Until recently, Marseille had a reputation for not being too attractive a city, which looked strange, given its antiquity, picturesque and vibrant identity. For a large European metropolis of 2,600 years old, the city has a disproportionately few monuments, spectacular buildings and ensembles. The picture is spoiled by multiple scars on the body of the city - the result of its contradictory development in the 1960s and 70s. An "aggravating circumstance" was also the unofficial status of the criminal capital of France, which for many years spoiled the reputation of Marseille. The city's impeccable image scared off entrepreneurs and representatives of the creative class, who today are the driving force behind the development of modern megacities.
However, in the mid-1990s, the situation began to change for the better, and in recent years Marseille has noticeably changed. As a reference point and model, Barcelona was, as expected, chosen, which managed to quickly become the Mediterranean metropolis No. 1. Of course, catching up with the capital of Catalonia in the coming decades is unthinkable (it has too many advantages over Marseille), but why not take advantage of the successful experience?
(Imp) Glorious Thirty Years
Although Marseille is one of the oldest cities in Europe, its planning structure was mainly formed in the second half of the 19th century. After France conquered North Africa and expanded its possessions deep into the Black Continent, its main port became the largest industrial center and the second largest city in the country. Under Napoleon III, large-scale infrastructure works were carried out, which were accompanied by the construction of imposing secular and religious buildings and entire ensembles. The largest projects were the punching of Republic Street (by the method of Baron Haussmann), and the Longchamp Museum and Park Complex. Since the bay opened by the Greeks (the present Old Port) no longer accommodated large ships, the port was moved to a new location in the Joliette area, where a "suite" of extensive harbors and docks was built on the open sea, which was subsequently continued far to the north. There, literally across the road, the cathedral of La Major was erected in the fashionable at that time Romanesque-Byzantine style, as if confirming the status of the place as a new center of the city. It was these representative structures and ensembles that largely determined the appearance of Marseille known to us. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city acquired a clear structure: the historical center, circled by a horseshoe old port, the port-industrial north, inhabited by working people, and the mountainous bourgeois south with villas, embankments and cozy bays.
Having grown on the leaps and bounds of French colonialism, Marseille felt the full impact of the collapse of the transcontinental empire. The urban economy was plunged into a protracted crisis, the bottom of which fell in the middle of the twentieth century. During the Second World War, Marseille lost an impressive part of the historical center, when, as part of a punitive operation, the Nazis razed the blocks on the northern embankment of the Old Port.
The development of the city during the Glorious Thirty Years (1946-1975) was dynamic, but chaotic. The colonial independence led to a massive migration of their population to France, and many newcomers settled in the largest ports. The largest influx of immigrants came to Marseille: the number of its inhabitants almost doubled, increasing the burden on the dilapidated infrastructure and exacerbating the already acute shortage of housing. The French state, which played a key role in the economy after the war, traditionally viewed the country's second city as the largest industrial center. Accordingly, the priority of government policy was to strengthen the production function. In Fos-sur-Mer, at the mouth of the Rhone, located 50 km from Marseille, a new cargo port was built, which, due to its more advantageous position, began to take over maritime transport and related industries (primarily petrochemical and heavy industry) … The port of Marseille itself, which had been under construction since the middle of the 19th century, began to fall into desolation, turning into a vast dead zone cutting off the northern half of the city from the sea.
Marseille itself has grown into a vast metropolitan area with sleeping areas and satellites. Since the main construction was deployed on the periphery, the center and old quarters suffered from a lack of attention. Buildings were dilapidated, turning into criminal slums, and the modernist reconstruction of neighborhoods and the laying of highways "along the living", although they solved local problems, simultaneously accelerated the degradation of the historical core. In the 1960s, Marseille acquired the dubious status of the criminal capital of France and the main staging post for drug trafficking. The 1973 energy shock, which accelerated the winding down of old industries, dealt a serious blow to the urban economy. A combination of negative factors, including ineffective management, hindered the transformation of the urban economy, frightening off business and qualified personnel and pushing the economically active population to move to other regions.
The realization of mistakes in planning came much later, in the late 1980s - after the change of city leadership. To compensate for the exodus of city-forming industries (shipbuilding, container shipping and heavy industry), the city began to develop new intelligent and high-tech activities. At the same time, the authorities are concerned about the quality of the environment, ecology and, in general, the image of Marseille. The results of the change of priorities in urban politics became noticeable only by the mid-1990s, when science, education, culture, management, tourism and new industries began to play a more or less noticeable role in the local economy.
New Deal
In 1995, a large-scale urban transformation program designed for several decades was launched, called Euroméditerranée - Euromediterrane (or abbreviated as Euromed). Its main goal is to overcome the consequences of the thoughtless policies of previous decades and the painful transformation of the local economy, as well as to reorganize the most problematic areas of the city's core. The development of the program was initiated by the regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which found support both at the city and national levels. For its implementation, a special structure was created - the State Agency for Planning and Development of the District (Établissement Public d'aménagement Euroméditerranée, EPAEM), and the program itself received the status of an “operation of national importance” (Opération d'Intérêt National). In the same legal regime, such well-known projects were carried out as the construction of new cities in France, and, on a more local scale, in the Parisian district of La Defense and La Villette Park.
Since Marcel was in rather bad shape, it was clear that "acupuncture" alone would not be enough. Therefore, along with the implementation of numerous "point" projects, a large (on a European scale) territory became the object of transformations: the total area of the 1st phase of Euromed was 310 hectares (it united a "pool" of plots north of the historic center between the port in the west and the station Saint-Charles in the east). In 2007, it was expanded to 480 hectares with new plots further north, which formed phase 2. This is comparable in size to the territory of ZIL, however, given that Marseille is about 10 times smaller than Moscow, the value of the Euroméditerranée project for its city is an order of magnitude higher than Moscow. In total, about 7 billion euros were invested, of which 5 billion were from private sources. The project was supported by the port administration and SNCF (French Railways), who agreed to cede their land plots to the municipality on mutually beneficial terms.
The epicenter of the reconstruction was the disadvantaged areas of the "middle zone", covering the historic center from the north. Deep changes affected the vast, abandoned port of the 19th century and the neighboring warehouses, factories, slums. In addition, the project focuses on numerous areas of the urban environment that have been excluded from life for many years: wastelands, railroad exclusion zones and sections of two highways pierced through the city center. In addition to the large-scale construction of housing, public buildings and social infrastructure (museums, theaters, schools, hospitals, etc.), an important element of the Euroméditerranée project was the improvement of the “voids” between buildings: streets, squares and squares - a belated compensation for many years of neglect of open spaces cities.
The Euroméditerranée program covered six sectors as well as a number of individual sites:
- Gare Saint-Charles together with the adjacent territories
- The nearby area of La Belle-de-Mae
- Renovation of quarters along Republic Street
- District Joliette
- Aranc district, including the Cité de la Méditerranée and Parc Habité zones
- Industrial zones in the northern suburb (phase 2)
Gare Saint-Charles and La Belle-de-Mae
The Saint-Charles train station was one of the first to undergo renovations: the dilapidated building of the 19th century was restored and expanded according to the design of the AREP bureau. The reconstruction of the transport hub has had a diffusion effect on the adjacent quarters, which are being put in order or rebuilt. The largest project in the forecourt of the city was the reconstruction of the old tobacco factory La Belle-de-Mae, turned into an art quarter. One of the buildings houses the municipal archives, the other houses the center of media technologies, including television studios, in which the popular French TV series Plus belle la vie is filmed. The largest building of the factory - "La Frisch" - has been transformed into a cultural center with auditoriums, exhibition halls and similar premises. Next door is the new storehouse and workshops of the MuCEM Museum, which had no place in the newly opened complex in the Old Town.
Port and surroundings
The most profound changes, however, have occurred with the territory of the port (more precisely, that part of it that is directly adjacent to the historical center) and the adjacent districts of Joliette and Aranc. Until recently, the port combined passenger and cargo functions, but the service of ferries and cruise liners pushed cargo transportation to its northern harbors. The boom in sea tourism that the Mediterranean is experiencing today is pushing for the modernization of land infrastructure, the construction of modern sea terminals and the reconstruction of neighboring territories.
To date, the transformation of the three-kilometer coastline, starting at Fort Saint-Jean, has been completed. Unfortunately, there is almost no talk of a full-fledged exit of the city to the sea in this part of Marseille, since, despite serious modernization, the port remained in its place, and instead of an embankment-promenade with palm trees and beaches, one has to contemplate walled marinas, warehouses and terminals …
The only exception is the extensive esplanade J4, set up in front of the Cathedral of La Major, which previously huddled on the outskirts of the historic center, and now, finally, "sounded" in full force. The MuCEM Museum (project by Rudy Ricciotti) and Villa Méditerranée (architect Stefano Boeri), which were opened in 2013, also open on J4, forming a single complex with Fort Saint-Jean (Renovation of Roland Carte), so the space is ideal for holding mass events.
Cité de la Méditerranée
Reconstruction of the port is only part of the ZAC Cité de la Méditerranée project (architect Ateliers Lion / Atelier Kern / Ilex), which also covers a wide strip of buildings and wastelands along the coast. Two 1.5-kilometer parallel sections of the A55 motorway, which passed overpasses along the coast, on the approach to the city center were removed into tunnels, and boulevards (in the French sense of the word, i.e., wide green streets) Littoral and Dunkirk were built in their place that linked the Old Port to the cluster of skyscrapers under construction near the Aranc harbor. The transformation of the freeway into a boulevard has increased the capitalization of the buildings overlooking it, many of which are of historical or cultural value. The first to be reconstructed was the 19th century dock building (designed by Eric Castaldi) into a cultural, shopping and business center with class A offices.
At the opposite, northern pole of the Cité de la Méditerranée zone, a high-rise cluster is being created, which will become the dominant feature of the city's new maritime façade, visible from miles away. The old elevator Aranc (industrial architectural monument of 1927) was reconstructed into the theater center "Le Silo" (project Karta and Castaldi). In the neighborhood, Zaha Hadid has realized her first high-rise facility - the headquarters of the shipping company CMA CGM. Soon his loneliness will be brightened up by several residential and office towers (projects by Jean Nouvel, Yves Lion and Jean-Battista Pietri) of the Quais d'Arenc complex. Between the two "poles", the Euromed Center complex (project by Massimiliano Fuksas) awaits implementation, which contains an expensive hotel, a business center and a multiplex.
"Inhabited Park Aranc", "Free Docks" and Euromed 2
It is noticeable that the Euroméditerranée program has something in common with the likes of Paris Rive Gauche and Lyon Confluence in Paris and Lyon, respectively. In this context, the participation in the Marseilles project of Yves Lion, who was responsible for one of the sections of the Rive Gauche, and played one of the key roles in Euroméditerranée, does not seem accidental. The concept of the “open block” (îlot ouvert), invented by Christian de Portzamparc and most fully implemented by him in the development of the Masséna-Nord quarter, also found its application in Marseille. This approach is used in two large projects, adjacent to each other: "Inhabited Park Aranc" - Parc Habité Arenc (architect Yves Lion) and "Free Docks" - Docks Libres (architect Roland Carta / Gilles Vexlar). In the case of the Inhabited Park, which covers 23 city blocks with a total area of 40 hectares, the planners' task is simplified by the presence of a dense street grid, which is complemented in place by walkways. But Karta, which operates on a 23-hectare site that houses a flour mill and a 1970s social housing block, has to re-plan it entirely. Although the second project is not part of the Euroméditerranée, the programs of both are similar - creating a full-fledged urban environment, where the dominant functions of housing and offices are complemented by trade, services, as well as schools, colleges, kindergartens and clinics. Since after the reconstruction the district from the semi-peripheral becomes central, the new building has a high density and increased (in relation to the morphotypes of the 19th - early 20th centuries) number of storeys. To avoid the creation of "stone bags", courtyards, terraces and roofs of residential buildings should be actively landscaped.
The Free Docks project envisages the creation of a large park along the Egalad stream, which will stretch northward along the territory of the Kane freight station. Reconstruction of the cargo yard and adjacent, mainly industrial and storage areas (the layout was developed by François Leclerc) is the "plot" of the second phase of the Euroméditerranée, which should be implemented by 2030.
At the moment, the Euromed project has been more than half completed. Despite construction work, the area is actively settling in, attracting new residents and first tourists. If we compare the project with similar ones, then, despite the external similarity, its closest analogues are not the Parisian Rive Gauche or the Lyon Confluence, but rather the Eurolille in Lille and Hafencity in Hamburg, which have significantly changed their appearance their cities, or, more precisely, added a new one to the old. Euroméditerranée is the 21st century Marseille.
