About the So-Called “Revitalization” of Algiers’ Casbah: An Open Letter to Jean Nouvel - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
▻https://thefunambulist.net/history/called-revitalization-algiers-casbah-open-letter-jean-nouvel
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.
