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Segregation and Counter-Hegemony in Colonial Algiers




The Battle of Algiers 1957. Photo by Nacerdine ZEBAR/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

Part 1. Introduction
Colonial Algiers was more than a state outpost. It was the centerpiece of the French imperial project in North Africa. For Paris, Algeria was France itself - “the most important, the most cherished, the most invested in, and the most problematic of all French territories”. From the invasion in 1830 until independence in 1962, Algiers, the capital and municipal core, was systematically reorganised through a programme of spatial hegemony and planning. Its urban form entrenched material and racial inequality as well as ideological domination.

Frantz Fanon described the colonial world as divided in two, inhabited by opposing species. In Algiers, this duality was clear. European quarters were spacious, well-maintained, and affluent, while the Casbah - the historic urban core - was dense, impoverished, and constrained. Fanon wrote:

“The settlers' town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt […] The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire”.

Algiers’ architecture was a deliberate tool of military and social engineering. French authorities, by framing the world in a crude West/rest dichotomy, reduced complex realities into a regime of Euro-American power, making intervention appear necessary. This essay presents Algiers as both an instrument of control and bed for resistance. By analysing the connections between urban planning, everyday life, and insurgent praxis, it positions the city as a site where subjugation was contested and ultimately overturned.

Part 2. Segregation
    Spatial Power

Following the French occupation, urban and rural policies efficiently privileged European settlers while repressing Algerian populations. Hegemony was enforced not only through coercion but also via psychological, administrative, and social means. Framed as a civilising mission, interventions appeared benevolent while concealing structural objectives. In rural areas, land dispossession and the reassignment of “productive land” obstructed livelihoods and drove mass migration to cities. In Algiers, investment was selective. European districts featured wide boulevards and large squares fit for military assembly, civic buildings, and rational infrastructure, projecting order. By contrast, the Casbah was overcrowded and poorly serviced, read by elites as evidence of native deficiency and resistance to change.

    Assimilation and Exclusion

The production of space is a social process, shaped by culture, politics, and economics. In Algiers, exclusion confined agency while also producing the conditions for disobedience. Early assimilationist leaders, such as Ferhat Abbas, sought civic inclusion for Muslims while affirming Islamic identity. Repeatedly denied, Abbas concluded that “one cannot build on the wind”. Within these constraints, organic intellectuals emerged as leaders of the liberation movement, capable of translating marginalisation into consciousness. Islam provided cohesion and frameworks for mobilisation, while suppression of reformist channels left armed insurgency as the only viable path.

As Fanon emphasised, insurgency was not merely a tactic but a preparation of self and community:

“The native who decides to put the programme into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence”.

Geographic and social barriers did more than display oppression, directing attention to density, networks, and operational readiness.

    Tactical Advantage
The Casbah typified centuries of Islamic planning, designed for privacy and introspection centred on the home. Narrow alleys, irregular layouts, and dead ends limited visibility while enabling discreet movement. Courtyards and arcades structured domestic life, providing spaces for social exchange, while rooftops offered an alternative public realm overlooking the city and sea. Islamic norms also gendered space, allocating streets primarily to men, and domestic interiors to women. Mosques, schools, and hammams organised circulation and structured cultural norms. Together, these features and the Casbah’s tight connectivity supported disruption, despite being dismissed as disordered by the imperialists.

Part 3. Counter-Hegemony

    War of Position - Theory

Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between war of position and war of manoeuvre is applicable to the Algerian resistance. The war of position is a slow, often underground effort to establish counter-hegemony through cultural, political, and intellectual preparation, whereas the war of manoeuvre represents direct confrontation and political praxis. In Algiers, routine practices, like neighbourhood solidarity, transmission of historical knowledge, and preservation of religious identity, constituted the war of position, building the mental, social, and logistical infrastructure for insurgency. French authorities recognised the threat and responded with intensified violence, aiming to render dissent impossible. 

    War of Position - Applied
In Algiers, the war of position unfolded through culture, consciousness, and the city’s spatial set-up. Mass mobilisation produced a shared purpose, transforming “othered” imperial subjects into political citizens. Denied access to European districts, residents forged autonomous circuits. Mosques and schools served as informal teaching spaces, while homes became sites for coordination and protection. These practices enacted the intellectual and cultural struggle Gramsci describes, preserving Islamic identity, histories, and sustaining associations that colonial planning sought to erase.

Everyday life became a medium of political pedagogy. Residents acted as proto-organic intellectuals, articulating a worldview grounded in experience rather than categories of backwardness. By the time the National Liberation Front (FLN) and its armed branch, the Armee de Liberation Nationale (ALN) initiated the war of manoeuvre in 1954, this groundwork - rooted in spatial and social cohesion - had already destabilised hegemony. The city, reimagined by its inhabitants, became a staging ground for revolution. Far from the “crouching village” of colonial discourse, the Casbah emerged as an arsenal of memory, knowledge, and resilience.

Part 4. Rupture - The Battle of Algiers 1956-57

The Battle of Algiers marked a break in the imperial order, and transition from clandestine resistance to open confrontation. By 1956, the FLN had established networks throughout the Casbah, embedding political and operational knowledge into ordinary behaviour. The Casbah’s urban form provided concealment and mobility, transforming the city into a zone intimately known to insurgents but disorienting for the French. Bombings, disguised operations, tunnels, and underground messaging exploited this, allowing fighters to systematically reclaim agency.

French countermeasures escalated with unprecedented brutality, fully militarising the city and inverting any colonial claims to civility. They implemented curfews, checkpoints, conducted mass raids, and demolished homes to deny shelter. Torture, rape, lynchings and executions obliterated distinctions between policing and militarism, demonstrating how state violence was institutionalised in the city’s governance. As Fanon observed, systemic oppression produces not only the conditions and mindset for rebellion but also the infrastructure to sustain it.

Women of the FLN played a central role, carrying explosives into cafés, distributing messages, and acting as couriers, challenging patriarchal assumptions. Children and adolescents contributed to information networks and surveillance, embedding insurgency within everyday life and family structures. In this way, insurgency was not an exceptional event but the culmination of prolonged and careful preparation.

The human cost was considerable. Key FLN figures, including Ben M'hidi and Ali la Pointe, were killed, with widespread civilian casualties. Yet, these losses were absorbed within a broader narrative of triumph. France had won militarily but lost in diplomacy, its conduct leaving it isolated on the international stage. By exploiting the Casbah’s characteristics, leveraging social cohesion, and translating underground practices into armed action, the FLN demonstrated that urban space could serve as shield and weapon. The battle thus represents the peak of counter-hegemonic practice. Algeria would not achieve independence until 1962.

Part 5. Aftermath

Independence ended formal French rule but did not dismantle the material or symbolic legacies of colonialism. The newly established Algerian state inherited a city structured by segregation, hierarchy, and spatial inequity. Liberation therefore marked a “second stage of struggle”. Political sovereignty alone was insufficient, as postcolonial authorities sought to remake society through modernisation, often replicating patterns of control.

The Casbah, once a tactical resource, became an image of revolutionary ingenuity. Yet the post-independence treatment of these spaces was ambivalent. The Casbah remained overcrowded and poor, targeted both for preservation and redevelopment. Urban renewal and infrastructure projects sought to impose order, reflecting a tension between institutional recognition and practical governance. The very spatial logics that had enabled insurgency were reinterpreted as obstacles to improvement.

Segregation and urban configurations endured, as boulevards, housing blocks, and administrative grids inherited from French planners continued to structure mobility, social relations, and access to resources. In some cases, forms of spatial organisation were even deployed by subsequent authorities to assert control, monitor, or manage urban change.

    Decolonial Perspectives on Knowledge and Research
Colonial urban studies highlights not only the persistence of spatial hierarchies but the politics of knowledge production. Accounts of the Casbah, historical and contemporary, often emphasise variation while overlooking residents’ expertise and heritage. This reflects broader patterns in how the West constructs and benchmarks, legitimising “othering” and domination through discourse. Similarly, contemporary urban research frequently treats communities in the Global South as objects of study, concentrating authority in distant institutions. Decolonial perspectives call for a shift. Rather than focusing on deficits, analysis should interrogate systems of privilege, regimes, and power. Postcolonial planning can reproduce inherited hierarchies or move to amplify local knowledge, demonstrating that methods of observation inform the understanding and transformation of cities. Seen this way, contests over space, memory, and agency in Algiers engage ongoing debates about representation and the responsibilities of urban research.

Sources

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