Sheila Crane – författare

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Marseille was a booming Mediterranean port. Positioned at the very edge of France, the city functioned as a critical fulcrum between the metropolitan center and its overseas empire. A notoriously dangerous and cosmopolitan city, Marseille became the focus of the extraordinary energies of some of the most remarkable architects and theorists of urban modernity.Drawing together a cast of both world-renowned and less familiar architects, photographers, and cultural theorists, including Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, Walter Benjamin, and LÁszlÓ Moholy-Nagy, Mediterranean Crossroads examines how mythic ideas about Marseille helped to shape its urban landscape. Tracing successive planning proposals in tandem with shifting representations of the city in photographs, film, guidebooks, and postcards, Sheila Crane reconstructs the history and politics of architecture in Marseille from the 1920s through the years of rebuilding after World War II.By exploring how architects and planners negotiated highly localized pressures, evolving imperial visions, and transnational aspirations at the borders of Europe and the Mediterranean region, Mediterranean Crossroads brings to life a lost chapter in the history of modern architecture.

Architects, politicians, and planners have repeatedly framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper, rather than integral components of the urban landscape with their own layered histories and often unrealized potentials. Describing a site as a bidonville––the francophone equivalent of the shantytown––positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural projects, anticipating and authorizing its targeting, control, and dispossession. In this richly illustrated study, Sheila Crane charts the emergence of the bidonville, a term first consolidated in Casablanca following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912 that was subsequently used to categorize and systematically target urban areas across Morocco, Algeria, and beyond—processes that continue to shape planning and urban landscapes today. Tracing significant episodes that extend into the post-independence period, Crane reveals how the bidonville became a potent artifact of the colonial city and a formative site for anticolonial thinking and action. Far from self-contained enclosures, sites deemed bidonvilles were shaped by dynamic human and non-human entanglements central to this book.