti-colonial revolution is never greater than when the order embodied by the former is subverted (voluntarily or not) in favor of the latter. Although the liberation of Morocco occurred in 1956 and that it is doubtful that such a process had been already achieved by then in the Ecochard grid in the Carrières Centrales, the visit of the modern architecture of current Hay Mohammadi certainly suggests such a subversion in the difficulty we might even experience trying to recognize it. Of course, the subversion here was mostly based on the appropriation of a domestic space for daily needs, not on the political anti-colonial effort; yet, just like settler architects do not need to voluntarily contribute to the colonial order to actually do so, colonized and post-colonial residents (Hay Mohammadi remains a proletarian neighborhood today) do not need to voluntarily subvert this order to actually do so. If we may conclude with an ultimate comparison with Algiers, the Casbah did not need to be politically transformed to constitute an ideal spatial condition for the Algerian Revolution, its continuous existence in discrepancy with colonial logic, as well as its embodiment of a multitude of rational processes (in opposition to a uniform one, always manifested in a master plan), made it this way. May the following photographs in comparison to the previous one of the Ecochard grid therefore represent less the effectiveness of a past anti-colonial struggle, than the symbol of its potentiality in the present or the future in the subversion to the colonial order they incarnate.

Acknowledgments: this article could only be written today because of an invitation in Hay Mohammadi by friends Karima El Kharraze and Hélène Harder in 2016, and the generous introduction to the proletarian history of the city by Karim Rouissi. I also take advantage of this extra paragraph to say that I have, of course, read several texts on the matter by Marion Von Osten, and I am therefore necessarily influenced one way or another by her work in this article; yet, I remain unable to articulate an answer to it as her discourse seems to be formulated more for the purpose of architecture history than for the history of colonialism and anti-colonial movements approached through the perspective of architecture as I’m interested to do.

All following photographs in Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca by Léopold Lambert (2016) ///

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on November 9, 2018
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I just came back from a trip to Kanaky-New-Caledonia where the first of three referendums to decolonize the archipelago was won by the “No” by a much shorter margin (56% vs 44%) than anticipated. There is would be so much to write about, but I am deliberately keeping what I feel legitimate to write about for my next book about the colonial history of the French state of emergency in Algeria, Kanaky, and the French banlieues as to give the proper context to the Indigenous Kanak (and their Caledonian supports) anti-colonial struggle. I however wanted to write a short article specifically dedicated to the French military police stations (gendarmeries) in Kanaky-New-Caledonia in order to draw parallels with an architectural inventory of police stations in the Paris banlieues published in 2016.

In the North Province of the Grande Terre (the main island of the archipelago), the only buildings that only fly the French flag — other public institutions such as town halls and fire fighter stations) fly both the French and the Kanaky flags — are the gendarmeries (military police stations). As such, they constitute clear reminders of the colonial dimension in which the country remains, despite the relative improvements that followed the Matignon Accords (1988) and the Nouméa Accords (1998). These accords, however debatable, are the direct results of the Kanak struggle towards the independence initiated in 1975, which intensified with the 1984-1988 insurrection. During these years, the occupation of gendarmeries was one of the prominent actions the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) organized to put pressure on the French colonial authorities. This was particularly the case during the active boycott of the November 18, 1984 territorial elections that marked the beginning of the insurrection, and it was again such an action that led to the 1988 hostage situation in Ouvéa island — when a military police officer opened fire on the occupiers, the situation escalated and led to the killing of four military police officers, the hostage take of every others for two weeks and the execution of 19 of the Kanak militants by the army. One of the main differences between the 1984-1985 occupations that never led to the death of military police officers nor independentist militant and what remains the biggest trauma of recent history for the Kanak people is that during the years of what is often euphemistically called “the events,” thousands of military personnel have been deployed in the archipelago by the colonial authorities, thus increasing significantly the amount of military police officers who were completely foreign to the reality of the country. What the materialization of the gendarmeries in the archipelago today reveals is that the lesson has not been learned as barbed wire fences have been erected around all of them, thus severing them even more from the villages and tribes that surround them. Although it would be naive to expect otherwise, the explicit militarization of the few institutions that remain under the scope of the French state (army, police, justice, money, and foreign affairs) is a visible reminder of the fact that “people are not born equal when facing the police batons” (quote from a French journalist describing the attack of the Kanak tribe of Saint-Philippo by the military police during the state of emergency on February 18, 1985).

All following photographs by Léopold Lambert (Oct-Nov 2018) ///

Gendarmerie of Thio, perhaps one of the most famous in Kanaky-New-Caledonia as it was occupied (along with the rest of the village whose mayor used to belong to the Front National) by Kanaky Provisional Government’s Minister of Defense, Eloi Machoro (who was assassinated by the military police special forces a few weeks later on January 11, 1985) and his squad of militants for over three weeks.

Gendarmerie of Canala, the village where the active boycott of the November 18, 1984 elections was one of the most intense (Eloi Machoro spectacularly broke a ballot box with an axe, with the complicity of the Kanak mayor, Maxime Karembeu). In addition of being fortified, the gendarmerie is situated, alone, on the top of a little hill that dominates the village. A municipal representative told me that there has been continuous demand that the military police “comes down” in a new building.

Gendarmerie of Hienghène, in front of the town hall, where Kanaky Provisional Government’s President, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, has been mayor for twelve years.

Gendarmerie of Touho, another predominantly Kanak village on the East coast of the Grande Terre. One of the most militarized I have seen.

Gendarmerie of Kouaoua, a strategic village of the East Coast because of its proximity of the biggest nickel mines of the country (Kanaky-New-Caledonia’s soil is the second largest resource of nickel in the world).

Gendarmerie of Boulouparis. The more “proper” architecture reveals the difference between the South province where towns are predominantly inhabited by white Caledonians and the North where the population is predominantly Kanak.

Gendarmerie of Nouméa, the main city of Kanaky-New-Caledonia.

I’m adding this photo from the local (loyalist) newspaper “Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes” from last Tuesday (Nov. 6, 2018) to show what kind of military equipment is deployed in case of confrontation between anti-colonial militants (systematically designed as rioters or delinquents by the French media and authorities in the case of the Saint-Louis Kanak tribe) and the military police. Although most people in the country insist on the difference of political conditions between the 1980s and now and that is important to note that these clashes were the only ones that occurred after the results of the referendum, this type of policing equipment — whose differentiation with the means used in France is blatant — has remained the same.

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Léopold Lambert – Paris on December 20, 2018
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This Monday, we were many in Algeria, in France, and elsewhere to be shocked when we learned that the Wilaya (prefecture) of Algiers had signed a convention with the region of Île-de-France (Paris’ region) whose President is a conservative Republican politician, and French architect Jean Nouvel to “revitalize” Algiers’ Casbah. The Casbah before being a UNESCO world heritage site is one of the most important sites of the anti-colonial history, as well as the home of thousands of residents who had no say in this decision. Three of us decided to write an open letter to him, asking him to renounce this commission, as part of what we believe is our strategy and our legitimacy (only one of us is from Algiers) from the Northern side of the Mediterranean Sea — we leave it to Algerians to form their own strategy against the Wilaya’s decision if they decide to do s,o and we will bring them the support they will ask from us in that case. 410 people all around the world (including from the Casbah itself) and from various backgrounds co-signed it and it was published today in French national communist newspaper L’Humanité.

(Original French version below)

Dear Jean Nouvel,

On March 6, 1999, almost twenty years ago, you wrote a text called “Boulogne assassine Billancourt” in the columns of Le Monde; a courageous text written resolutely against the scheduled (and sadly achieved) destruction of the historic workers’ heritage represented by the Renault factory of the Ile Seguin in the suburbs of Paris.

We start this open letter by mentioning this text because it is to the person who wrote it that we wish to address ourselves. This Monday, December 17th, we were many to be shocked, learning that a tripartite agreement was signed between the Wilaya of Algiers, the region of Île-de-France and your architecture office, in order to supposedly “revitalize” Algiers’ Casbah — etymologically, “revitalize” means to give back life, which leads us to ask ourselves if the life, however vibrant, which characterizes today the winding streets of this district is not worthy of being considered as such.

Algiers’ Casbah , before belonging to humanity — the one of which is supposed to to possess a world heritage — belongs first of all to its inhabitants, whether they possess a property deed or not. It then belongs to the Algerians whose revolutionary struggle against French colonialism has regularly taken roots in the capital and in particular its Casbah. It finally belongs to the anti-colonial activists from Africa, the Global South, but also from the North, for whom the Casbah’s urban fabric and architecture embody a powerful symbol of the struggles of those who can only use their passion and their environment against the asymmetrical forces opposed by the colonial armies and police.

The French have already partially destroyed the Casbah three times in the past. First, following the invasion of the Regency of Algiers in 1830, the colonial officers had already fully understood the potential danger of its insurrectional urbanism and ordered the destruction of the entire lower part of the city, thus depriving the Casbah of its access to the sea. Later, the colonial authorities built Haussmann buildings there, taking up the counter-insurgency town planning tactics already applied in Paris and Marseille. Again, at the end of the 1930s, when the colonial authorities went “at war with the slums” and destroyed the Marine neighborhood. Finally, between 1956 and 1957, it is still within the Casbah that the famous “Battle of Algiers” found its paroxysm. On the night of August 10, 1956, French terrorists placed a bomb in Rue de Thèbes that destroyed several buildings and killed 80 inhabitants. On October 8, 1957, this time, it was French paratroopers, having stifled this area of the city for a year, who dynamited the house where the last FLN militants in Algiers (Hassiba Ben Bouali, Mahmoud Bouhamidi, Ali Ammar aka Ali la Pointe, and Petit Omar) had taken shelter. As you may have seen during your short visit, this house has been left unchanged for the last six decades to make it a memorial, a memorial without an architect.

We believe that any change in the Casbah that would not come directly from its inhabitants and community would need, at least,to demonstrate an acute knowledge and respect of its past and its present, well beyond the instructions that the Wilaya of Algiers itself seem to have can provide or understand. Projects that are not committed first and foremost to serve its inhabitants as well as the historical, political and cultural legacy of this “city in the city,” and would rather favor their tourist or financial ambitions are not worthy of this place of life and history. The announcement of cultural projects in particular, while many homes experience leaks and problems of water evacuation, which is nowadays one of the major problems of the neighborhood, seems to be, particularly problematic and yet again, disconnected from the everyday concerns of the residents. Similarly, the release of a staggering budget to finance this study can only contrast with the blatant lack of resources that the associative community of the Casbah has to confront daily to carry out its initiatives.

Today, we came to learn that you collaborate with Valérie Pécresse, President of the Region of Île-de-France. In this sense, do we need to remind you that the decisions of the latter weigh every day a little more on the lives of the most precarious Paris inhabitants who, for many, are people who (directly or through their family history) suffered from french colonialism, especially the one at work during 132 years in Algeria? The same one who, in addition to her unequal policies, did not hesitate to join an Islamophobic crowd who pushed around Muslim devots in Clichy when they were praying in the street so as to protest against the transformation of their library prayer room by the municipality (in November 2017). The same person who also did not hesitate to declare that she would be in favor of a law aimed at doubling the prison sentences for acts committed in certain neighborhoods, in contempt of all constitutionality (October 2018). We let you evaluate the link that such actions and speeches can have with the French colonial history and its continuation through other forms.

The decision of the Wilaya of Algiers to “revitalize” the Casbah is its own decision, and we leave it to our friends in Algeria to fight it they feel the urge for it; that is not our role ourselves. However, we, architects, historians, electricians, cleaners, academics, artists and other activists, for whom the Casbah continues to represent one of the strongest symbols of revolutionary architecture, appeal to your political conscience to give up this project. Do not accept to be complicit in a fourth wave of brutal French transformation of the Casbah. All architects must be fully responsible for the political conditions and consequences of the projects they accept; any position that would make them only an executant constitutes an insult to their function and their ability to act. Sometimes this ability to act politically lies within the design of the project itself; at other times, it is rather in the refusal or the renunciation to this same project. This is the case here and you have the power to do that.

We therefore ask you to decline this invitation and recommend to the Wilaya of Algiers some of your Algerois colleagues who will adequately problematize this project in order to preserve the Casbah and the symbol it holds, rather than to control, alter and gentrify it.

Thank you for reading us, we sincerely hope that you also heard us.

Original French version ///

Cher Jean Nouvel,

Le 6 mars 1999, il y a bientôt vingt ans, vous titriez “Boulogne assassine Billancourt” dans les colonnes du Monde; un texte courageux s’indignant avec force de la destruction programmée (et désormais réalisée) du patrimoine historique ouvrier que représentait “le paquebot” de l’Île Seguin dans la proche banlieue de Paris.

Nous débutons cette lettre ouverte en mentionnant ce texte car c’est à la personne qui a écrit celui-ci que nous souhaitons nous adresser. Ce lundi 17 décembre, nous sommes beaucoup à avoir été choqué·e·s en apprenant qu’une convention tripartite avait été signée entre la Wilaya d’Alger, la région Île-de-France et vos ateliers afin de, nous dit-on, “revitaliser” la Casbah d’Alger — étymologiquement, “revitaliser” implique redonner de la vie, ce qui nous permet de nous demander si la vie, pourtant vibrante, qui caractérise aujourd’hui les rues sinueuses de ce quartier n’est pas digne d’être considérée comme telle.

La Casbah d’Alger, pour nous, bien avant d’appartenir à l’humanité — celle dont on nous dit qu’elle possède un patrimoine mondial — appartient d’abord à ses habitant.e.s, qu’iels possèdent un titre de propriété ou non, ensuite aux Algérien·ne·s dont la lutte révolutionnaire contre le colonialisme français a régulièrement pris appui sur sa capitale et en particulier, sa Casbah, et enfin aux militant·e·s anti-coloniaux·ales de l’Afrique, du Sud Global, mais aussi du Nord, tant la Casbah par son urbanisme et son architecture incarne un symbole puissant des luttes de ceux et celles qui ne peuvent mettre à profit que leur passion et leur environnement face aux forces asymétriques que leur opposent les armées et polices coloniales.

La Casbah, les français l’ont déjà partiellement détruite trois fois. Suivant l’invasion de la Régence d’Alger en 1830, les officiers coloniaux avaient déjà bien compris le danger potentiel de son urbanisme insurrectionnel; ils ont ainsi ordonné la destruction de toute la partie basse de la ville, privant ainsi la Casbah de son accès à la mer. Plus tard, les autorités coloniales y construiront des immeubles haussmanniens, reprenant les tactiques urbanistes contre-insurrectionnelles déjà appliquées à Paris et Marseille. A la fin des années 1930, lorsque les autorités coloniales ont fait “la guerre aux taudis” et ont ainsi détruit le quartier de la Marine. Entre 1956 et 1957, c’est toujours au sein de la Casbah que la fameuse “bataille d’Alger” trouve son paroxysme. Dans la nuit du 10 août 1956, des terroristes français y placent une bombe rue de Thèbes qui détruit plusieurs immeubles et tue 80 habitant·e·s. Le 8 octobre 1957, ce sont les parachutistes français qui, après avoir étouffé ce quartier de la ville pendant un an, dynamitent la maison où se sont réfugié·e·s les dernier·e·s survivant·e·s du FLN à Alger: Hassiba Ben Bouali, Zohra Drif, Ali Ammar dit Ali la Pointe, Petit Omar et Yacef Saâdi. Comme vous l’avez peut-être vue durant votre courte visite, cette maison a été laissée telle quelle ces six dernières décennies afin d’en faire un mémorial, un mémorial sans architecte.

Toute modification de la Casbah qui ne viendrait pas directement de ses habitant·e·s doit ainsi faire preuve d’une connaissance et d’un respect sans faille de son passé et de son présent, bien au delà des instructions que la Wilaya d’Alger puisse elle-même fournir ou comprendre. Des projets qui n’auraient pas à coeur de servir en premier lieu ses habitant·e·s ainsi que le legs historique, politique et culturel de cette ville dans la ville, et qui leur préféreraient des ambitions touristiques ou financières ne sont pas dignes de ce lieu de vie et d’histoire. L’annonce de projets culturels notamment, alors que de nombreuses habitations ne sont pas étanches et que l’évacuation d’eau du quartier constitue aujourd’hui l’un des problèmes majeurs du quartier, nous semble par exemple particulièrement problématique et là encore, déconnectée des préoccupations quotidiennes des habitant·e·s. De même, le déblocage d’un budget stupéfiant pour financer cette étude ne peut que contraster avec le peu de moyens criant que le tissu associatif de la Casbah affronte au jour le jour dans ses initiatives.

Aujourd’hui, nous apprenons donc que vous collaborez avec Valérie Pécresse la Présidente de la Région Île-de-France. Devons-nous vous rappeler que les décisions de celle-ci pèsent chaque jour un peu plus sur les résident·e·s précarisé·e·s de la métropole parisienne qui, pour beaucoup, sont des personnes ayant (directement ou par l’intermédiaire de leur histoire familiale) souffert du colonialisme français, en particulier celui-ci qui sévit pendant 132 ans en Algérie? Celle qui, en plus de ses politiques inégalitaires, n’hésite pas à se joindre à une foule islamophobe qui agressent les fidèles musulman·ne·s de Clichy lorsque ceux·elles-ci prient dans la rue pour protester contre la transformation de leur salle de prière en bibliothèque par la municipalité (novembre 2017). Celle qui n’hésite pas non-plus à déclarer qu’elle serait favorable à une loi visant à doubler les peines de prisons pour des faits commis dans certains quartiers populaires, au mépris de toute constitutionnalité (octobre 2018). Nous vous laissons apprécier le lien que de telles actions et discours peuvent avoir avec l’histoire coloniale française et sa continuation sous d’autres formes.

La décision qu’a prise la Wilaya d’Alger de “revitaliser” la Casbah, est la sienne, et nous laissons le soin à nos ami·e·s en Algérie de combattre celle-ci si iels le pensent nécessaire; là n’est pas notre rôle. Nous, architectes, historien·ne·s, electricien·ne·s, agent·e·s d’entretien, universitaires, artistes, et autres militant·e·s internationaux.ales, pour qui la Casbah continue de représenter l’un des symboles les plus forts d’une architecture révolutionnaire, nous faisons appel à votre conscience politique afin que vous renonciez à ce projet. N’acceptez pas d’être complice d’une quatrième vague de transformation brutale française de la Casbah. Tout architecte se doit d’être complètement responsable des conditions et conséquences politiques des projets qu’iel accepte; toute position qui ferait de lui ou d’elle un.e simple exécutant·e constituerait une insulte à sa fonction et à sa capacité d’agir. Parfois, cette capacité d’agir politiquement se situe au sein de la conception du projet elle-même; à d’autres moments, elle se trouve plutôt dans le refus ou la renonciation à ce même projet. C’est le cas ici et vous avez ce pouvoir.

Nous vous demandons donc: désistez-vous et recommandez à la Wilaya d’Alger certain·e·s de vos confrères·soeurs algérois·es qui sauront problématiser ce projet de manière à préserver la Casbah et ce que celle-ci signifie, plutôt que de la contrôler, la modifier et la gentrifier.

Nous vous remercions de nous avoir lu·e·s et espérons que vous nous avez également entendu·e·s.

Salma Abouelhossein, Doctorante en études urbaines, Harvard University
Sabrien Amrov, Doctorante, University of Toronto
Harold Dede Acosta, Architecte-urbaniste
Mohamed Abdelghafour, Assureur
Mara Ahmed, Activiste, réalisatrice
Meryam Ajari, étudiante en Architecture, TU Delft
Madeleine Aktypi, Poète et enseignante à l’Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design de Grenoble, Valence
Heba Alnajada, Doctorante en histoire de l’architecture, UC Berkeley
Sahar Amarir, Etudiante au Centre des Etudes Moyen-Orientales, Harvard University
Antoine Atallah, Architecte-urbaniste, vice-président de l’ONG Save Beirut Heritage, comité du Arab Center for Architecture
Fatima-Ezzahra Abid, Etudiante
Elisa Aigner, Assistante sociale et psychothérapeute
Zaina Ait Ahmed, Militante décolonisée
Myriam Ait El Hara, Artiste plasticienne
Farouk Ait Hamoudi, Etudiant
Norman Ajari, Enseignant chercheur
Nora Akawi, Architecte, Columbia University
Esra Akcan, Professeur, Cornell University
Tamara Al Saadi, Metteuse en scène
Leïla Alaouf, Journaliste
Zahra Ali, Rutgers University
Yasmina Ali Yahia, Etudiante en muséologie
Sahar Amarir, Etudiante au Centre des Etudes Moyen-Orientales, Harvard University
Samia Ammour, Militante féministe algérienne
Laaha Mohamed Anis, Docteur, Business analyste et artiste
Francesca Ansaloni, Docteure en aménagement régional et politiques publiques
Noureddine Aoussat, Universitaire algéro-français
Rebecca Armstrong, Facilitatrice en concertation
Maël Assal, Etudiant
Sihame Assbague, Journaliste et militante
Faiza Atmani, Fondatrice et présidente « Femmes d’Alger & d’Ailleurs »
Amira Attalaoui, Designer
Rym Atallaoui, Artiste plasticienne & infirmière de la santé publique
Kader Attia, Artiste réparateur
Tom Avermaete, Chair du departement d’Histoire et de Théorie de l’Urbanisme de l’université ETH Zurich
Nick Axel, E-Flux architecture
Axelle, Etudiante mobilisée à l’Université Paris 8
Ariella Azoulay, Professeure, Brown University
Louisa Babari, Artiste
Salah Badis, Ecrivain et traducteur
Marine Bachelot Nguyen, Autrice et metteuse en scène
Riad Baghdadi, Etudiant, Université d’Alger 1
Linda Baka, Etudiante en Lettres
Sofiane Bakouri, Photographe
Saba Barani, Architecte et doctorante en architecture et urbanisme, TU Berlin
Romullo Baratto, Editorialiste et photographe
Ahmad Barclay, Architecte
Tamami Bataouche, Designer
Jean Beaman, Sociologue à Purdue Université (USA)
Merve Bedir, Architecte
Walid Bekhti, Producteur de cinéma
Mohamed Nazim Bekkouche, Architecte-urbaniste
Salma Belal, Architecte
Nadia Belaala, Architecte
Ramia Beladel, Artiste visuelle
Yasmine Belaala, Etudiante-vétérinaire
Safia Belazzoug, cheffe d’entreprise
Mohamed Belhorma, Commissaire d’expositions
Yessa Belkhodja, Créatrice en « stand-by », semeuse de mots, militante décoloniale
Yasmine Bellouch, Architecte doctorante en histoire de l’architecture
Cirine Ben Azoune, Etudiante en Sciences Politiques
Meriem Ben-Belkacem, Traductrice
Hajer Ben Boubaker, Chercheure en science politique et activiste culturelle
Hiba Ben Boubaker, Etudiante
Manel Ben Boubaker, Enseignante
Johanna Soraya Benamrouche, Collectif intersectionnel féministe contre le cyberharcèlement
Ibtissem Benarabe, Militante anticoloniale et antiraciste
Norah Benarrosh, Anthropologue
Maxime Benatouil, Militant à l’Union juive française pour la paix
Asma Benazouz, Journaliste
Saadane Benbabaali, Maître de conférences honoraire, Université Paris 3
Amina Benboureche, Traductrice
Djamel Benchenine, Artiste plasticien
Abdeldjalil Bendiha, Artisan décorateur
Nadia Bendjilali, Auteure
Aline Benecke, Artist, dramaturge et doctorante
Sarah Benichou, Enseignante d’Histoire
Ali-Dine Benkoula, Artisan bijoutier-joaillier
Farïd Bennaï, Militant au Front Uni des immigrations et des quartiers populaires
Mouna Bennamani, Artiste plasticienne
Abdelmalek Bensetti, Architecte et graphiste
Hajira Bentahar, Agent d’entretien
Massica Bentahar, Avocate
Omar Berrada, Ecrivain, curateur
Charlotte Malterre Barthes ( ETHZ/ Prof. TU Berlin)
Ana Dana Beroš, Association Croate des Architectes
Afaf Bessa, Militante féministe
Nargesse Bibimoune, Auteure et militante
Elizabeth Bishop, Historienne, Université d’Oran 2, co-directirice: “Making Space in the Maghrib”
Nacim Bouamama, Elève avocat
Camillo Boano, The Bartlett University College of London
René Boer
Irène Bonnaud, Metteuse en scène et traductrice
Henri Bony, Architecte
Zakaria Bouatif, Etudiant-chercheur
Lamine Bouchakhchoukha, Conseiller technique
Houari Bouchenak, Photographe
Yanis Bouda, Consultant
Amina Boudia, Biologiste
Bruno Boudjelal, Photographe
Halida Boughriet, Artiste
Mohamed Bouhamidi, philosophe
Ghyzlène Boukaïla, Artiste-étudiante multimédia
Asma Boukli-Hacene, Architecte
Naïm Boukir, Artiste plasticien
Sarah Boumédine, Syndicaliste
Safia Bourdache, Attachée de Recherche Clinique
Mourad Bouzar, Enseignant-chercheur à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, Doctorant Université Paris 1
Hicham Bouzid, Directeur artistique de Think Tanger et curateur
Sadek Bouzinou, Artiviste
Boutaina Brahimi, Artiste,doctorante
Caitlin Blanchfield, Historienne de l’architecture
Elsa Brès, Artiste architecte
Armelle Breuil, Architecte
Hubert Brouta, Architecte, Sydney
Eduardo Rega Calvo, Architecte
Ro Caminwl, Artiste
Maristella Casciato, Historienne de l’architecture
Meriem Chabani, Architecte
Amir Chaïbi, Architecte
Nidhal Chamekh, Artiste
Malik Chaoui, Acteur culturel
Souad Chatta, Humanitaire, Photographe
Amine Cheballah&
Irene Cheng, California College of the Arts
Salim Cherif, Designer
Dimitri Chiron, Etudiant
Julia Chryssostalis, Conférencière principale, co-directrice, Law and Theory Lab, University of Westminster
Marie Cosnay, Autrice
Cyrille Cotrupi, Electricien
Deborah Cowen, Professeur associé, University of Toronto
Sheila Crane, Professeur en Histoire de l’architecture, Université de Virginie
Kenny Cupers, Université de Bâle
Gihane D., Directrice fonction publique
Adèle Dauxais, Chargée de mission
Anette Davis, Militante afroféministe
Régine Debatty, Critique d’art
Mehdi Derfoufi, Chercheur
Olivier De Perrot, Architecte Université ETH Zurich
Laurent De Wangen, Enseignant
Nawel Dekhli, Galeriste
Alèssi Dell’Umbria, Auteur-réalisateur
Yasmine Derrouiche, DAF Support
Sophie Derveau, Chercheuse en neurosciences
Eva Dietrich, Architecte
Amel Djenidi, Artiste visuelle travaillant tous les jours à la Casbah
Alexandra Dols, Productrice et réalisatrice
Toufik Douib, Curateur
Zahra Doumandji, Militante féministe, actrice et biologiste
Zahira Dris, Juriste
Adeline Dugoujon, Architecte urbaniste
Emmanuel Dupont, Architecte
John Edom, Architecte
Kaleche Zine El Abidine, Libre penseur
Bahijja El Amrani, Intermittente du spectacle
Baba Ali Mohamed El Habibi, Digital Manager et Photographe (né à la Casbah)
Nadia El Hakim, Architecte
Soraya El Kahlaoui, Sociologue
Lyoubi El Mahdi, Etudiant-réalisateur
Inès El-Shikh, Chargée de projet VIH/Sida et militante féministe antiraciste
Leila Elyaakabi, Enseignante
Anouk Essyad, Etudiante et militante
Dimitri Fagbohoun, Artiste
Diego Fagundes, Nimbu
Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Etudiante, Université de Toronto
Sandra Sainte Rose Fanchine, Chorégraphe, danseuse, graphiste
Kaouadji Fares, Chef de projet
Mustafa Faruki, Directeur de theLab-lab for architecture
Jessica Ferreiro, Travailleuse sociale
Feriel Fezoui, Stagiaire en marketing
Mehdi Fikri , Scénariste
Fatim Zahra Fofana, Chef d’entreprise
Laleh Foroughanfar, Doctorante en architecture et urban design, Lund University
Nada Diane Fridi, Architecte et anthropologue
Joao Gabriell, Blogueur et militant panafricain
Chiraz Gafsia, Architecte urbaniste
Feriel Gasmi Issiakhem, Architecte designer
Noelle Geller, Lectrice/Libraire
Clarisse Genton, Doctorante en architecture
François Gèze, Editeur
Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Professeure de géographie, City University of New York
Kanishka Goonewardena, Professeur associé, University of Toronto
Aly Gouchene, Technicien.ne du son et musicien.ne
N. Guehairia, Ingénieur d’Etat
Nora Guendour, Professeur formateur d’enseignement secondaire
Anna Guilló, artiste
Nacira Guénif, Professeure des universités, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis
Halima Guerroumi, Enseignante/chargée de missions arts appliqués et métiers d’art, fondatrice du collectif I.SIM
Anna Guilló, Artiste
Alyosha Goldstein, Professeur, Université du New Mexico
Hélène Veiga Gomes, anthropologiste urbaine
Sarra Griga, Journaliste et chercheuse en littérature
Maude Grübel, Photographe
Asma Guenifi, Psychologue clinicienne
Fadila Habchi, Doctorante et enseignante universitaire
Khalil Habrih, Doctorant
Lydia Haddag, Etudiante en politiques culturelles, Sciences Po Paris
Nedjma Hadj Ben, Curatrice de spectacles vivants, Bruxelles/Alger
Chaïnaise Hamaoui, Militante
Jasmine Hamaoui, étudiante en science politique et études sur le genre
Nabila Hamici, Architecte D.E
Naama Hamizi, Développeuse
Samir Hamma, Journaliste
Ahmed Hammad, Militant anticapacitiste
Julien Hammel, Militant décolonial
A.Hassen, Artiste onirique
Eric Hazan, Editeur
Samia Henni, Maîtresse de conférences en Histoire de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Université de Cornell
Gonzalo Herrero, Curateur
Laila Hida, Artist, activiste Culturelle, LE 18, Medina de Marrakech
Elise Hunchuck, Rédactrice, Scapegoat Journal
Jeffrey Hogrefe, Professeur associé, Humanities and Media Studies, fondateur de l’Architecture Writing Program, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY
Gaba Imed, Militant FLN
Nuha Innab, Architecte
Saba lnnab, Architecte, artiste
Bogdan Ionescu, Architecte
Matthew Irwin, Doctorant en American studies, University of New Mexico
Smail Issiakhem, Habitant de la Casbah
Michel Jaquet, Architecte
Mehdi K., Auteur et développeur web
Djamila Kabla, Economiste et guide conférencière de la Casbah
Kamel Kadri, Architecte directeur technique IPFIG
Caren Kaplan, Professeur, UC Davis
Anais Khaldi, Chercheuse en sociologie
Yazan Khalili, Artiste, Palestine
Jameldin Khan, Ingénieur
Hamid Khedjari, Natif de la Casbah (le papa de Rym)
Rym Hanna Khedjari (la fille de Hamid), diplômée en gouvernance urbaine, Sciences Po Paris
Fella Khelif, architecte
Rebekka Kiesewetter, Historienne d’art
Elisa Kim, Assistant de professeur d’architecture, Smith College
Aristodimos Komninos, Architect et Urban Designer
Charlie Kouka, Artiste
Yanis Koussim, Cinéaste
Lalla Kowska Régnier, Commerçante
Guilhem Lautrec, Travailleur social
Annick Labeca, Urban Lab Global Cities
Samia Labidi, Programmatrice de festival, curatrice de films
Yann Lacroix, Artiste
Frédérique Lagny, Cinéaste
Adrian Lahoud, Dean de l’école d’architecture du Royal College of Art à Londres
Lila Lakehal, Géographe et artiste
Léopold Lambert, Architecte et rédacteur-en-Chef de The Funambulist
Mathilde Lambert, Etudiante
Sido Lansari, Directeur de la Cinémathèque de Tanger
Ève Laroche-Joubert, Sculptrice, New York
Nina Støttrup Larsen, Artiste, Professeure à la Haute Ecole des arts du Rhin, Strasbourg
Marina Lathouri, Architectural Association (Master en Histoire et pensée critique)
Youcef Latreche, Etudiant
Mounia Lazali, Artiste
Hannah Le Roux, Architecte University of the Witwatersrand
Faïza Lellou, Attachée de production musiques actuelles
Ana María León, Architecte, historienne, et enseignante
William S. Lewis, Professeur de philosophie, Skidmore College, New York
Christine de Lignières, Artiste Visuelle
Cosimo Lisi, Doctorant en art et urbanisme
Marcelo Lopez-Dinardi, Architect, Professeur
Camille Louis – Kompost, Philosophe (Universités Paris 7 et Paris 8), dramaturge
Elena Loizidou, Conférencière en droit et théorie politique, Birkbeck College, University of London
Xavier Luce, Doctorant
B. Lynda, Assureur
Amel M’harzi, Chercheuse en sociologie
Imène Makhlouf, Juriste
Karim Makhlouf, Etudiant
Nadja Makhlouf, Photographe et Documentariste
Nagy Makhlouf, Etudiant en architecture
Ahfir Malik, Lycéen
Charlotte Malterre Barthes ( ETHZ/ Prof. TU Berlin)
Malika Mansouri, Psychologue clinicienne et Maître de conférences en psychologie
Joëlle Marelli, traductrice, chercheuse indépendante
Iva Marčetić, Architecte, activiste
Francesca Masoero, Commissaire, programmatrice, activiste culturelle
Jamel Matari, Designer et photographe
Dahbia Meddahi, Architecte et directrice d’un institut de formation professionnelle
Nadia Meflah, Auteure, formatrice, consultante en cinéma
Doreen Mende, Directrice CCC programme de recherche des arts visuelles, HEAD Genève
Elis Mendoza, Doctorante en Architecture, Princeton University
Anys Merhoum, Cofondateur des Ateliers d’Alger (Ad’A)
Nesma Merhoum, Cofondatrice de l’association Ateliers d’Alger (Ad’A)
Eléonore Merza Bronstein, Anthropologue du politique et co-directrice de De-Colonizer
Karim Meskia, Enseignant
Lina Meskine, Architecte
Madjid Messaoudene, Elu de Saint-Denis
Sadek Messaoudi, Journalier
Ismaël Metis, Rappeur
Hassane Mezine, Photographe et réalisateur
Fatéma Mezyane, Inspectrice régionale de la langue arabe
Majda Milad Cheikh, étudiante à Paris 8, Collectif Prenez ce couteau, Paris
Mohamed Mimoun, Militant antiraciste et DJ
Saadia Mirza, Architecte, artiste résidente, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professeur, New York University
Noah Modie, Architecte
Sundus Mohamed, Chargée d’exploitation
Amel Mohammedi, Formatrice et artiste
Houria Mokadem, Professeure du second degré
Karim Ait Mokhtar, Musicien auteur compositeur
Jacob Moore, Columbia University
Sarah Moretti, Urbaniste-géographe
Tiago Mota Saraiva, Architecte
Patricia A. Morton, Historienne de l’architecture colonial française, Professeure associée, UC Riverside
Azziz Mouats, Auteur, journaliste
Sasha Moujaes, Etudiante
Sofia Mourato (Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisbon)
Amina Mourid, Chef de projet (Think Tanger)
Nathalie Muchamad, Artiste-plasticienne
Margarethe Müller, Architecte, conférencière
Corinna Mullin, Universitaire
Can E. Mutlu, Professeur assistant, Acadia University
Aya Nasser
Mohamad Nahleh, Architecte
Arslan Naili, Designer et co-fondateur de l’atelier N.A.S, basé à la Casbah
Faouzi Nasrallah, Médecin
Massicilia Nedir, Etudiante
Mame-Fatou Niang, Universitaire
Lucie Nicolas, Metteure en scène
Ilaf Noury, Architecte d’intérieur
Tadashi Ono, Artiste-photographe, Professeur, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie
Ager Oueslati
Iza Oueslati
Najwa Ouguerram, Center for Intersectional Justice
Shreya Parikh, Doctorante en sociologie, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jussi Parikka, Professeure, University of Southampton
Amarí Peliowski ,Architecte et historienne, Chili
Mehdi Pennec, Coordinateur de projets
Octave Perrault, Architecte
Lucien Perrin, Etudiant en philosophie
Ryan Peterson, consultant en affaires publiques
Lorenzo Pezzani Goldsmiths, University of London
Minh-Ha T. Pham, Docteur en études éthniques comparatives
Anne Piot, Etudiante
Ethel Baraona Pohl, Dpr-Barcelona
Jean-François Pinet, Architecte et doctorant en architecture,Université libre de Bruxelles
Cécile Portier, Auteur
Joanne Pouzenc , Architecte
Dena Qaddumi, Doctorante en architecture, University of Cambridge
Yasmine Rabet, Musicienne, compositeur et interprète
Kenza Rady, Coordinatrice de projet
Sadek Rahim, Artiste
Anandi Ramamurthy, Universitaire, Sheffield Hallam Université
Abla Rehoudja, Personne d’important
Béatrice Rettig, Artiste
Cesar Reyes, Dpr-barcelona
Fabrice Riceputi, Historien
Brahim Rouabah, Universitaire
Adeline Rosenstein, Metteure en scène
Edith Roux, Photographe et artiste vidéo
Andreas Rumpfhuber, Architecte, Vienne
Romy Rüegger, Artiste et chercheuse Zurich université des Beaux Arts
Youcef S.
Ibtissam Saad, Auto-entrepreneuse
Leïla Saadna, Réalisatrice
Célia Sadai, Journaliste
Arafat Sadallah, Philosophe
Sandra Sainte Rose Fanchine, Chorégraphe, danseuse, graphiste
Ayesha Sarfraz, Architecte, Pakistan
Alina Sajed, Universitaire
Walid Sahraoui, Cascadeur
Sara Salem, Universitaire
Lavinia Scaletti, Urban designer
Mauro Sirotnjak, Architecte
Katrin Ströbel, artiste, docteur en histoire de l’art, enseignante dans une Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
Martín Garber Salzberg, Architecte
Coumba Samaké, Collectif intersectionnel féministe contre le cyberharcèlement
Kahena Sanaâ, Plasticienne et chercheuse
Yara Saqfalhait, Doctorante en histoire de l’architecture, Columbia University
Meriem Sator, Architecte
Sana Sbouaï, Journaliste et formatrice
Eva Schreiner, Doctorante en architecture, Columbia University
Pascal Schwaighofer, Artiste et doctorant Cornell University
Massinissa Selmani, Artiste
Rouan Sérik Imene, Architecte
Todd Shepard, Historien
Dina Siddiqi, Professeure agrégée de Clinique, New York University
Samir Slama, Paysagiste et journaliste
Younsi Smicha, Pharmacienne
Eric Smoodin, Professor d’American Studies, UC Davis
Elsa Soussan, Consultante genre et droits des femmes
Amina Tabti, Coordinatrice marketing
Fatiha Tabti, Retraitée de l’éducation nationale
Djibril Tachefine, Etudiant
Zoulikha Tahar, Autrice
Niloufar Tajeri, Assistant de recherche TU Braunschweig
Yamina Tahri, Educatrice sportive/Assistante sociale
Fanny Taillandier, Ecrivain, urbaniste
Rosario Talevi, Architecte, Berlin/Buenos Aires
Kenza Talmat, chercheuse en science politique
Wassyla Tamzali, Directrice fondatrice des Ateliers Sauvages
Eva Tapiero, Journaliste
Seghiri Tarek, l’Algérien
Frederic Tcheng, Réalisateur
Kengné Téguia, Artiste
Michele Tenzon, Doctorante, Université libre de Bruxelles
Teddy Théodose, Attaché d’administration
Olga Touloumi, Historienne de l’architecture, Bard College
Françoise Vergès, Politologue, féministe décoloniale
Pauline Vermeren, philosophe
Thomas Vescovi, Chercheur indépendant en histoire contemporaine
Tyler Wall, Professeur de sociologie, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Vehia Wheeler, Etudiante et consultante
Jozef Wouters, Artiste
Maja Ajmia Yde Zellama, Réalisatrice
Kamel Yahiaoui, Artiste plasticien
Nine Yamamoto-Masson, Artiste, théoricienne et chercheuse, University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis), co-directrice de Artists Without A Cause
Lamya Ygarmaten, Professeure de Lettres
Haythem Zakaria, Artiste
Myriam Zeggat, Illustratice et Auteure
Lynda Zein, Architecte
Manil Zenaki, Etudiant à Paris-Dauphine
Mr Ziani, Artisan
Sarah Zouak, Militante féministe et antiraciste, entrepreneure sociale et réalisatrice
Nadéra Zoubir

The post About the So-Called “Revitalization” of Algiers’ Casbah: An Open Letter to Jean Nouvel appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on January 17, 2019
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

On December 20, 2018, we were more than 400 people to sign an open letter addressed to French architect Jean Nouvel, asking him to refuse to be complicit in the project of the so-called “revitalization” of the Algiers’ Casbah financed by the Paris (Ile-de-France) region. His response, which did not satisfy us, allows me to react again about the persisting effects of colonialism and the legitimacy of architects to intervene or not. His response is available at the end of this text in French (only the passages that I am quoting in my answers were translated) and this text in its original French version is available on Mediapart.

Dear Jean Nouvel,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer us, which attests that you took the message we sent you seriously. The content of your letter, however, reveals a number of misunderstandings, and it seems important, therefore, to begin this answer with a short clarification.

We are three people to have written this open letter. Although one of us is from Algiers, the three of us live in France and the only useful and legitimate reaction to a project that we disapprove consisted for us in writing to you. Had we addressed our reproaches to the Wilaya of Algiers, you could have rightly blamed us for the same interventionism we denounced in our letter. As for Valérie Pécresse [the President of the Ile-de-France region], I think that our point is clear: we have nothing to say to her ,and we fight every day against the policies she and the elected members of the party to which she belongs [the French Republican Party] have developed internationally and nationally, and continue to develop at the regional and municipal levels. Of the three signatories of the convention for the so-called “revitalization” of the Casbah, you were thus for us the only interlocutor that we wanted to contact.

Your letter tells us at length what you believe is the quality of your work; we let everyone free to judge it and we have not at any time taken part in the many debates which are wondering whether your architectural firm has the appropriate skills for such a project or not. This is not the question in our opinion. And although almost all of your answer is dedicated to this question; a shocking sentence, however, burst in and reveals that this is not just a misunderstanding. Indeed, you write towards the end of your letter “Half a century later, no one is responsible for the crimes and errors of the generations of that time.”

Here probably lies the whole problem as well as the absolute necessity I feel to write to you again. I remind you first that many people who participated in the “errors” (sic) that you mention are still alive. Yourself are only a few years short to share the age of the youngest police officers in Paris who massacred nearly 300 peaceful Algerian demonstrators on October 17, 1961. It is true that the responsibilities to be imputed are less individual than collective. France (of which we are both a part, whether we like it or not) has never apologize to the Algerian people for forgiveness for 132 years of murder, looting, destruction, torture and humiliation. The “crime against humanity” constituted by colonialism (which was denounced a short time ago by a presidential candidate who, since then, has become President and is less vocal on this subject) has no prescription and every French (even more so white French) shares some responsibility for this crime as long as it is not recognized, regretted and repaired. It is not up to us to say that the page is turned and that “the time is for mutual respect and friendship” as you write.

This brings me to architecture since your answer focuses mainly on this aspect and, being an architect myself, I think I can answer you. You talk about friendship, but when friendship is healthy, it is characterized by a position of equality. You speak of a gift [architecture as a gift], but a gift is generous only when those to whom it is intended are able to refuse it. The relationship between an architect and those who will be subjects of architecture is not a relation of equality; it’s a power relationship. Of course, this does not mean that architects can only be malevolent with regard to the people whom the lines they trace will organize in space when those become walls.  It rather means that architects must consider whether the position that they occupy within this power relationship is legitimate or not. In the case of the Casbah, the power relationship that the Wilaya of Algiers, Valérie Pécresse and yourself propose to exercise towards a neighborhood that has already experienced so many times the expense of such an equation can only be harmful to its inhabitants.

Unfortunately, there is no Hippocratic oath for architects, which would prevent anyone from designing a project that would be harmful to the inhabitants of a given site — many architecture offices would have to close shop! So I can only appeal to your conscience to ask you again not to be complicit in what you call “patronage” — note how you could not stop yourself from using quotation marks — by the Ile-de-France region. Please leave the Casbah to those who are still waiting for the physical and symbolic marks that colonialism has left on their bodies and their cities to be recognized so that they can finally fade away; those who are what the Casbah has made of them; those who live it not as a heritage of a distant UNESCO, but as a place of life, a place of memory and an urban symbol of the struggle against colonialism. These people have among them all the skills, all the knowledge and all the legitimacy to respond to the difficulties that the Casbah is going through.

I thank you again for your time.

Léopold Lambert

Jean Nouvel’s response to our open letter (received on January 11, 2018):

A la lecture de cet appel et des tweets qui l’ont accompagné, j’ai compris que l’immense majorité des signataires ne me connaissent pas, m’imaginent comme un autre, tant les suspicions sont nombreuses : colonialiste ? Affairiste ? Gentrificateur ? Incompétent ? Prédateur ? Étranger ? Profiteur ? Amnésique ?

Je me permets donc de vous exprimer qui je suis. Ce n’est pas un autoportrait. Simplement, c’est un curriculum vitae sommaire et orienté sur la situation présente.

J’ai toujours été un homme de convictions et d’engagements. Fils d’enseignants laïques, ils m’ont inculqué le sens de la droiture et de la tolérance. Ils m’ont appris aussi à exprimer sans honte mes pensées, à ne pas rester silencieux face à l’humiliation.

Dans les années 1960, admis à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts en section architecture, j’ai été choqué par l’idéologie dominante qui marquait tous les projets : le style international, le même style pour tous les pays, pour toutes les villes, pour tous les climats, toutes les cultures… J’ai été aussi sidéré par le fait que tous les projets se développaient sans localisations, sans terrains, sans contextes… Aujourd’hui, cette idéologie a triomphé, mais je continue à la combattre. Je suis un engagé. Cet engagement est total depuis 50 ans. Tout site, tout programme, tout client a droit à une architecture spécifique. Cela s’appelle le droit à l’architecture, le droit à une pensée, à une stratégie étudiée à un moment précis pour un lieu précis. Parce que l’Histoire et la Géographie ne peuvent être oubliées.

Les engagements qui en découlent : d’abord le choix de Claude Parent et Paul Virilio comme professeurs loin des Beaux-Arts. Puis la création du mouvement Mars 76 avec des architectes de ma génération pour critiquer l’urbanisme officiel français qui appliquait la même recette pour toutes les villes françaises. Le même plan urbain basé sur un zoning brutal et sommaire caractérisé par les zones pavillonnaires, les zones d’habitations, les zones commerciales, les zones industrielles… l’ensemble complété par des gabarits et des densités obligatoires ! Après, mon engagement suivant, fut la création du syndicat de l’Architecture contre le corporatisme des architectes pour expliquer que la meilleure façon de défendre les architectes, c’était de défendre l’architecture, le droit à l’architecture. Si les architectes ne font plus d’architecture, leur rôle sociétal est annulé. La différenciation architecture et construction est cruciale. La frontière entre aménagement du territoire et urbanisme-architecture est à établir objectivement. L’aménagement du territoire est une donnée politique et stratégique qui s’impose à tous. L’urbanisme doit être considéré comme de l’architecture à grande échelle. L’organisation de l’espace et le choix des sites constructibles sont des actes architecturaux. Or, l’architecture est un art. Si les choix et les options sont catastrophiques – ce qui est souvent le cas – l’architecture ne peut plus exister. Si l’architecte, les architectes n’ont plus de vision et n’ont plus de pouvoir, c’est dramatique. Pas pour les architectes, ils se reconvertiront. C’est dramatique pour tous les habitants et habitantes, du plus jeune au plus vieux et évidemment pour l’équilibre et le plaisir de vivre tous ensemble. Le rôle de l’architecte est de défendre l’habitant. Or l’architecte n’a plus de pouvoir, ne peut plus exercer une légitime autorité pour le bien commun. Pour ces raisons ce syndicat de l’architecture fut créé. Pour ces raisons aussi mes engagements furent nombreux. Sur la mutation du centre de Paris, du Marais, des Halles, sur les polémiques publiques sur l’évolution parisienne, sur le développement de Seine Rive Gauche, puis sur le Grand Paris où les architectes avaient obtenu l’organisation d’une consultation internationale de dix équipes en 2008 pour, au-delà des schémas directeurs existants, imaginer les nouvelles stratégies de développement métropolitain. Sur tous ces sujets, des alternatives ont fait l’objet d’études urbaines. J’ai pour ma part participé et formalisé des projets sur l’ensemble d’entre eux. Ces études en ont amené d’autres à l’échelle internationale. En Espagne à Valencia, puis à la Corogne, à Barcelone, puis en Allemagne à Berlin, puis en Italie à Colle Val d’Elsa, cité historique entre Sienne et Florence, puis à Pérouse pour l’implantation du Mini-métro, puis en Suède sur les îles du centre historique de Stockholm, enfin en Chine pour l’étude d’un quartier de Shenzhen pour la création pour Tencent d’une ville de plusieurs centaines de milliers d’habitants. Autant d’exemples d’engagements sur des études lourdes et longues, invitations généralement liées à mes références et ma capacité à répondre à la question de l’intégration de programmes importants en milieu urbain historique et protégé. En relation directe avec les administrations des monuments historiques à Paris, à Lyon, à Lucerne, à Madrid, à Barcelone, à Tokyo, à Vienne, à Londres et à Manhattan.

Il est donc pour moi étonnant de lire que tant de professionnels de la profession (comme le disait si bien Jean- Luc Godard) soient contrariés du choix d’un architecte comme moi pour réfléchir sur une thématique de même ordre pour la ville d’Alger.

Mes engagements urbains ne sont pas les seuls. La question du logement social aujourd’hui cloné et étriqué est pour moi une longue bataille. La politique de Réalisation Expérimentale (Rex) sous François Mitterrand m’a permis de réaliser des logements sociaux avec 30 à 50 % de plus de surface habitable pour le même prix à Nîmes, mais aussi à Saint-Ouen et à Bezons en banlieue parisienne, démonstrations très mal vues par les bailleurs sociaux de l’époque. 15 ans après pour le centième anniversaire de la cité ouvrière de Mulhouse, j’ai été invité à étudier des habitations individuelles sociales et expérimentales, expérience que j’ai proposée de partager et de construire avec mes confrères Lacaton & Vassal, Duncan Lewis, Matthieu Poitevin et Shigeru Ban. En 2010 la bataille a continué à Bordeaux avec Mia Hagg, puis aujourd’hui à Nice et Marseille. Marseille qui fut aussi pour moi l’objet d’un engagement majeur pour pérenniser la Friche de la Belle de Mai, véritable quartier urbain culturel où des producteurs de multiples disciplines invitent des artistes de tous horizons (souvent méditerranéens), Friche que j’ai eu l’honneur de présider pendant 7 ans. L’architecte et l’architecture doivent être liés à un savoir transculturel, trans-artistique, malheureusement sous-estimé aujourd’hui dans la plupart des écoles internationales. Cette intime conviction m’a conduit à être l’architecte de la Biennale d’art de Paris pendant 15 ans dans les années 80, puis à créer la Biennale d’architecture, puis à être commissaire du Pavillon français à la Biennale de Venise (2000) sur le thème « Moins d’esthétique, plus d’éthique » pour demander l’engagement des architectes sur les scandaleuses conditions de logement dans le monde. Puis architecte du musée des civilisations du Quai Branly (2005) pour concevoir mon projet avec des artistes de ces civilisations vivantes (artistes Aborigènes), et j’ai déjà aussi rendu hommage à la culture arabe dans de nombreux projets, depuis la réalisation de l’Institut du Monde Arabe à Paris jusqu’à celles du Louvre Abu Dhabi et du Musée National du Qatar. Aujourd’hui mon implication est de formuler des propositions pour le Grand Paris et pour une politique d’élaboration des territoires français.

Je pense que la proposition de la Région Île-de-France de « mécéner » des études urbaines pour Alger et sa Casbah va dans le sens de l’Histoire. Attitude déjà initiée par l’accord d’amitié et de coopération signé en 2003 entre la Ville de Paris et la Wilaya pour la sauvegarde et l’étude du Jardin d’Essai du Hamma. L’heure est au respect mutuel et à l’amitié. Un demi-siècle après, personne n’est responsable des crimes et des erreurs des générations d’alors. J’ai toujours considéré que l’architecture doit être un don, un cadeau, un acte d’amour pour un lieu et ceux qui le vivent.

Je vais essayer, avec tous ceux qui s’impliquent avec moi dans cette étude qui débutera mi-janvier (la Wilaya d’Alger, la Région Île-de-France, l’Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme d’ Île-de-France, l’Agence Nationale algérienne des Secteurs sauvegardés, l’Agence Nationale algérienne de Gestion des Téalisations des Grands Projets de la Culture, l’Association des Amis d’Alger “Sauvons la Casbah”, des architectes et urbanistes algériens…), de formuler une contribution qui pourrait se développer et évoluer à l’échelle du territoire et du temps urbain et… toutes les bonnes idées sont et seront les bienvenues.

Jean Nouvel Janvier 2019

The post Algiers’ Casbah: Jean Nouvel’s Response to Our Open Letter appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Léopold Lambert – Paris on April 23, 2019
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

On March 25, 2019, architecture news platform Dezeen published an article entitled “Architects who don’t pay interns “shouldn’t be given prestigious commissions” says designer who revealed Ishigami internships” that related a story many in the field of architecture know all too well: a young white designer applied to an internship at Junya Ishigami’s architecture office in Tokyo. The response from the Japanese firm consisted in a list of exploitative conditions for one to be an intern in their office, the main ones consisting in the absence of any salary as well as intensive hours of work (11AM-midnight). The focus of the article on Japanese architecture firms (that tend to be more explicit about their exploitative terms than their western counterparts that nonetheless share similar practices) was a little unsettling as was the idea that what was at stake was “prestigious commissions” more than dignifying labor conditions, but its general topic was legitimate: whether for internships or for the amount of extra hours worked by so many within the field of architecture, unpaid labor and other exploitative conditions must be addressed and fought in a coordinated front.

Although this article was certainly not exhuming something unknown, it could have contributed to a healthy debate about how to organize against the many forms of violence that architecture offices hosts — exploitative labor being one, racism and misogyny being two other predominant ones. Instead, the designer whose experience was related in the article shared his experience on social media using the two following hashtags: #MakeArchitectureGreatAgain and #ArchiSlavery. While the first one was addressed by several people for its connection with the violence of the current U.S. President’s policies — most likely, the designer does not approve of these policies, but the possibility of playing with a slogan that polices, incarcerates and kills says a lot about privilege — the second one is even more revealing about the overwhelming whiteness that characterizes architecture as a discipline. The designer was subsequently publicly and privately called out by some people including friends Elise Misao Hunchuck and Dubravka Sekulic to which followed the usual manifestation of denial, upset, and the “agree to disagree” of those who have the luxury to live in a world where disagreement with others does not constitute a life-threatening situation.

I have no interest in specifically citing this person here; although they should be held accountable for his public statement, singling them out would prevent to read the collective responsibility of his words. And clearly, the idea that unpaid internships is somehow comparable with slavery seems to go much beyond them and be well accepted within architecture as a field, as we can see through a recently published (again on Dezeen) tribune by London-based established architect Sean Griffiths, entitled with a quote of his text: “The master and slave mentality remains firmly embedded in architectural culture” (April 11, 2019). In it, Griffiths shares with us his dilemma when he confronts architectures he admires while knowing that they have been produced thanks to unpaid labor! Reflecting on the state of the profession, he affirms “As Friedrich Nietszche would have recognised, the master and slave mentality remains firmly embedded in architectural culture.” The post-mortem approval of the philosopher notwithstanding, it is baffling to see that this sentence represented so much not a problem for the editors, that they decided to turn it into the title of the column.

So no, dear Dezeen and Sean Griffiths, unpaid internships in architecture offices are not comparable to slavery — it makes me cringe to associate them in a sentence, even a negative one. Slavery is a European industrial racist machine of kidnapping, transcontinental displacement, imprisoning, enforced labor, and systematic death of 13 millions of African people in a settler colonial context, which still affects the life conditions of millions of Black people today. Furthermore, this machine would have never been possible without the active and willing contributions of architects designing boats, barracks, plantations, and prisons. And if we are to speak about slave labor, it was used by settler colonial architects to build the monuments and infrastructures of entire cities like Washington D.C. as Mabel Wilson demonstrates extensively in her work.

The dilemma of the discipline should therefore not be whether we can admire architecture produced within exploitative conditions, but first and foremost to recognize, study, and address how the global system of colonial, racist, and capitalist violence could simply not operate the way it does without the active contribution of architects. This is true for the physical enforcement of this system’s programs that architecture materializes (citing only a few: prisons, colonies, police stations, gentrifying housing units, gated communities, militarized/exclusive public space…), but also for the exploited labor of construction workers in most geographical contexts (not just in the Gulf or China!), which has to be fought at the same time if not before the exploitative conditions at work within architecture offices.

The post On Architecture’s Implacable Whiteness: European Architects Compare Unpaid Internships to Slavery appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

A joint statement by Dubravka Sekulić, Elise Misao Hunchuck, and Léopold Lambert ///

Yesterday, like many people, our social media was inundated by a wave of enthusiasm for the artistic intervention that the U.S.-based architecture office Rael-San Fratello have installed on a portion of what is commonly known as the border between the nation states of the United States and Mexico. Before we proceed, we would like to say that our urge to offer a statement has less to do with the intervention itself (we have no doubt that those who live close to “the border” must negotiate their existence with it on a daily basis) which has been taken down by its designers after the “photo shoot” anyway, but rather, with the publicization orchestrated by Rael-San Fratello and relayed by countless media, because this publicization, just like the book published by Ronald Rael in 2017, Borderwall as Architecture, holds a discursive value and as such, invites urgently-needed debate. We do so as architects and landscape architects, which is to say, as people involved in disciplines that continue to be among the most implacable means of enforcement of nation states’ violence. 

When it comes to this piece of architecture that extends hundreds of miles since the first George H. W. Bush administration — we were baffled during the last U.S. presidential campaign to see how many people in the U.S. seemed to have forgotten that the wall already existed — two narratives oppose themselves. The first narrative perceives the wall as a quarrel between neighbors that ended with the erection of this oppositional architectural typology. The Rael-San Fratello intervention is thus perceived by this narrative and its adherents as a salutatory encounter where “children from both sides can play together” and where one learns to know “the other.” If we believed that this narrative was accurately describing this situation, we could join the enthusiasm for a small yet symbolic gesture.

We however believe that an accurate depiction of the current situation involves the narrative that situates this border — even before the erection of the wall that has come to embody it — as a violent settler colonial infrastructure, a result of the European (British, Spanish, French, and later white U.S.) project of the historical and ongoing systematic dispossession and genocide of Indigenous nations. The enforcement of the political infrastructure embodied in this border is not limited to the wall itself: the line of the border is thick and extends ruthlessly outward to include a 100-mile wide zone of immigration control where an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 have died in the last 20 years, where weapon-carrying U.S. white-supremacist militias have murdered many, and where the brutal hands of ICE agents can appear at any moment to seize and imprison mostly Indigenous people coming from the south of Turtle Island in its growing network of concentration camps. 

Three years ago, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign saw two paradigms facing each other: on the one hand, the active reinforcement of the neoliberal settler colonial status quo and, on the other hand, its fascist intensification, an architecture competition entitled “Build the Border Wall?”. Launched to offer designers the possibility to envision the materialization of the border wall extension ‘proposed’ by then-candidate and now 45th president of the northern settler colony, the outrage within the architecture scene against this competition was swift and it was substantial. Rightfully, many saw the efforts by the organizers to make the competition “politically neutral” (LOL) and to imagine a “humane” border as fundamentally unacceptable, although the outrage was certainly less than in 2006 when the New York Times imagined an architectural competition for “A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs” (see this text written by Léopold in 2017). Imagine our surprise then when we saw the very same architecture scene celebrating three pink seesaws set up on the very same settler colonial wall through the provision and distribution of images (because again, this is less about the installation itself than its publicization) of a more beautiful, more productive, more “humane” settler colonial infrastructure. The immediate public acceptance and celebration of this project flattened it into a palatable image of hope, concealing if not erasing real and pressing  concerns. By doing so, it reinforces the continuous political production of the two sides of a line for which one side is fully subjected to its enforcement, while the other is able to navigate between both (as demonstrated in the case of the seesaws videos).

“They are three seesaws, why do you care?” We care because, if we are serious about the dismantlement of the racist and colonial structures that rule the people living in Turtle Island (and we are), then our actions and political imaginaries must be consistent with this program. As such, the only publicized intervention we could possibly imagine supporting regarding the settler colonial wall involves a bulldozer (painted in pink, if you’d like) and a driver with the privilege of a U.S. passport behind the wheel. We do not ask you for the same sacrificial gesture that was carried out by Willem van Spronsen who was killed as he was attacking ICE’s Northwest Detention Center (read: concentration camp infrastructure) in Tacoma just two weeks ago on July 13, 2019, but, let us be clear: we cannot and will not  support any project that does not fundamentally challenge — symbolically or effectively — the structure of settler colonialism. 

SUGGESTED READING/LISTENING ///

• Silvia Federici interviewed by Max Haiven, On capitalism, colonialism, women and food politics, Politics and Culture, Issue 2, 2009
• Nick Estes, Our History is the Future, Verso, 2018
• Our history is the Future with Nick Estes, The Dig Radio Podcast
  
• Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as a Method, Duke University Press, 2013
  
• Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, On Colonial Unknowing, Theory & Event, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2016
  

The post Borderwall as (Settler Colonial) Architecture, or why We Prefer Bulldozers to Seesaws appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

The names of the signatories will be regularly added to this page.

We are making a few past articles of the magazine and podcast episodes available to all in order to provide a useful resource complementing this pledge:

• MAKING ABOLITION GEOGRAPHY IN CALIFORNIA’S CENTRAL VALLEY
  with Ruth Wilson Gilmore in The Funambulist 21 (Jan-Feb. 2019) Space & Activism
• RACIALIZED CRIMINALIZATION AND PRISON UPRISINGS IN THE UNITED STATES
  with Orisanmi Burton in The Funambulist 12 (July-August 2017) Racialized Incarceration
• ON PRISON ABOLITIONISM
  with Nasrin Himada in The Funambulist 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments / You can also listen to this conversation in The Funambulist Podcast
• BODIES IN RESISTANCE IN THE NORTH OF IRELAND’S POLITICAL PRISONS
  by Fiona McCann in The Funambulist 04 (Mar-Apr. 2016) Carceral Environments
• DOCUMENTING THE UNDOCUMENTED: CARCERAL ARCHITECTURE AND MIGRANT BODIES
  with Tings Chak in The Funambulist Podcast episode 41 (May 2014).
• ON GENOCIDE, DETENTION, AND REFUGEEHOOD
  with Imran Mohammad in The Funambulist Podcast episode 134 (December 2019).
• ABOLISH ALL PRISONS: FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE AND NON-PRACTICE OF ARCHITECTURE
  by Léopold Lambert in The Architectural Review (June 2018).

We also recommend consulting the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) website, as well as this comprehensive text by Rachel Kushner about the abolitionist work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Names of signatories as of March 10 (140 architects & designers):

The post We Pledge to Never Participate to the Design of Spaces of Detention appeared first on THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE.

Addendum: Snøhetta’s response to this letter can be read below the names of the signatories. 

Dear Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, dear Craig Edward Dykers, dear partners and employees of the world-renowned architecture office Snøhetta,

This letter to you originates from Paris where, one of your design is slowly materializing into what soon will be the new headquarters of France’s major newspaper Le Monde. You are hopefully aware that the construction site of this project has been the place of a crucial struggle for workers’ rights these past few days. In fact, as we are writing you this letter, some of our undocumented worker comrades, along with the union CNT-Solidarité ouvrière (Labor National Confederation-Workers solidarity) have been “inaugurating your building” (their words) occupying day and night the construction site as a means to obtain reparations.

About 30 undocumented workers have been hired by two subcontractors (CICAD and Golden Clean) of the fifth largest construction company in Europe, the infamous Eiffage, which has been hired by Le Monde for the construction of the steel structure and facade of “your building.” Similarly to the situation of many undocumented workers in Europe, these workers have been exploited and their labor is legally qualified as “dissimulated” by the French Penal Code.

These undocumented workers demand:

• the end of subcontracting and their direct hire by Eiffage ;
• the payment of all the hours of labor according to the standard hourly rate (some of them have been only paid 40 euros per night; extra time has been paid 5 euro per hour) ;
• the pay stubs corresponding to their labor ;
• the respect of the labor code, security norms and collective conventions;
• the documents that would allow their documentation.

Some of the 600 Gilets Noirs (group of undocumented activists), who, on July 12, 2019, succeeded in occupying the French Pantheon before being violently charged and beaten by armed racist police, are part of the occupation. Gilets Noirs activists — many of whom came to live and work in France from Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, or Ivory Coast — have been stressing the many reasons that make their extremely precarious conditions the effects of colonial structures, both in the way their countries still exist in an economic, military, and political dependency imposed by France, and through the process of racialization to which the French state and its representatives (the police in particular) are subjecting them. It is also crucial to understand that the status of undocumented workers does not only make them economically vulnerable, it also makes them virtually disposable and creates conditions of potentially deadly physical harm. Every year, many undocumented workers die on European construction sites with no accountability whatsoever for the many people responsible for this situation — even far from the shores and way into its land, Fortress Europe continues to kill racialized people.

As the architects of Le Monde‘s headquarters, you are part of the entities politically responsible for the conditions of labor in which your design is being materialized. As such, you cannot claim neutrality, and we, 252 architects and non-architects from various places of the world, formally ask you to unequivocally position yourselves with regards to this situation. If you choose to side with Eiffage, claims that this is not your responsibility, or decline to answer, we will consider you as political adversaries and hold you publicly accountable. If, on the other hand, you recognize that architects are co-responsible for the labor conditions on the sites of the materialization of their design, you can establish an important precedent for the profession, undocumented workers’ rights, and society at large. In doing so, you must explicitly communicate to Eiffage your support to undocumented workers’ claims so as to put pressure on them as it is your prerogative.

We thank you for your time and hope to hear from you as soon as possible.

Signatories (names of people who identify with the “we” of this letter will be regularly added here)
Léopold Lambert, publisher & architect
Evelyn Hofmann, architecture
Desiree Valadares
Jessica Ferreiro, Social Worker
Nataša Prljević, cultural worker
Bogdan Ionescu, architect
Margarida Waco
Antoine Perron, architecture student
Chloé Darmon, architecture student
Hadj-Hassen Amel, architecture student
Françoise Vergès, Political Activist
Anne Barthes, architecte
Patricia Morton, Professor of Architectural History
Muchamad Nathalie, visual artist
Karima El Kharraze, playwright and theatre director
Hajer Ben Boubaker
Miriam H Abraham, educator & developer
Dubravka Sekulić, architect and educator
Esther Delaunay, architecture student
Lynda Zein, architect
Pedro Telles da Silveira, Historian
Amarí Peliowski, Architect
Apruzzese Antoine, architect
Erika Brandl, architect
Dr Hannah le Roux, architect
Mitchell Lawrence, Architecture Student
Isabel Gutierrez Sanchez, Architect
Benoit, architecture student
Gerty Dambury, playwright
Faune Stevens, designer
Nadia El Hakim, architect
Peter Box Andersson, curator, Oslo
Kenza Talmat, student
Nathyfa Michel, teacher
Ben Abdallah Yassine, Design Student
Amel M’harzi, student
Shela Sheikh, academic
Lori A. Brown, architect and professor
Madeeha Merchant, Architect
Biayna Bogosian
Jérémy DC, translator
James Martin, Architect
seldal giritli, architect / redaktor
Leó Barista
Karolína Plášková, architect
Michael Badu, architect
Leslie Forehand, Architect and Professor
Xavier Wrona, architect and professor
Olivia Ahn, Designer
Zineb El Gharbi, PhD Candidate, Ehess (Paris)
Marianne Ferrand, Architect
Olivier Peyricot, direction recherche Cité du design
Charlotte, architect etc
Etienne Chobaux, architect
Kordae Jatafa Henry, Director + Designer
Rosalba González, urban planner
Orit Theuer, Architect
Alfred Amely
René Boer, critic
emily suzanne lever, reporter
Emilie Pichot, librarian
Sadia Shirazi, PhD candidate and educator
Albert Refiti, associate professor of art and design
Peter Macapia, Professor, Architectural Designer
Jeanne Rivière, architecte
lize wessels, architecture student
Mina Rafiee- Architect
SOV
Martin Byrne, Architect
ST Luk, Designer
Sarah Roubach, architect
Nasser Rabbat, Professor of Architecture
Wardak Feda, Architect
Melissa BELL BELL – travailleuse social
Samaneh Moafi, Senior Researcher (architecture)
Marina Otero, architect
Marat Cackley-Hughes
Brent Patterson, Teacher architectural theory & history – ENSAPM, ENSAPLV, ENSAB
Jeevan Farias, Researcher
Nayri Carman, student
Tibourki youssef student
Marie Hamoniaux, architecture student
Baptiste SÉRIS – ENSA Paris-Malaquais
Julia Markey, Architectural Designer
Etienne Issa, arch designer, researcher, and activist
Sonia Zerhouni, Engineer
Jaemin AN, architecture student
Alex Lenthe
Massicilia Nedir, student
Rula Shadid, Architect
Sunmi Lee, Designer
Ziheng Li student
Nagy Makhlouf Architecture student
Noelle Geller
Charlotte Grace, Lecturer in Architecture
architect
Jade Bénéï – Architecture student
Mai AlBattat _ Urban designer
Jean Makhlouta, architecte
Belen Laquèche, architecture student
Elise Hunchuck, landscape architect & editor
Silvia Rafael Pazos – architect
Timothy Perkins, professor urban politics ENSCI-les ateliers, artist, architect
Marina L, student
Merve Bedir, architect
Jude Hamze, student
Ana Dana Beroš, architect and curator
Dimitra Andritsou, architect, researcher
Georges Kallab – Architecte
Ethel Baraona Pohl. Co-founder of dpr-barcelona
Emilio Brandao, architect & teacher
Leroy & Architecture’s Student
Arvind Ramachandran, architect
Enguerran Chauve, Artist and Designer
A. Journée-Duez, PhD candidate in Anthropology
HiroKo Nakatani, Architect
Fernande Njonkou Njanjo, architecte
M. Wesam Al Asali, Architect
Elias Guenoun, architect
Thomas Batzenschlager – Architect & Teacher
Daron Chiu, architecture student
Lenka Milerova, architect
Stijn Baets architect
Mara Petra Architect
Giacomo Pirazzoli, architect and professor
Ana María León, architect, historian, educator
Gianluca Croce, architect
Bernardo Amaral, Architect
Álvaro López Gadea, architecture student
Keith Hack, Graduate Architecture Student
Sarah Gerdiken architecture student
Nacira GUÉNIF Sociologist, Professor University Paris !
Karina A. Architect
Constantinos Miltiadis, architect
Alexandra Bedin – architecture master student
Alice Ravelo de Tovar, architecture student
Nagapane Shalinie – étudiante
Ruth Lang, architect
Anaïs Duong-Pedica, Researcher at Åbo Akademi University (Finland)
Nora Labo, art historian
mireille besnard artiste
Sam Maolánach Ó Gealbháin, Architecture student.
Aref, architect
Max Turnheim, Architect
Sanela Dizdar, architect
Ena Kukic, architect
Kendra James, Sr Design Director
Sébastien Beauregard, architecte
Deborah Cowen, professor – urban planning and geography
Joshua Barnett, RA, architect.
Frixos Petrou, architecture student
Christos Floros, Architect
Erdem Üngür, Researcher/Architect
Evan , architect
Lindesay Dawe, Architect (UK)
Marianna Kontos, architect and PhD student
Hulya Ertas, critic
Lescot, teacher
Tanguy Aubin, Architecture student
Clara Piolatto, PhD student in architecture
Anders Neergaard, professor in Sociology
Erik Berggren, Research communicator, curator
Sandra Lange performance design and research
Erik Berggren, Research communicator, curator
João Paupério, architect
Martin Jacob, Student
Socrates Stratis, Architect, Urbanist
Nora El Massioui Anti-discrimination Trainer
Mario Pessa , Architect
Clarisse Genton PhD Candidate (ENSA Paris-Malaquais)
Tamaya Sapey-Triomphe – architecture student
Clément Vergé Architecture student
Léo Dumont, designer
Perspectivas anómalas | ciudad · arquitectura · ideas
esraa smadi, an architect
cyril nicosia (architecture student)
Luis Angel Flores, urbanist
Nathaniel, Architecture Student
Albert Brenchat-Aguilar (architect/curator)
Nuno Neves
Maxime Geny, Architect
Guillaume Tisserand, Student of architecture.
Henrik Almquist
Lachlan Welsh – architect
Sarah Gunawan, Senior Architectural Designer
Adam Achrati, Architect
Patrick Donbeck, designer & educator
Eduardo Cassina, architect/ adj. Professor of architecture
Javier Arbona, Assistant Professor, University of California – Davis
Michael Maginness, Architectural Designer and Visual Artist
Jeremy Lecomte, Philosophe et historien de l’architecture
Tim de Boer aecitectural critic
Pietro Castano Teacher
Thierry Decuypere, architect, assistant ULB Brussels
Mahmoud Keshavarz, Design researcher
Tamar Shafrir, designer
Diana Cuc, architecture student
Dario Di Turi
Alfredo Roccia, Architect
cécile researcher in history of architecture
Vincent Meessen, Artist
Chloé & architect
Lorenzo Lazzari, researcher
RANA SALAMAT Kanzal-Noor, Architecture student
Afroditi Dosopoulou, Architect
Feda Wardak – Architect
Alex Bodkin, Architectural Designer
Jess Myers, urbanist
Mahdi Sabbagh, architect
Lucia Alonso architect
Joey Swerdlin, Architectural Designer
Bart Decroos, Architect
Iben von Holck, Anthropologist
Lambert Dauvillier architecte DE
Mira Younes, Scholar, Psychologist
Jakob Grabher, student
Nils Neuboeck, architecture student
Roanne Moodley, Candidate Architect
Hannah Höfte, architect
Sidonia Tabita Waco, Leisure manager
Luís Pinto, architecture student
Léa Noguès architecte
Regis Lisa-Marine, architecture student
Gack Flores, human
Helena Souto, architecture student
Kirti Durelle, architect
Eleanor Peres, architect
Senaka Weeraman Designer
Baris Yarsel / Chef de projet
UVW – Section of Architectural Workers (U.K. Trade Union)
Tatiana vela, architect
Florian Corniquel – architecte
Jean-Edouard Jaber, architecture student
Jennifer Endozo, architectural designer
Alix Rever, studying Architecture ENSAPM
Concrete Action
C. Lefebure, architect
Camille Rouaud, architect
César Reyes Nájera | dpr-barcelona
Jerome le liard worker
Daham Marapane, architecture student
Berenice GAUTHIER, STUDENT
Trine Strand Hale, Architect
Salvatore Peluso, writer
Assia Boudhar Lecturer and Researcher at University College London
Francelle Cane, Architect
Alexandre Marguerie
Maarten Slof, Designer
George Kafka, architecture writer/editor
Lucas Issey, architect
Angel Dodov, architecture student
Inoussia Ahmed – Student

Answer by Snøhetta sent to us and Le Monde on March 2, 2020 by Kjetil Trædal Thorsen ////

We are saddened and caught off guard by the news about the situation for the cleaning personnel on the Le Monde Group Headquarters building site. We support the personnel’s demands for fair treatment and urge for an agreement that ensures that working regulations are respected. 

Ever since working on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, we have actively been advocating for workers’ rights on the building sites in which we have been involved around the world. This includes health and safety regulations for construction workers as well as their overall contractual conditions.

We will continue to do our utmost to make sure that workers’ rights are respected. This incident is an important reminder that both we and the building industry must work even harder to prevent unjust treatment of workers – both today and in the future.

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