Lecture: Migrant Marseille

At 9 AM on November 5, 2018, a pair of buildings in central Marseille collapsed, taking the lives of eight people hailing from Algeria, the Comoros, France, Italy, and Tunisia. This devastating toll of urban decay reflects both the diversity of the district and the hardship of living in Marseille, a city marked for centuries by migration, poverty, and social struggle. Divided along ethnicity and class lines, with wealthy conservatives dominating the south and an energetic but pauperized community of immigrant origins in the north, Marseille highlights the tensions stemming from problematic governance, a lack of housing-stock maintenance, a constant influx of migrants, widespread privatization of services, and rapid, profit-driven, and destructive post-industrial urbanization. Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity examines this complex city through the prism of the correlations between migration on space, architecture, and territory.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer and Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Marseille (ENSA), she holds a doctoral degree from ETH Zurich on food and territories and directed the MAS Urban Design (2014-2019) and co-authored with Marc Angélil Cairo Desert Cities (2018) and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016). Charlotte is a founding member of the Parity Group and Front, associations committed to gender equality and diversity in the profession. 

Marc Angelil is a practicing architect at agps architecture, with offices in Los Angeles and Zurich. He holds the 2021 Kenzo Tange Visiting Professorship at Harvard University and is professor emeritus from ETH Zurich, conducting research on social and spatial developments of metropolitan regions worldwide. His most recent publication Mirroring Effects: Tales of Territory was written in collaboration with Cary Siress.

Urban Design Lecture Series

In this year’s program the Section of Urban Design aims to reflect on the ecology of crisis designers are faced with and their impact and ongoing efforts on the redefinition of  “the urban project”. By confronting the rationalities of modernity and the processes of modernization that designed the status of urban life, the series proposes to look critically into forms of inhabitation, production, and infrastructure that lead to an evolving disrupted and uneven nature and society. If the legitimacy of the urban is questioned by the increasingly unfolding and simultaneous moments of crisis, what is then the agency of urban design in altering and stablishing new relations? Structured over four sessions, the series proposes conversations around dimensions of care, diversity, decentralization and ownership -currently revising the discourse, disciplinary boundaries and practices of urban design.

More information

• Join the lecture here via Zoom.
• Contact Tanja Herdt for more information.