Housing as Battleground: Targeting the City in the Battles of Algiers

Abstract

Abstract In the months preceding the Algerian war for independence, the mayor of Algiers declared a much‐publicized “battle for housing” through which new apartment complexes were intended to replace the rapidly proliferating bidonvilles, or shantytowns, along the capital city's urban periphery. The declaration in 1956 of a state of emergency in French Algeria marked a shift from the rhetorical framing of mass housing estates as tools of pacification to the overt militarization of residential areas with majority Muslim Algerian populations, areas that were thereafter subject to direct military control and surveillance. By reading evidence gleaned from military reports against substantially different accounts of the city at war by Mouloud Feraoun and others, this essay traces the radical urban transformations effected in Algiers under cover of war as well as the multiple means by which inhabitants actively rewrote these same spaces as battlegrounds. In the process, significant links are revealed between new models of emergency housing and new policies to eliminate the bidonville (shantytown) that were developed in Algiers during the war and later implemented on a grand scale in France. Taking advantage of the state of exception in a war that was not acknowledged as such, the military played an active role in the provision of housing, the policing of residents, and the thoroughgoing transformation of the urban landscape in Algiers. [Algeria, war, colonialism, urban space, housing, shantytowns]

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