Euroméditerranée: Spatial Injustice by Design and by Law
Marseille, France

Euroméditerranée (EuroMed) is an extensive urban renewal scheme that has transformed Marseille's northern industrial area through a €7 billion investment of public and private funds, using legal tools to erase and replace the urban fabric over its 480-hectare area. Massive urban forms emerge from a process of aggregated ownership facilitating sizable property transfer and large-scale operations, paving the way for current expropriation and demolition policies toward recapitalization and new buildings.

EuroMed’s urbanism yields an architecture of large, monofunctional blocks with blind or vacant ground floors and aims to sanitize the adjacent small, affordable, diverse urban fabric of urban villages like Les Crottes and La Cabucelle. So, if we admit the identity-shattering posit that construction can never be sustainable, how to respond to housing needs? This studio intenasjdflajsdlfjalsdfds to face t
Through a mixed methodology of archival and discourse analysis complemented by extensive fieldwork, this project seeks to uncover how an architecture generated by past and present real estate economics aided by public force and design hubris impacts the streetscape of Marseille. |1|

|1| See Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, and Something Fantastic, Migrant Marseille. Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2020) and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, "Euroméditerranée : Une Injustice Spatiale Dessinée Et Légiférée," in Patrimoine et Projets et Tourisme Dans La Ville Méditerranéenne, ed. Mazen Haïdar Virginie Picon-Lefebvre (Forthcoming, 2024).