Marseille is changing

One of the “Marseille change” signs that can be seen all over the city, this one at the Cinq Avenues tram stop. “Marseille change” is best translated “Marseille is changing.” These signs all have the same text but include different images. All the images focus on some aspect of urban life that does not involve automobiles.

Many—and probably most—French cities have engaged in large-scale urban renewal projects over the last thirty years or so.¹ Obsolete industrial and port facilities have been replaced by offices and housing. Research centers, museums, and concert halls have been squeezed into underused spaces. Housing projects (HLMs) have either been torn down or else altered substantially with a view to creating neighborhoods characterized by mixité—the mixing of people of all social classes, which has become the holy grail of much French comment on urbanism. There has also been at least a modest pushback against the hegemony of the automobile. Numerous streets in city centers have been pedestrianized. Bicycle lanes or paths have been constructed. Tram lines have been built in just about all cities above a certain size class, and rail rapid-transit lines have been extended in the cities that have them.

Marseille has done as much urban renewal work as any city in France, and I spent a week there at the end of April, making a special point of looking closely at Marseille’s renewal efforts. I’d been in the city numerous times over the years but had never stayed there for more than a couple of days.

It’s important to say that Marseille for many years has been something of an outlier among major French cities. None of Marseille’s peer cities has had as many poor, ethnically non-French people living in such strikingly dilapidated housing close to the city center. There has been some gentrification but on a relatively small scale. A factor here was that the city consistently lost population—and jobs—between the 1970s and 2000, as its industries and port declined.² One result of this is that there hasn’t been the same demand among well-off people for inner-city housing that there has been elsewhere. Marseille had acquired a fearsome reputation by the early 21st century, comparable in some ways to the reputation of some rust-belt cities in the United States. It was seen by many as a dangerous place. Tourists avoided it.

Marseille’s massive redevelopment efforts over the last two or three decades have been heavily colored by a desire to improve its image.

Much of Marseille’s urban renewal work has been similar to that in other French cities. It’s focused in part on transportation. Marseille’s built tram lines, for example, and extended its subway. It’s also set up both bike-share and dockless-scooter systems.

Map of much of Marseille, showing rail transit lines and pedestrian facilities. “U/C” = “under construction.” GIS data mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, heavily edited.

Tram lines 2 and 3 along the Cours Belsunce. Automobiles are not allowed on this major street.

Marseille has also done a great deal of work to improve the pedestrian environment of the central city. It’s built a substantial walkway that circles the old port. Inland, many small streets have been completely closed to motor vehicles. There are also some weekend street closings. Parts of the Canebière, perhaps Marseille’s most famous street, become an open-air market on Sundays.

The Canebière on Sunday afternoon.

There has also been some transportation-related urban renewal work outside the central city, but it’s generally been smaller in scale. One new subway extension is under construction; a couple of tram lines have been extended; and protected bus lanes have been built along the Prado and elsewhere.

There has only been a modest amount of pedestrianization work outside the central city, perhaps because less was needed. Marseille, like most older European cities, is for the most part a comfortable place for pedestrians. It has a pleasantly complicated urban environment; reasonable sidewalks; and drivers who are generally willing to cede to people on foot. The city has added some bicycle lanes in recent years, mostly however just defined by lines painted on sidewalks. The boundaries between space set aside for cyclists and space set aside for pedestrians do not seem to be respected very assiduously by anyone.

Painted bicycle lane on the sidewalk on an island between the main part of Boulevard Michelet and a separate side road. Note the protected bus lane. This is the part of the city that contains Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, which has been joined by several other apartment towers designed to be surrounded by parks but now mostly surrounded by surface parking lots. 

The most impressively improved pedestrian facility in Marseille may be the set of paths along the Corniche Kennedy. Marseille’s Corniche (which acquired the name Kennedy in 1963) is a road winding along the cliffs above the Mediterranean between the old port and the Prado area approximately 5 km south. It’s been around since the 19th century. The wonderful views from this area caused many well-off people to move in even during an era when it must have been difficult to get there. When automobiles came along, the area filled in quickly, and the Corniche became a crowded two-lane highway. When cycling and running became popular in the 1980s, the sidewalk along the highway attracted numerous cyclists and runners. There are no major parks in central Marseille, and the Corniche is one of the few places where it’s possible to bicycle or run for several kilometers without encountering cross-traffic. The views are an added bonus. It took years of nagging, but Marseille’s government has finally responded to the demands of cyclists and pedestrians and begun widening parts of the Corniche sidewalk. In places, there are now three separate parallel paths along the highway: a protected bicycle lane right next to the road; a raised running path next to that; and a pedestrian right-of-way at the cliff edge which includes what is claimed to be the world’s longest bench.³ It’s a really impressive facility despite the proximity of road traffic, although when I was there part of it was closed for repair. Apparently, the supports that hold the paths to the cliff were beginning to fail.

The three parallel paths along the Corniche Kennedy, at the point where they are interrupted for construction work. The Mediterranean is just out of sight to the left, many dozens of meters lower.

In one important respect, Marseille has outdone other French cities in its renewal work. Much of its effort has been put into a new quarter, Euroméditerranée (or just Euromed in everyday French). Euroméditerranée is a substantial zone of 480 hectares that’s said to be the largest urban renewal project in southern Europe. It’s been replacing what is in part an older port and warehousing area lying along the Mediterranean coast just north of its CBD around the Vieux Port. Work on the southern half of the area started as long ago as 1995 but took some time to get going. In the last ten years, however, the extreme southwestern portions of Euroméditerranée have been almost completely rebuilt. (Marseille’s selection as one of the 2013 “capitals of European culture” was apparently a real impetus to move its urban-renewal work forward.) The zone incorporated in Euroméditerranée was extended north into partly residential areas in 2007, but the northern areas have not yet seen as much activity as Euroméditerranée’s southern half. It’s relevant that it’s in northern Marseille where a disproportionate number of its poor inhabitants live.

Map of the southern half of Euroméditerranée and vicinity. Sources of GIS data as in earlier map.

Overview of part of central Marseille looking north from the Marseille’s highest point, the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde, a point just below the bottom center of the map above. Euroméditerranée’s most altered area stretches from Fort Saint-Jean, in front of the Ferris wheel at the left center and now part of MUCEM, to the two skyscrapers at the photo’s right center, which were designed (left to right) by Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel.

Marseille’s choice of a name for this quarter and at least some of what it’s aimed to do with it have involved an attempt to capitalize on what it claims to be one of its special characteristics. Marseille’s a port city with long-term intimate contacts throughout the Mediterranean Basin, including the non-European parts of the Mediterranean area. It’s hardly the only city of which this can be said, but there is at least some basis for the argument that Marseille has particularly rich historical links to many parts of the Mediterranean. The city was founded by Phocaeans, Greeks from what is now Turkey, and much of its current population has roots in North Africa. Tens of thousands of the French who had to leave Algeria in 1963 (the so-called pieds noirs) settled in Marseille, and something like a quarter of the Marseille region’s population is ethnically North African, consisting either of relatively recent immigrants or of their descendants. (There are also large numbers of people with roots in sub-Saharan Africa, the Comoros Islands, and Italy.) Marseille’s North and sub-Saharan African connections are of course not always seen by people elsewhere in France as a good thing, so Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots could be viewed as including an element of bravado, but the chief point is that there may be something genuine about this. In its branding efforts, Marseille (unlike some cities) is not pretending to be something that it definitely isn’t.

From a tourist point of view, Euroméditerranée’s key feature may be the new MUCEM (sometimes MuCEM), the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is located at the entrance to the harbor at the extreme south end of the Euroméditerranée site. MUCEM’s focus on Mediterranean civilization jibes perfectly with Marseille’s emphasis on its Mediterranean roots in its branding work. MUCEM does indeed have a permanent exhibit on Mediterranean rural culture, rooted in great measure in the work of Fernand Braudel. It’s a nice exhibit but reveals the fact that the museum does not have a very distinguished permanent collection. What it does have is an impressive building by Rudy Ricciotti, which is connected to and incorporates the partly medieval Fort Saint-Jean, which stands at the entrance to the harbor and from which there are remarkable views. MUCEM has been attracting substantial crowds despite the €9.50 admission price and has been a key factor in improving Marseille’s image.

Most of central Euroméditerranée is considerably less tourist-oriented and less connected to the district’s branding than the MUCEM area. Much of it was designed to deal with the fact that Marseille had a shortage of office space suitable for banks and insurance companies, whose decision-makers have perhaps felt a bit skittish about setting up shop in the ethnically complicated central business district around the Vieux Port. Much of central Euroméditerranée has been given over to new offices. There are two starchitect-designed skyscrapers, the CMA-CGM Tower by Zaha Hadid and La Marseillaise by Jean Nouvel. There are also quite a number of smaller (and rather bland!) seven-to-ten story office buildings.

Newish (2014) tram line running through a part of Euroméditerranée largely used for medium-sized office buildings.

In addition, the largest old warehouse in the district has been preserved and has reopened as Les Docks, whose upper floors are devoted to offices, while its lower floors have acquired restaurants.

Les Docks, Marseille, an enormous warehouse converted into an office building with numerous restaurants on the ground floor.

These are also several hotels and entertainment venues as well as a big shopping center, Les Terraces du Port, which includes a nice terrace overlooking a part of the outer harbor (which, however, is no longer a particularly active section of the port).

There are apartment buildings as well, but most of these—both new and renovated—are on the edge of Euroméditerranée. The fact that Marseille has not emphasized residential buildings in Euroméditerranée probably reflects the fact that there has been only a modest market for housing in a quarter whose edges can still feel a bit grotty. But this is changing. Many new residences are planned, some of which will push Euroméditerranée into the difficult quartiers nord. Among these is a big project, Smartseille, whose status as an “ecocity” is particularly emphasized on the Euroméditerranée Website.

Transportation changes as always have accompanied renewal work. One of Marseille’s tram lines was extended in 2010 to serve central Euroméditerranée (see photo above). An elevated freeway was (a bit oddly) replaced in part by a surface boulevard and in part by an elevated one-way freeway paired with a tunnel for traffic moving in the other direction. The OpenStreetMap database shows Euroméditerranée teeming with pedestrian facilities, but, in fact, all that have been built are wide sidewalks, sometimes with a little used bicycle lane painted down the center.

Bicycling/pedestrian path along the edge of Euroméditerranée. The tall building in the background center is Jean Nouvel’s La Marseillaise office building. The building in front of it is the Silo d’Arenc, a concert hall created from grain silos. 

There are certainly people at all hours of the day and evening in central Euroméditerranée, but I wouldn’t describe it as being particularly crowded, especially in comparison with the area around the Vieux Port. Still, there is no doubt that Euroméditerranée has made a big chunk of northern Marseille a respectable area. It really is in some ways functioning like the modern (if blander) extension of Marseille’s central business district that it was intended to be. This is no small accomplishment.

It has also almost surely been one reason for the gentrification of Le Panier, a medieval quarter on a hill overlooking MUCEM. Twenty years ago, this was one of Marseille’s dilapidated inner-city quarters of poor people. Today, tourists are more common than actual residents. Cynics would be tempted to claim that Le Panier’s chief economic functions these days are serving “authentic” bouillabaisse and selling expensive souvenirs.

I had the impression that, perhaps in part because of the work in nearby Euroméditerranée, the traditional CBD around the Vieux Port is also more crowded and prosperous-seeming than it was a few years ago, even though it remains a more ethnically complicated place than the CBD of most big Western European cities.

Marseille has definitely not succeeded in reworking itself in the distinctive way that, say, Lyon has. Marseille’s inner-city neighborhoods still have many more poor residents than comparable areas in Lyon (and most other French cities). Furthermore, Marseille’s Euroméditerranée does not have the quirky architecture and substantial housing component of Lyon’s otherwise roughly comparable Confluence; a lot of Euroméditerranée just seems to have been built to project an image of normalcy. And there is nothing in Marseille comparable in scale to the pedestrian facilities along the Rhône and Saone either.

But Marseille has made a pretty serious attempt to get beyond its indifferent reputation in part by capitalizing on what is arguably a genuine and significant part of its heritage: its long role as a port city and its historical connection with other parts of the Mediterranean. Marseille’s Office du Tourisme offers some statistics that seem to demonstrate that it’s succeeded. Perhaps Marseille really has become a bit less of an outlier among French cities.