Translation in the Mediterranean basin: benefits and interest.
Algerian urbanism testedTranslation in the Mediterranean basin: benefits and interest. Algerian urbanism tested
Abstract
Arab countries have a lot to gain from the translation operation. The initiative taken by the Algerian Ministry of Veterans Mojahedin making different French, English and German works available in Arabic should arouse a general craze for translation in the Arab world. Conversely, many works published in the language of "Dad” (ﺿﺎﺩ) deserve to be discovered in the West. Encourage their translation into the language of Shakespeare would give the Arabic though an international focus.
Today, the value of the Arabic thought is well established; its place in the general history of thought and culture must stop take it problematic and give
it an uncertain aspect or status.
The determining role of translation in access to knowledge, fundamental condition for economic, social and cultural development of a country, is evident as well. Translation promotes dialogue and this is one of the master pieces of urban planning where we even speak about “trialogue”. By scrutinizing the Algerian town planning, as it has been bequeathed to us by the French colonization, we realize how much openness to the Other is inescapable.
Keywords
Algeria, Arabic though, regularization, translation, urbanism,
By
Saïd ALMI
Anthropologist, Sociologist of the built space, Ph.D. in Town planning
Town planner SFU (French Society of Planners) (Paris). In charge of Renewable energies and North Africa.Member of the FTERSI (Temimi Fundation of Scientific Research and Information) (Tunis) and APA (African Planning Association) (South Africa).
Summary
Where the translation is in Mediterranean ?
Dialogue and urbanism
Colonialism and urbanism
Digressions on the city and urbanism
Urbanism and civilization
Advent of urban
Urbanism…
Urbanification
Urbanology
Urbanistique
Urbistique
Functionalism and culturalism in urban planning
Regularization, founding principle of the French school of urbanism
From dialogue to trialogue, through regularization
Enforcement of the principle of regularization in Algiers
Translation in the Mediterranean basin: benefits and interest
Algerian urbanism tested
Tribute should be paid to the Algerian Ministry of Veterans Mojahedin which, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the accession of Algeria to independence, has made possible the translation into Arabic of a number of scientific and academic works. Arabic-speaking readers enjoy.
In general, Arab countries have everything to gain from the translation operation.
Where the translation is in Mediterranean ?
In 2010, Transeuropéennes launched with the support of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Regional Council of Ile-de-France and the French Institute and in collaboration with several euro-Mediterranean partners (1), an extensive survey of translation across the Mediterranean.
Numerous studies have focused on the actors concerned (authors, translators, publishers, booksellers, librarians, critics and support organizations) and
the flow situation and issues, the dissemination and receipt of the translation and on training translators, it appears a state of unprecedented places: the
Mediterranean Basin accuses a large deficit in this area. Large qualitative and quantitative differences were noted in the chain of translation between the
two sides (Glasson Deshaumes G. & Aubarell G. 2012). The situation is so severe that, during the presentation of the final report in June 2012 in
Brussels, the Executive Director of the Anna Lindh Foundation, Andreu Claret, rightly spoke of a "clash of ignorance" (3). The term seems to have been
dictated by Edward Said, who, in reaction to the crazy idea of a "clash of civilizations" of American ideologue Samuel Huntington, has denounced the
stigmatizing position. Indeed, as Bernard Lewis who influenced him, Huntington, strongly opposes the West to Islam, forgetting the internal plurality in
each of the two "blocks" and their respective heterogeneity.
Andreu Claret therefore called his wishes in a clear improvement of the situation between the different Mediterranean languages (Glasson Deshaumes
G. & Aubarell G. 2012).
The implementation of the conclusions and recommendations of the study may be able to open the way for a new Euro-Mediterranean era, based both on a common identity and cultural diversity. The Saint-Simonians have been the first to have understood. Early in the19th century, they have indeed advocated the "union in difference" and advocated to do precisely the Mediterranean a "nuptial bed of the East and the West" (Chevalier M. 1832).
Beyond linguistic and cultural question, the entire political and geopolitical sphere is well underway.
First, the determining role of translation in access to knowledge, fundamental condition for economic, social and cultural development of a country, is well established.
Indeed, Greek thought has penetrated the Arab-Muslim world through translations which have experienced their high level in the 9th century. The Caliph Ma'mun encouraged the initiative by setting up Bayt al-Hikma. Even today, the level of activity and rigor and scholarship that prevailed in this House of Wisdom remains unique in that same Arab-Muslim world. The first major translations date back to the early 8th century, when Salim Abu-l-Ala, Iran's secretary of the Umayyad Hisham, attacked various epistles published from Aristotle to Alexander, before, thanks to the development of papermaking in 762, translations of the Greek philosophers did take an unprecedented scale. So well in fact that the historian of science, Alexandre Koyré, said later, to the chagrin of some Westerners, "It was the Arabs who were the teachers and educators of the Latin West" (Koyré A. 1966. Underlined by the author).
But today it is quite different. In his presentation of the "Plan Ibn Ishaq Hunayn" in 2006 in Paris, Abdessalam Cheddadi denounced the delay in the
translation into Arabic. He said the failure "prohibits the Arabic language (...) to be on a par with minimum level normally required in knowledge and
modern creation" (cited by Glasson Deshaumes G. 2009). And at a recent symposium on the translation into human and social sciences, he added:
"no discipline offers in Arabic all the constituent elements of a disciplinary field", knowing that translation does not concern only words but whole
strands of thought (Jacquemond R. 2007). Therefore, translation is a working background that affects the whole of "episteme" of a society or era.
The ignorance of a language is therefore up to a misunderstanding of an entire culture or a civilization. About ignorance, Edward Said (2001)
comdemned the misunderstanding and confusion experienced by some ideologues like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Considering the
"civilizations" and "identities" as closed entities without plurality or internal contradictions, these argue the idea of a "clash of civilizations" and
radically oppose Islam and the West, defined as "Judeo-Christian civilization."
In 1964 , the Israeli-American orientalist, originally from England, an expert on Turkish civilization, Bernard Lewis, addressing the issue of the Middle East, draws on the work – far richer and more complex - of Fernand Braudel (1963) to establish his theory of the antagonism between civilizations and launch his famous formula. According to him, the crisis in the Middle East is not due to a dispute between States but to a "clash of civilizations" (Lewis B. (1964). Huntington refers to Lewis (1990) and publishes an article, then a very controversial book (Huntington S. 1993).
This antagonist vision must be fought and outdated by creating the conditions for dialogue. Among these conditions, the translation is not the least. The Arab world will benefit because most of its scientific disciplines show an almost total failure in terms of components, frameworks and concepts, specific to constitute a disciplinary field. Urbanism is one of them.
Dialogue and urbanism
Dialogue means exchange of words between two or more people. As part of the rediscovery movement and imitation of antiquity, the dialogue was present among all humanists and all the great intellectual debates of the Renaissance. Thanks to the game representation of interlocutors, it brought a "possibility of critical distance and questioning of the powers of speech" (Godard A. (2001).
In urban planning, dialogue plays a key role. Prior to any work on the Parisian urban area in the second half of the 19th century, for example, Prefect urban planner of Paris, Haussmann, was still engaged in a wide consultation.
By the mid-nineteenth century, requirements for planning were going to be diversified and the building process more complex. So the heirs of Haussmann’s method worked to overcome the dialogue in favor of the "trialogue" they endow three properties: long-term vision, create conditions and broad participation as possible.
Dialogue and trialogue have their origins in a process established by Haussmann himself, the " regularization ": a term invented by the Prefect urban planner of Paris (Haussmann E. 2000).
The principle of regularization, whose Haussmann, like Napoleon III, his protector, influenced by the thinking industrialist Saint-Simonian, measured the importance, aims to optimize the urban space using modern techniques and adapt historic new needs generated by industrial civilization, without sacrificing the legacy of the past.
As for the regularization, the trialogue approach includes three levels, comparable: historical (an inseparable link is established between the past, present and future), geographic (any city is inseparable from the region with which it carries on interaction) and consensus (based on the amount of information). The articulation of these orders is expressed in a formula characteristic of the regularization: the general rules applicable to all cities need to add specific provisions for each city treated concrete (Almi S. 2008).
Urbanism and colonialism
Trialogue and regularization: both these neologisms were created more than a century apart. They refer to two groups of approaches or oddly similar intentions. One and one summons the otherness: the contest of the Other is indeed erected in order.
To illustrate these concepts trialogue and regularization, consider the case of the cities of Algieria during the French colonial period. The domination of the Other was, there, a major factor. So this environment is an ideal setting for examining the question of otherness, central idea in our subject.
Among the works that have received support from the Algerian Ministry, Colonialism and urbanism (Almi S. 2013). This book deals precisely with the French colonial urbanism in Algeria in a comparative perspective as, under the urban model chosen, the dialogue is unevenly convened.
At the origin of this book there was the will to understand the ins and outs of the Algerian urban situation. So we had to find the necessary keys to the analysis and interpretation of this situation by identifying its major conceptual frameworks. This choice caused two methodological consequences. First, the need for what Michel Foucault would have called "an archeology of urban initiatives", going back to the beginnings of the colonial era.
To escape the ideological interpretations carried by the historiography on the French presence in Algeria, I could not do otherwise than by directly grasping the sources of information, drawing on first-hand documents.
Then there was the desire not to separate these processes from the cultural context (political, economic, social, and epistemological), in which they were developed. In other words, I had to become a historian, or at least acquire a minimum of skills in this field.
The systematic reading of the colonial literature and local news media showed three major ideological or cultural currents, respectively under the military policy of the conquerors, the Fourierism and the Saint-Simonism. The historians curiously have lost sight of the importance of these last two doctrines appeared very early in Algeria. So they neglected their role in the genesis of two main principles: assimilation, initiated by the Fourierists and appropriate by the settlers, and the association, introduced par the Saint-Simonians.
For its part, the role of the military administration is generally observed through the prism of one armed expeditions and war campaigns.
However, this role was, after all, different. It was certainly dominant, but "protector". And the civil order was, paradoxically, more repressive towards Muslims than the military order. In other words, behind the apparent homogeneity of colonialism, we can discover a kind of "heterogeneous", as written by Michel de Certeau in his “historiographical operation” (Certeau M. de 1975).
The three ideological principles in question: assimilation, association and protective domination, helped to understand the diversity of colonial policies adopted before providing a clue to think heterogeneity observed in urban planning procedures with Le Corbusier, Henri Prost and Tony Socard, at the head of the three different tendencies (functionalism, culturalism and regularization).
So I was taken to confront, term by term, trends in the respective fields of development (development and human settlements) and the colonial policy. And between each other, a curious analogy was noted.
Digressions on the city and urbanism
Before examining the marks printed by the three trends observed in the Algerian urban space, it is appropriate to question the meaning of the words « city » and « urbanism ».
Everyone agrees that only the word « city » remains. It continues to point out something that does not fit him anymore. Urban life that profiles an ideal of civilized existence, pleasant relationship between men and their space, is not characteristic of our cities today. Civility, courtesy, politeness, friendliness, solidarity, sociability, conviviality... urbanity fascinates. It still feeds an imaginary that only some old centers or neighborhoods continue to support or to wake in the conscience and feeling.
Conversely, the life of "cities" afflicts and causes controversies and debates. Everywhere we denounce its excesses and inhuman character. Certainly, the city is not what it was.
In 1994, a big exhibition was dedicated to it at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (La ville, art et architecture en Europe, 1870-1993, 1994). Designed around a confrontation of varied looks of artists (painters, photographers and filmmakers) and practitioners (architects and planners), the meeting resumed serious reflection. Equally legitimately, Algeria now poses the problem and submit it for discussion.
Its "urban" setting indeed suffers from many dysfunctions.
In French, "ville" comes from Latin, then from the Italian word of “villa” (which takes its name from the casa di villa), i.e. farm or rural area, which have generally been the source of the Medieval towns.
The urbs and civitas Latin words are often raised about the antique city.
Urbs designated the physical environment, built and inhabited by a civis community (citizens, members of a city). Civitas designated these citizens themselves, as they were an organized group socially, politically and religiously (Fustel de Coulanges N. D. 1948). Civis led to civitas, then, in the 11th century, it gave "cité" (city) and, in the 13th century, it gave citeien (inhabitant of a city). Civitas has generated in turn the Italian words città, cittade and cittadino (inhabitant of the city) which were borrowed from the French citadin, the Spanish ciudad and the Portuguese cidade. The cittadella (citadel, generally a small city surrounded by a fortification) is also a derivative of civitas.
The political dimension conveyed by the notion of civitas is crucial. Latin politicus, taken from the Greek politikos which came from politês (from the city, from the State, or citizen), itself derived from polis (city or town as a political body) indeed refers to civitas .
What about the Muslim city ?
During the French colonial presence in Algeria, the art historian Georges Marçais proposed Western planners meditation solutions that the Muslims had made to the development of their cities instinctively or traditionally. Indeed, in the Arab-Muslim culture, it never existed specialized texts for structuring the urban spaces or to condition them. Marçais stressed this specificity, but noted that the Muslim city was still based on the mosque, "essential body of worship, religious and political center of early Islam". Political life such as knew the Greek and Roman cities was foreign to it, he said (Marçais G. 1940).
Let us be back to the etymology. The word "civil", borrowed in 1290 to Latin civilis (which is relative to the citizen, to his rights and to the city), is no stranger to "civilization". And in political philosophy, civilis is a translation of the Greek politikos.
So, City, state, citizen, political, civil and civilization have however a semantic relationship with the Arabic terminology. Indeed, the term al hadhara (الحضارة)) covers both civilization and urbanity, and al hadhari (الحضاري) denotes the city-dwelle, but also the Civilized.
It is the same with madina (مدينة) (city) which may be substitutated with bilad (بلاد) or balad (بلد) (derived: baladya, city or municipality). Now, if madani (adjective, derivative of madina) appoints what is secular, city, urban, lay or civil, (mass'oulya madania: liability; canoun madani: civil law), bilad and balad mean country or territory. The French term "bled”, which is a translation of an impairment recorded in colloquial Arabic of North Africa, also designates inland, countryside, country and place or any remote village at the same time.
Urbanism and civilization
In the West, the verb "civilize" and the adjective or participle "civilized" mean, since the 16th century "(make) able for life in society", and, by a shift in meaning, "get a (human community) to a state of higher material development, intellectual and social". Then, breaking with the idea of historical process "advanced" progress, which is marred of a certain ethnocentrism, we use the terms "evolution" and "culture" (the plural “cultures” is more used from the 19th century).
In the Arab-Muslim culture, hadhari indicates which is urban and everything related to civilization. For Ibn Khaldun for example, al hadhara defines action to settle in the city. That is, specifically, the transition process from the Bedouin life (badawi: nomadic and badiya: part of the dry peri-Mediterranean steppe where the tribes of nomadic pastoralists do live and move) and village life (although village translates into qaria) to the city sedentary life. In short, civilization is installation in cities and material improvement of the live. In his Prolegomena there are two fundamental concepts: umran and assabiya. Umran (عمران) means both civilization, social organization and state. It is also the science that concerns the rational study of "natural sociability", the science which allows to understand the mechanism of historical behavior, within its general context.
If in the Middle East, “urbanism”, given as the equivalent of town planning or urban planning, is sometimes translated into takhtit al mudun, takhtit hadhari, or handasa(t) imariya, takhtit umrani, takhtit umran al-mudun, handasat al- mudun, tanthim al-mudun, in the Maghreb preference seems just go to umran.
This uncertainty vocabulary reflects the vagueness that characterizes the planning practice and partnership projects envisaged in the Arab-Muslim world today. But the situation is far from being its own. It is general. Societies have changed, but the words have remained the same; they did not follow: we always talk about town, city, urbanity ...
The explanation is fundamentally in the breakdown operated in the ancestral balance between urbs and civitas and their divorce..
Everywhere, there is the advent of "urban". So that beyond the inflation that accompanies this terminological inflation (we talk fluent conurbation, agglomeration, metropolis, megalopolis, technopolis, urban area and region area...), the substantive " urban " itself is now accepted.
Advent of urban
Until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the urbs/civitas adjustment, arranged harmoniously, made the city. Since then, almost everywhere on the planet, we see the same phenomenon: break between content and container, urbs and civitas.
The traditional separation between town and campaign as we could still perceive in France in the 14th century, for example, is practically inexistent. Until then, there was urban space, usually bounded by walls and perfectly identifiable, on one side, and farmland, forest and livestock on another one (Cf. Le Roy Ladurie E. 1988). But in the 14th century, the word "city", competed with the term "town" meant only the central part (e.g. the city of London) or the oldest part of the city. Then the word was gradually losing its meaning.
As città term in the Italian language and culture, it passed a specific meaning in a vague and general sense.
It is now necessary, to designate a field or a particular area, to accompany it by denotative qualifiers: University City, Science City, working city, dormitory city, garden city...
In the Arab-Muslim world, the situation is the same. Colonization, yesterday, and international exchanges, today, are the cause of the new spatial pattern of human settlement. As for the "city", the word madina is equally applied to historic sites and to any urban area.
So much so that a plurality terminology is used to describe the urban practices. This is an emblematic sign of the cission. Indeed, as if to conjure this upheaval, approaches and designations of the new urban reality are increasing.
Urbanism…
In the 19th century, to name the practice of building urban space, use is made of neologisms. In 1867, the Spanish engineer Ildefondo Cerdá introduced the term "urbanizacion" (Cerdá I. 1979). Contemporary of Haussmann, Cerdá is the designer of the regulator plan of Barcelona, but he is especially the first theoretician of urbanism considered as a science.
In French, the word "urbanisme" appeared for the first time in 1910 in Switzerland (Clerget P. 1910). Since then, it means the discipline for the material and functional urban development, the expansion process of urban space and the organization of its population.
But by adding the suffix "ism" to the radical "urban", planning is erected to the status of science whose privilegied object is space as a material substance, neutral object, malleable and reproducible. There is so to say predominance of physical reality (urbs) on the social, human and political reality (civitas and polis).
With its new status, the modern practice of spatial planning thus emptied of its substance its purpose. However, as we have seen, the polis was historically a community of individuals before being a "space" (a concept understood in the sense of conceptual and material entity, specific to the Western world).
For the Greeks, for example, the city was first citizens themselves. The city of Athens did not exist as such; it was the city of the Athenians. The citizen condition and the idea of the political body prevailed. And in the culture and the imaginary Arab-Muslim, city is a community before being a built space. Space is secondary to human relations. Hence, presumably, the absence in Arabic exact equivalent to the concept of “space” (in the architectural and urban sense) as it exists in the Western imagination. ) In the French-Arabic dictionaries, the word 'space' is usually translated as massafa (surface, area), fush'a (extent or area), fadhaa (universe), faragh (empty), saaha (place), makane (place, site), oues'e (wide), hawa'e (air) or heiz, rihaba, madjal, madaa... None of these terms denotes it rigorously.
Urbanification
The term “urbanification” has been proposed by Gaston Bardet, to designate the spontaneous phenomenon of urban development, as opposed to
the organized form implied by urban planning.
Urbanology
This word has been coined by Marcel Cornu and taken especially by Paul and Françoise Claval (Claval P. & Claval F. 1981). In an article published in 1969 in Les Lettres françaises andentitled "The need for an ”urbanologie”", Marcel Cornu said:"We propose to call 'urbanology' all the research and studies whose field is to be urban space, that is to say everything about the growth of cities. The urbanologie would be the science of the city".
Two other words are entering the French jargon on the urban space:”urbanistique” and “urbistique”.
Urbanistique
In the early 1950s, the Italian anarchist architect and urban planner Carlo Doglio linked the garden city to anarchism and criticized Ebenezer Howard to aim a capitalist ideal of philistine. In a series of articles published in the journal Volontà of Naples, he defines the “urbanistique” as how to respond to the needs and aspirations of the human species particulary by focusing on social (Doglio C. 1974).
The term was taken in a different direction by Henry Raymond (1977) and students who do not consider the city as an agglomeration turning around a unique historical pole, but as an urban space as articulated according homogeneous and specific areas, functionally distributed and communicating with each other.
Urbistique
Two keywords are characteristic of urbistique, whose approach is based on systemic: "urban system" and "management". This neologism was forged by combining the Latin "urbis" and the suffix "tique" alluding to the ICT (information and communication technologies) which is made extensive use.
At a time when the substantive "urban" often prevails over the word "city" because of the anachronism of that designation, “urbistique” aims to give back to the urban area a certain unity. Its management will be global and its policy wants to be transverse. Any fragmented approach is banished.
Consultation, systems analysis and holistic approach to urban planning problems by using the amount of information and limiting the expansive
development, these are the watchwords of the urbistique. The word is used since thirty years mainly in Switzerland, where it extends, through
the Competence Centre Urbistique (CREM) of Marigny, and in Canada.
But these four terms (urbanification, urbanology, urbanistique and urbistique) fail more or less to enter into common usage.
Functionalism and culturalism in urban planning
More than half a century after gaining independence, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are still living in the shadow of three major planning principles from their French colonial past: functionalism, culturalism and, to a lesser extent, regularization.
The functionalism came from the modern movement of CIAM (Congrès Inernationaux d’Architecture Moderne/International Congress of Modern Architecture) and its Athens Charter, which extended the ideas of some protagonists of progressive thinking in the XIXe century such as Robert Owen in England, Charles Fourier in France…
As for the functionalism, the culturalist principles are inherited from a backward-looking movement whose origins date back to the 19th century, with Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, in England, Camillo Sitte, in Austria… (Cf. Choay F. 1965). Functionalism in architecture and urban planning is based on a universal ideology of progress. It advocates strict adaptation of form to function and rigorous separation of urban functions. It emphasizes values of economy, hygiene and movement and uses technical and industrial know-how to create a new space to meet anticipated needs which are assumed to be the same the world over: to live, work, travel and enjoy entertainment. Thus functionalism does not take into account the past or local, regional or national specificities.
Conversely, the culturalist approach focuses on cultural aspects of society and advocates a graded organization of space, following a federative scheme. It is marked by a strong nostalgia for the old social and cultural communities.
North African cities are still dependent on that planning models.
After a period in which their inspiration was mainly European, North African developers are turning more and more (and appeal) to international urban development firms, which practice the policy of universal models, no taking into account local or regional peculiarities. This use has been made possible thanks to anchoring functionalist and culturalist principles in political North African development. These principles were supposed universally valid. But, in Europe today, there is a failure of functionalist and culturalist models.
Question: these North African countries, do not they benefit from inspiration rather the principle of regularization whose the realistic vision contrasts with the utopian nature of functionalism and culturalism ?
Regularization, founding principle of the French school of urbanism
The regularization was implemented by the so-called French school of urbanism (whose the SFU, French Society of Planners, is a direct emanation still alive) in the early 19th century. It was applied between the two wars through PAEE (Plans d’Aménagement, d’Embellissement et d’Extension/Development, Embellishment and Extension Plans), then it was quickly abandoned in 1939.
Originating from the four major influences: the Ponts et Chaussées, the Musée Social and the Moroccan colonial experience under Lyautey, and to an extent, British culturalism, the French School of Urbanism can be mainly characterized by its realism and its distance from any domineering ideology. These two elements are indeed what the functionalist and culturalist models of modern urbanism lack, in spite of their decisively scientist objectives, which still prevail worldwide. Since it is linked with value systems, urbanism cannot in any way prevail itself to be a rigorous science. It sand cannot claim to be anything but a praxis, i.e. a group of human activities potentially able to transform the natural environment or to change social relationships. The French school of urbanism has been so convinced ever since its birth in the early 20th century, combining the technical, economic, social and cultural dimensions in its project of regularization of urban space. Meanwhile, within the French school of urbanism, the French word "urbanisme" enters the language. Also within the framework of the French school, was born in 1911 the SFU whose such founding members as H. Prost, L. Jaussely, D-A. Agache, J-M. Auburtin, A. Bérard, J-C-N Forestier, E. Hebrard, E. Hénard, L. , A. Parenty, E. Redont are prominent members of the French school, along with H. Cornudet, G. Risler, J. Siegfried...from the Musée Social.
From dialogue to trialogue, through regularization
ln the fields of edification, with a general acceptance of the term, the requierement of dialogue can be found mainly in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, the father of modern in the 15th century.building. For him the three specific levels of edification are necessity (necessitas), pleasure (voluptas) and above all convenience (commoditas) where the dialogue between the planner and the client is of first and foremost importance (3).
With the appearance of the Industrial Revolution occurs undeniably a complexification of the process of edification. The entrepreneurs or planners are then much more numerous than when Alberti was alive, and when his dialogical axiom could come down to the relationship between an architect and his client
As from the mid-nineteenth century, the requirements related to edification become more various. Haussmann becomes well aware of it. The Prefect of Paris realises the necessity to extend the consulting and besides to regard the town not as a collection of separate parts, as in the traditional road widening schemes, but as a whole.
Such is what a part of the principle of regularization consists in, which is what today's «synthesis of haussmannian thought » is called (Choay F. 1969). The remaining part consists more precisely in the idea of an unbreakable link between the past, the present and the future. Such is not the case in the functionalist and culturalist theories of contemporanean urbanism of haussmannian regularization, whose protagonists are no other than Ildefonso Cerdá (1979) on the one hand and both the Austrian Camillo Sitte (1996) and the British Ebenezer Howard (1998) on the other. The former of these theories is indeed almost entirely turned to the future, whereas the latter focuses on the past.
A third part can be defined in the characterisation of hausmannian regularization: this one deals with geography. No town can be separated from its region with which it is inter-related.
Oddly enough, the regularization-functionalism-culturalism trilogy of urban thought in the late half of the 19th century are to be found integrally in Algiers from 1930, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of colonisation. Prost, le Corbusier and the couple Bardet-Socard are respectively its main leaders and representatives.
Enforcement of the principle of regularization in Algiers(9)
The three principles of extended consulting, historical dimension of town-planning and geographical determining factors are all present in the process of urbanisation of Algiers, as they are in the one of all the major Algerian towns to which is enforced the Law of March 14, 1919 on the organisation of planning, enhancement and extension (PAEE). This Law enables a new way of intervening on urban space. The new proceeding, which originated from the group of professionals and the think-tank who started working together as from 1910 in the framework of the French school of urbanism, aimed at the optimisation of urban space. As a matter of fact, this is just the logical result of the haussmannian regulatory tradition, to which has been added by the fruit of the experience acquired in Morocco in a colonial context under the rule of Lyautey, the works of a visionary engineer called Eugène Hénard and the socially oriented reflexions of the Musée Social.
The new regulatory viewpoint is indeed made up of three major orders: geographical, historical and consensual. Each of these orders is itself strongly connected to three vital elements.
- Geographical order: the town, its neighbourhoods and its regions
By means of its PAEE, the town of Algiers endowed itself, for the first time in 1929 with an overall scheme conceived on the scale of its whole territory. This PAEE is even aimed at being a genuine leading plan, upon which will depend all the following projects. Conversely, this town plan very quickly reveals its regional links, in other words the necessity of a regional plan whose conception started as early as 1930. It so happens that this scheme was already present in the law of March 14, 1919 and in the decree of October 24, 1925 which made this law enforceable in Algeria. The surrounding towns or villages were allowed to « have only a single general scheme for every extension or town-planning unlikely to be achieved in the short term », as is stated (Official Journal, October 31,1925). Thus the town of Algiers will not wait for the votes of the Law of July 25, 1935 on regional plans to resume the study of its regional planning.
- Historical order: the techniciens, the colonizers and the colonizing
As if it were a triptyque, past, present and future are more than closely linked in the regulatory approach of urban space. ln addition to the general rules which must be enforced to every town endowed with a PAEE, there are still specific clauses adapted to every one of them and which underline its « own character » (Danger R. 1933). ln Algiers, five large areas set the way buildings should be constructed and how many people should live there, in accordance with the way these buildings should be lived in, by what category of people and by people having what kind of job. The fifth one, covering the historical quarter of the Casbah, was added to the list in a correction made in 1934. This correction endows the old Muslim quarter with a specific regimen aimed at preserving its general features. It goes under a special rule and involves very severe conditions of conservation.
- Consensual order: the political power, the technicians and the users
Both the historical and the geographical orders enable the regulatory proceedings to benefit from a realism which both the functionalist and the culturalist theories are deprived of. There is additional profit: a consensuous will be based on a sum of information. The vote of the PAEE goes along, as early as 1929 with the birth of the «Société des Amis d'Alger », an association which focuses on a wide debate on town-planning and on getting the inhabitants involved in the development of their town. This repreents a huge attempt at making people aware at what was at stake thanks to numerous newspapers either local or metropolitan. Lectures to which leading figures were invited, surveys focusing on the planning of Algiers and two major exhibitions of architecture and town planning were also set up so as to make Algiers the setting of an unprecedented debate. Meanwhile, a large work of documentation and research was launched. Mentioning “Algiers. Urban geographical and historical study” by René Lespès (1930), Henri Prost goes as far as saying that it is a precious tool and «a valuable introduction» (Prost H. 1929) to his plan for the development of Algiers.
Thus local history remains most valuable.
This way of thinking is incompatible with the functionalist and culturalist models which were created from scratch and applied indifferently, whatever the location, because they were supposedly easy to reproduce, on account of their given universal value. Therefore, these same models would have survived the war, benefiting from the recovery of the country, and even its independence.
The choices which were made were the easy victims of the misleading of these comforting models.
All in all, the three orders above mentioned (geographical, historical and consensuous) are all in favour of a mind-openness proper to regularization, which aims at a composed town-planning, as opposed to the functionalist and culturalist models aiming at an imposed one.
The initiative taken by the Algerian Ministry making French, English and German works available in Arabic should arouse a general craze for
translation in the Arab world. Conversely, many works published in the language of "Dad” (ﺿﺎﺩ) deserve to be discovered in the West. Encourage
their translation into the language of Shakespeare would give the Arabic though an international focus.
Today, the value of this thought is well established (Arkoun M. 1975) ), its place in the general history of thought and culture must stop take it
problematic aspect that gives it an uncertain status.
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(1) This is Banipal (London), ÇEVIR (Istanbul), European Council of Literary Translators Associations (CEATL) (Brussels), Escuela de Traductores de Toledo (Toledo), King Abdul Aziz Foundation (Casablanca), Next Page Foundation (Sofia), Goethe Institute (Cairo), Index Translationum (UNESCO), the Arab World Institute (Paris), French Institute for the Near East (Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Ramallah), IREMAM (Research Institute and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World) (Aix-en-Provence), Literature Across frontiers (Manchester), Swedish Institute Alexandria (Alexandria) and Università degli studi di Napoli Orientale (Naples).
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benefits and interest.
Algerian urbanism tested
