Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity

Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in conversation, discussing their newest publication Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity, co-edited with Something Fantastic (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2020).

On November 5, 2018, a pair of dilapidated buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people, many of them from immigrant origin. This toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social inequality. Divided along ethnic and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from discriminatory governance, lack of housing-stock maintenance, constant influx of migrants, widespread privatization of services, as well as rapid, profit-driven, and destructive post-industrial urbanization. Migrant Marseille examines this complex city through the prisms of migration and socio-spatial production – at the architectural, urban, and territorial scales. In this conversation, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Assistant Professor of Urban Design) and Marc Angélil (Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor in Architecture and Urban Planning and Design) will discuss the role of planners and urban designers in fostering social and spatial integration.

This event is supported by the Prof. Bill Breger, MAR ’45, Fund in Honor of Professor Walter Gropius.