MARSEILLE BARRIER
A text on the noticeable and unnoticeable barriers of the city, including interviews by Anne Speicher + Michael Güller
by Anaïs Bonroy + Carina Kurta, Marseille 2025
Marseille
is a city with 2,600 years of migration experience. Diversity and interaction are part of daily life. Greeting each other on the street, exchanging a few words at the bakery, and offering help when needed, that is the unspoken code. It's a city with a big social heart. “Openness” is an important term in community living here. But this openness does not translate to the substantial urban planning of this Mediterranean city. While walking through Marseille, we bump easily into barriers, both being noticeable and unnoticeable. What kind of barriers can we face, and why do we counter them so often while moving around in the city?
Deep, daily challenges can be faced in Marseille. In terms of urban planning and city management, it is a city that has to catch up to other EU cities. The deterioration of public infrastructure, the political disagreement on waste management or the obsolescence of public schools. These persistent problems fuel a distrust in the public system and lead to consequences largely visible in the city’s physical landscape. Fences, gates, bollards, and uneven sidewalks translate lack of municipal management and comfort negligence for the user of common public space. And in Marseille we face even bigger barriers, since the city has one of the world’s highest per capita concentrations of gated communities. This creates a fragmented cityscape full of barriers, where living spaces are fenced off by grids and automatic gates. The term “urbanisme de la peur” has become a widespread phenomenon. Its shaping force reflects in how we design and live in our urban environments, challenging the openness of Marseille’s (maybe romantic) cosmopolitan cohesion. What future awaits a city that prides itself on being open to the world, while so many of its own citizens are shutting themselves off from one another?
Urbanism of fear
The phenomenon of “urbanisme de la peur” creates a kind of fragmentation that follows a global tendency of “negative” urbanity since the ‘90 (Dario, J & Dorier, E). It is not to forget that a city is set up of a “natural” fragmentation, composing different districts to a whole unit. On the contrary, social, economic and political reasons are behind the scenery of voluntary fragmentation. The spirit of the “feeling of insecurity” hovers over everything. In Marseille, a banal problem like a parking lot can explain everything: the Stade Velodrome, a spectacular soccer stadium, also used as an event center, can host almost 70 000 people. A conflict zone for the neighborhood that sees itself regularly deprived of parking lots in the area. Informal erections of traffic signs, clientelistic arrangements or physical barriers block this problem outside of the street, inciting a triggering domino effect on juxtaposed settlements.
Besides this, anger, fear and partly financial ease can create an obsession to have control over space, creating a “safer” environment, knowing who is going in and out of their “territory”. However, It should be mentioned that these phenomena ironically have a potential of community building by the mobilisation of neighbors. Also, there is an important economic question: an apartment situated in a “private residential area” values more. It is part of a business strategy by real estate promoters and helps to raise the price of your property, a private parking lot included - of course. This vicious circle creates the so-called “urbanism of fear” that can be closely linked to a form of urban “paranoïa” (Pedrazzini, Y).
As the city with the most gated communities in Europe, Marseille has a long history for 35 years in constructing these “résidences fermées”. It started in the 90s when it became a new luxury item to secure your home. The last statistics date from 2023, when there were counted 1884 gated communities in the whole urban area (Dario, J & Dorier, E). As a consequence, these actions of privately driven fragmentation lead to very absurd situations: in Marseille, parents with their kids have to walk all around a “gated community” to have access to their school, garbage cleaners can’t do their job because the access is closed and city planners rack their brains over how to plan public transport around gated communities. This insecurity, which is either real or perceived, has a direct influence on mobility practices, access to services and quality of life, and therefore on the production of the city and the transformation of its spaces. Resulting in a city that is increasingly fragmented socially, spatially and politically. To say it with the words of Elisabeth Dorier, a researcher on gated communities,: ‘La ville qui se ferme, la ville qui s’effondre’, meaning the city that closes, is the city that collapses.
Marseille Daily
As Marseillais, as the user of the city, you are well acclimated to these barriers. There is hardly a road that does not have superfluous barriers and the feeling one gets is that they hinder the smooth handling of the street rather than being a protection. In a climate of video surveillance, the French anti-terrorism dispositive Vigipirate and the feeling of fear imposed by politics and society, the perception of barriers becomes omnipresent and these barriers are no longer questioned.
As a new inhabitant of Marseille, you wonder about this and ask yourself why nobody questions the fact that sometimes small children are kept on a leash when they are on a walk with their nanny? How come that the municipal police are parking several cars on the main street, making it impossible to have a fluid traffic situation and creating an even more dangerous traffic situation? How come that barriers which have visibly no sense are blocking parts of the city? You quickly feel a certain deception when you ask these questions to your Marseillais friend who can only answer: “Parce que ça c’est Marseille”. Nothing we can or even want to do about it, because these barriers have become part of a local and national mindset. Here, the vital question for urbanists arises: How to plan future projects in this fragmented and security-driven Marseille? Is it even possible to build back barriers?
New urban development projects
Based on insights gathered from two expert interviews with architects/urbanists, we elaborate further on two new urbanism projects in Marseille: the expansion of the main train station, St Charles 360° and Les Fabriques within Euroméditerranée. Both have the potential to significantly reshape the city’s character, if they are not already doing so.
The challenge of the Gare Saint-Charles as part of the St Charles 360° project brings to light the tension between creating an open, integrated train station and the current control-oriented mentality. Drawing conclusions from an interview with Michael Güller, head of the Swiss Güller Güller architecture urbanisme working currently on the “Stadtraum” Lucerne station, the question arises on how can we open up Saint-Charles station despite the rigid control systems? Compared to Switzerland, where train stations are often conceived as public spaces, fluid, accessible, and woven into the urban fabric, French stations tend to be closed systems, heavily regulated, with only limited access for all. The goal of the project though is to increase urban continuity, allow free movement across platforms and levels, and transform the station into a vibrant node within the city. Yet this remains a complex task, because the current system sets lots of mental barriers. How to trigger a reflection on coherence instead of on protection in French society?
One of the urban development projects within the Euroméditerranée II zone is Les Fabriques. Situated near the new Gèze metro station (2019) and a huge market, Marché aux Puces, it is currently delineated within a defined perimeter. While its urban plan emphasizes integration with the surrounding areas, its development is perceived as spatially bounded, with physical and infrastructural barriers limiting full openness. This raises questions about to which degree Les Fabriques facilitates genuine connectivity with its socio-economically diverse surroundings. How can these new developments or living spaces be designed to remain open and well-connected to the city? How open are these ‘open spaces'?
In an interview with Anne Speicher, head of the Austrian architecture office Baumschlager + Eberle in Marseille, she talks about the growing awareness among architects that façades alone do not constitute urbanism. It is rather the quality of public space that defines meaningful urban integration. The challenge for the B+E housing project in Les Fabriques lies in moving beyond isolated architecture to create living places that are genuinely open, inclusive, and connected to the environment. The question is not only how buildings are constructed, but how they relate to existing bigger urban fabric, and whether they enable flows of people across their boundaries, developing an urban porosity. In this context, Speicher cites pope Francis: ‘Never construct walls, always construct bridges’.
sources:
- Manifesta 13 Marseille: Le Grand Puzzle. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2020.
- Pedrazzini, Yves. "Fragmentation sécuritaire et urbanisme de la peur: notes sur les nouvelles guerres de sécession." URBIA-Les cahiers du développement durable 14 (2012): 11-28, https://www.unil.ch/files/live/sites/ouvdd/files/shared/URBIA/urbia_14/articles/2._Fragmentation_securitaire_et_urbanisme_de_la_peur-_Y._Pedrazzini__11-28.pdf
- Dorier, Elisabeth, Julien Dario. "Les espaces résidentiels fermés à Marseille, la fragmentation urbaine devient-elle une norme?." L’Espace géographique 47.4 (2018): 323-345, https://urbanicites.hypotheses.org/files/2019/02/2018_DORIER_DARIO_ESPACE_GEO_erratum.pdf.
- Saint Charles 360°, https://ampmetropole.fr/grands-projets/marseille-saint-charles-a-360/