Implications of Two Colonial Approaches on Urban Expansion of Tripoli, Libya

Colonizers interpret their colonies differently and many urban and planning approaches can be traced. The aim of this paper is to examine the colonial approaches of urban expansion in the city of Tripoli, Libya. It focuses on two distinguished colonial periods, the late Ottomans and the Italians (1830s to 1940s). Both colonizers have approached the concept of modernizing the city differently and both had perceived their approaches to the city’s expansion as means of practicing dominance over the colonized under the disguise of facilitating the process of modernization. The striking difference between the two colonizers’ plans for the expansion of the city resided in the way they had treated the old city. Under the claim of respecting the ‘indigenous culture; the Italians ghettoized old city while endowing the new one with an intense architectural and urban planning orders to project on the ground an Italian national representation. By exploring some archival documents and maps as well as the literature related to these colonial periods, the paper will illustrate how these two colonial approaches influenced the urban growth of the city in the post-independence period (1950s – 1990s) and also became an integral part of the subsequent planning visions of the city.