War on the Casbah

War on the Casbah Synopsis

Under the increasing pressures of globalisation, the Algerian government is planning to turn Algiers and its hinterland into one of the most important metropolitan areas of the Mediterranean region by 2025. Part of this challenge is to overcome the housing crisis, which has characterised the city since the 1920s. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of urban housing in Algiers from the Ottoman era through the period of French colonial rule up to the present. By exploring important topics such as power, discourse, representation, resistance, memory and everyday life, it aims to highlight the relationship between the built environment, culture, and broader political-economic contexts. The study of the impact of colonial projects on the formation of post-colonial cities and societies has been limited in scope. This volume uses a broader approach, which considers the examination of four main aspects: 1. How colonial power constructed and organised policies and strategies (the investigation of the ways that colonial administration articulated and represented its motives in discursive form is as important as the way that colonial power functioned in practice, since both had effects on the colonised subjects). 2. The impact of the use of the built environment as a colonial instrument in colonial societies. 3. The way that the colonised subjects responded to colonial power. 4. The post-independence practices, strategies of development and social changes.