Marseilles is a right bugger of a city. They are all bastards. There are no Frenchmen, no
Moroccans, Comorians, Spanish, Italians or Armenians. They are all Marseilleis. Marseilles
is a typically Mediterranean city, open to those who come and go, in constant motion, never
still. If you don’t know where to settle, you can drop your anchor here, you will feel
instantly at home, but you might also get quickly swallowed up by your own cultural or
ethnic community. From the chic neighbourhoods to the souq, the urban skyline changes in a
sudden. There is no coherence to the city. There is no centre, different styles overlap, there is no order and it’s dirty. Each different neighbourhood reflects the struggles of its
own community, thus there is no integration here. Arabs, Armenians, Comorians arrive en
masse and let themselves be welcomed by the city with an embrace that is as warm as it is
deceptive.
The degraded suburbs, the banlieue, are in the city centre, in the heart of
the city. They are not ghettoes but they are still, sociologically, confined spaces whose
boundaries lie in the minds of the locals rather than being geographical. Marseilles is
fundamentally a city made up of its communities, where you live according to social circle,
without mixing. Here you don’t mingle you just superimpose. Fractures run deep in the communities, in the neighbourhoods and between people. Marseilles is not sun and tourism,
bouillabaisse and Olympique de Marseille.
Bastard
inside
It’s also a city that is not designed to bring people together. Forcing strangers to live
side by side for no particular reason doesn’t help the weaving of the social fabric. The
formal boundary between the rich and the poor fluctuates and is somewhat unclear. Social
breakdown happens when the city isolates communities that struggle to fulfil their
expectations in a silo. These communities define themselves from a negative standpoint,
through their daily struggle, an opposition that in recent years has fortunately become more
active. The citizens have started fighting that engulfs the city, the lack of citizenship
and the unruliness. They also fight the conformism that unifies all behaviour which is
typical of French, European and even Western society in general.
The Marseilleis have
always been against all the drives to homologation. Today they are challenging a new wave of
conformism that is driven by property speculation. In recent years the push to rationalise
the urban structure hasn’t been flanked by social reform. Building new houses is not enough
if you don’t build bridges between the people who live in them. The experiment hasn’t
worked. The outlook will not get better. There are vested political interests to keep the
city in its fragmented state. There’s expectation for 2013 when Marseilles will be European
Capital of Culture but little will change since the change is being led in a top down
fashion without the involvement of the citizens.
Marseilles will keep on being highly fragmented until the city is transformed on a social
level, through fighting the cash in hand phenomenon, through the reintroduction of
interaction between communities and through the support of the rich social fabric of this
city which is still inaccessible to those who don’t belong to the community network. Until
then Marseille will remain fractured, fragmented, bastard.
Alberto D'Argenzio