Euroméditerranée: The Mute Streets of Marseille

An extensive urban renewal scheme, Euroméditerranée (EuroMed), has transformed Marseille’s northern industrial harbour through a seven billion euro investment of public and private funds, using robust legal tools to erase and replace the urban fabric over its 480‐hectare area. Since 1994, it has introduced offices, upscale housing, and commercial spaces, promoting new construction to solve Marseille’s perceived social issues: poverty and crime. Operated by the EuroMed Development Agency (EPAEM), it deploys legal instruments similar to an aggressive precedent, the Haussmann-style urbanization of the Rue de la République (1864). In this case, large urban forms and aggregated ownership facilitated sizeable property transfer and large‐scale operations, paving the way for current expropriation and demolition policies towards recapitalization via urbanization. EuroMed’s urbanism yields an architecture of large, monofunctional blocks with blind, sealed, or vacant ground floors. It aims to partially demolish and sanitize the former industrial area and the adjacent small, affordable, diverse urban fabric of urban villages like Les Crottes, Le Canet, and La Cabucelle. The present work builds on ongoing research on the evolving character of the Euroméditerranée project, its actors and forces, and the tools it employs, detecting changes in urban quality with a focus on the pilot block Smartseille (Angélil et al., 2020; Malterre‐Barthes, 2024). In particular, the work articulates a critique of the resulting aspect of the urban ground floors: inactive and unengaged with the surroundings, termed here as ‘mute’. Through a mixed methodology of archival and discourse analysis complemented by extensive fieldwork focused on ground floors, this project seeks to uncover how an architecture generated by past and present real estate economics aided by public force and design hubris impacts the streetscape of Marseille.