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Les Grands Paysages | Algier

Landscape Utopia

The Obus Project was a myth. In one grand gesture, Le Corbusier placed a ten-kilometre-long building along the coast from St. Eugène to Maison Carée (Bologhine to El-Harrach). The building‘s roof served as a motorway and all of the flats that were stacked on top of each other like boxes had a view of the sea. In order to envision this gesture for Algiers, ”the fact that cities, structures, and inhabitants were already in existence on the project site was blithely ignored. This lack of context is indicative of the territorial thinking, practices, and representational policies of colonial modernism.“(Karakayalı/ von Osten 2008)

In contrast, the gesture of opening the city of Algiers to the sea is a positive utopia and the result of democratic urban development in which public space is created. This coastal city, which is built into the slopes of the Tell Atlas Mountains, has an infrastructurally challenging and dense centre. Expanding the city into the sea – similar to the land reclamation that has occurred in Dubai, for example – with universally accessible public space could help to improve the overall quality of life for inhabitants. In combination with the development of an underground transport infrastructure (streets and rails, parking garages), this type of urban expansion could be a vision, a type of landscape utopia.