Echoes of decolonization | From North Africa to Europe: questioning the trip back home

Abstract

The Colonial Modern enterprise in North Africa produced unique architectural responses in the twentieth century, oscillating between rupture with the past and continuity of the tradition, negotiation of indigenous expression in the “Villes Nouvelles” and imposition of European forms of settlement. The colonial years thus led to the formation of new spatial imaginaries and novel aesthetics regimes in Morocco, most of them being experiments of European theories. The descriptive content relative to the latter portion of the narrative is abundant. Nevertheless, seldom has the subsequent era been studied as a catalyst for the dissemination of Modernity in Europe. This thesis builds a critical discourse on the available body of knowledge on colonial modernity, following the “travel back” forms and dynamics in the mid-twentieth century, in to order to unveil the role of North African colonial experience in the overall Modern Movement. The first level of investigation is an expansive literature review that has permitted a holistic understanding of the discourse and confirmed the rarity of scholarly knowledge on the echoes of decolonization from post-colonial Morocco to metropolitan France. The second is the study - through the in-depth analysis of ATBAT-Afrique’s experience in both Morocco and France - of the vehicles of motion of Colonial Modern ideas and theories between both contexts, from 1951 on through the 1970s. Relying on new forms of evidence, this work thus sparks an interdisciplinary debate on the understanding of Colonial Modernism as a real-life experiment whose results are critical in piecing together the contemporary relationship of Europe to the non-European space; such space being present on European lands in the form of mass housing complexes originated in postwar French government-led programs, among others.