A new session of the Aula Mediterrània conference series 2024-2025 with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
Malterre-Barthers, in her most recent role as an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, launched in 2021 the initiative “A Global Moratorium on New Construction”, examining the current protocols of development and urging for a profound reform of planning disciplines to face the climate and social emergency. Malterre-Barthes holds a PhD in Architecture from ETH Zurich, as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees in architecture from the National School of Architecture of Marseille (ENSAM). During her time at ETH Zürich, she co-founded the Parity Group, a militant grassroots collective labouring toward equity in architecture, which received the prestigious Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023. Some of her publications are: On Architecture and Greenwashing (ed., Hatje Cantz, 2024); Eileen Gray. Une maison sous le soleil (cowritten with Z. Dzierzawaska, Dargaud, 2020); Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (eds., with Marc Angélil, Ruby Press, 2016).
CONFERENCE ABSTRACT
Initiated in 1995, Euroméditerranée is a vast urban renewal project in the Northern districts of Marseille, along the industrial harbour. The budget of the public project amounts to an investment of seven billion euros, of which five billion are private investment. Presented as “serving the common good,” the public operating entity Établissement Public d’Aménagement Euroméditerranée (EPAEM) benefited from expropriating prerogatives over 480 hectares of urban surface. It is but a profit-driven enterprise involving France’s construction leading companies. Relying on prestigious designers to build a skyline of generic skyscrapers, the project generates a mediocre architecture of large, monofunctional, repetitive blocks. Euroméditerranée II, the second phase of the project, is a self-proclaimed ‘Mediterranean eco-friendly district of the future.’ However, the 14-hectare construction will obliterate the diverse, fine-grain urban fabric that characterizes the area, dislodging lower and middle-income inhabitants, and threatening the continuity of Marseille’s flea market. The neighbouring industrial villages of Les Crottes and La Cabucelle are populated by working-class residents and migrants from Chad and Sudan, who survive in precarious conditions due to affordable rents. Euromediterranée II will displace 5,000 impoverished inhabitants to accommodate 30,000 new residents of a higher social status. By destroying an arrival neighbourhood and a historically active industrial district, the project raises alarming issues about the social and spatial exclusion of its inhabitants.