La ville et l’architecture européennes du XIXe siècle dans la Casbah d’Alger Transformation et construction : entre liberté et idéal esthétiques

Abstract

History of creation of the first European quarters within Algiers’s old city called “Casbah” is both little known and poorly understood. It is little known because it has often been part of a macro history, and it is poorly understood because, wheneve we have ventured into detailed studies, one aspect was privileged over the other , which gives a skewed and essentialist vision . The introduction, since 1830, of the notion of embellishment in the city authorities discourse and in texts governing the city suggests an aesthetic end to these interventions, but remains closely tied to the need for circulation. Aside from its contribution to the a posteriori rewriting of the urban and architectural history of the Casbah, this thesis contributes to making the aesthetic aims of the transformation and reconstruction of the Casbah more explicit. It addresses several issues: competences of the colonial administration protagonists in the field of architecture and urbanism ; legislative mechanisms underlying the idealised urban and architectural aesthetic; elements defining the latter; and finally, the role of both public and private architecture in affirming or, rather, emancipating the aesthetic ideal on both urban and architectural levels. Moreover, this thesis provides new elements of knowledge to the global history of the city and 19th century architecture by not viewing Algiers as a colonial city but as a transcultural model resulting from a dual influence, that of the pre-colonial city and the metropolitan model. Through a substantial corpus of archival documents, we will reconstruct the course of urban events. This historical method requires to approach the research object on several levels, in order to avoid a biased interpretation of the observed phenomena. Thus, we will opt for the analysis of political, social and cultural levels which are in our opinion closely tied to the city and to architecture. The analysis will be carried out at the scale of the public space as well as surrounding buildings in order to identify and deduce general rules characterizing the urban transformation and the resulting reconstruction