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Hey kids, do you want to learn more about Algiers? It’s time for our second walk!
Today, we’ll be starting again on the Place des Martyrs, but walking in the opposite direction: north through Bab el Oued.
and this time, we’re going to ask - what is a beautiful city?
Today, we’ll be starting again on the Place des Martyrs, but walking in the opposite direction: north through Bab el Oued.
and this time, we’re going to ask - what is a beautiful city?
so just north of the Martyrs' Square lies a rare and beautiful remain of the Ottoman period: le palace of the Rais or bastion 23. It is one of the few bits of the old Lower Casbah that was not destroyed by the French. Most of the construction dates back to 1750.
It's a very beautiful place, right on the sea. But until the 1980s, it was an active building: first for institutions, and then lived in by a number of families. Now, it is empty: clean, pristine, a museum.
Many people will say that Algiers is not a beautiful city, that it is not clean, full of trash, busy, full of rude people (in fact many people commented this on my previous thread): this is true, but does that mean it’s not beautiful?
(photo: Stéphane Couturier)
(photo: Stéphane Couturier)
Much of Algiers is dysfunctional because it is inhabited by people it was not designed for.
This will become clearer as we keep walking to Bab el Oued: the neighbourhood just north of the old city walls, and the 'Gate of the River' (bāb al-wād).
This will become clearer as we keep walking to Bab el Oued: the neighbourhood just north of the old city walls, and the 'Gate of the River' (bāb al-wād).
Bab el Oued, under the colonial period, was a neighbourhood for lower-class European settlers. Richer people moved into the fancy areas to the south of the port, as we saw in our previous walk, this was a more working-class area with a difficult relationship with the police.
In 1962, the European population left very rapidly and in a panic, leaving the apartments deserted. Algerians from estates and slums in the heights moved down to take ownership of the buildings. In the process, they rewired, modified and changed the buildings they live in.
Despite the complete turnover of its inhabitants, Bab el Oued is still seen as a more 'popular' (sha'bi) lower-class neighbourhood. In the 1980s and 90s, it was especially associated with violent Islamist movements.
(here, a former church turned into a mosque)
(here, a former church turned into a mosque)
But let's come back to the question: what makes a city beautiful? and we can keep walking, past Bab el-Oued, towards Saint-Eugène, now Bologhine. If we go up, we get to Notre-Dame d'Afrique, the Catholic basilica overlooking the sea
Completed in 1872, the basilica was obviously intended as a celebration of the French, Christian, and Catholic presence in North Africa. Yet it remains popular with the algérois to this day, who go there for the sea views, or sometimes to pray even if they are not Christian
If you want something pristine, maybe you are better off in Geneva or in Dubai.
But isn't there a beauty in the rewiring? I find these pictures by Stéphane Couturier for example compelling, signs of an exuberant beauty
But isn't there a beauty in the rewiring? I find these pictures by Stéphane Couturier for example compelling, signs of an exuberant beauty
As Saidiya Hartmann says: 'Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness (...) a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of *too much*.'
So if beauty is about creating possibilities out of curses, of making too much out of nothing, is there anything more beautiful than Algiers?
See you soon, for another walk. I'll leave you here, among the strange abandoned castles along the seaside in Saint-Eugène
See you soon, for another walk. I'll leave you here, among the strange abandoned castles along the seaside in Saint-Eugène
