How does one actually DO ‘historic preservation’? The following essays and interview provide nuts and bolts responses to that question. Each focuses on the actual challenge of taking care of buildings inherited from the past. You will read here, for example, about the dangers of sealing up a sixteenth century drainage pipe. (The walls will run with water.) Because several of the authors have worked on building sites, their essays could even be read by future historians as primary documents. They bear witness to how people in the early twenty-first century thought about and treated architectural vestiges – forts, apartment buildings, plazas surrounded by modest homes – inherited from previous centuries.
In addition to their common experience dealing with vexing practical problems, these authors share a keen interest in popular initiatives. They all focus on the actions taken by citizens – sometimes acting alone, but more often in groups – to safeguard and change those old buildings.
The essays reveal that the best laid plans of architects can be confounded by the inexorable force and logic of individual residents’ behaviour. For example, when modernists designed what they thought would be cutting-edge social housing in 1950s Casablanca, they had not bargained on local people firmly asserting their desires, and their capacity, to control their own space. These residents, most likely newly arrived from the countryside, built walls to enclose balconies and otherwise make their apartments evolve to suit their changing needs: expanding to take in lodgers or more newly arrived family members, or to set up a shop in an extra room [Rouissi]. Inhabitants of an atrium-style building in today’s Algiers have made less dramatic adaptations. To ensure that they have the right amount of privacy, they angle the shutters to block the prying eyes of their neighbours. [Daoudi] These two examples of popular initiatives in shaping housing may seem slight, but they bear weighty significance: they suggest that people are simply too hard to control to be completely captured by the buildings they live in and by the cultural values associated with them.
Since the 1990s the Maghreb has seen the rise of popular associations (NGOs) seeking to preserve the buildings they inherited in their cities, as highlighted in several essays. While the associations’ stated goals are sometimes expressed in narrow terms – save that particular historic building! – their unspoken goals and their impact have been broad and social. Heritage associations have taken upon themselves two serious educational functions: to teach people about their past, and to encourage them to take care of where they live. Their tactics have been various: training guides, leading tours, lobbying to save or restore a particular building, publishing books [Metair]. Taken together these strategies accomplish goals that schools should ideally foster: getting people to appreciate their history and environment, and to pose questions about both. In some cases, these movements are even trying to invert local patterns of authority, as when they put young people in charge of a meeting where older people are simply participants. [Abdelhak] Thus, we see historic preservation movements using ‘preservation’ to achieve precisely the opposite goal of maintaining the status quo. They are using the past to call for change on many different levels, ranging from the intimate to the institutional.
Not long ago the call for ‘change’ tended to be phrased in terms of rejecting the colonial past, including inherited French architecture. There is no denying the existence of the wound left by the colonial experience. Each essay refers to it in one way or another – as, for example, a ‘trauma’ [Daoudi] or as ‘hideous and terrible’ [Abdelhak] – though the emotional force of the reference may differ according to the nationality and the generation of the writer. Not surprisingly the tone tends to be less pained in essays written by Moroccans and younger people. But what role should this wound play in the actual practice of preserving the vestiges of the French presence? Each of the following authors is writing as if the colonial scars, undeniable though they are, can indeed be separated from the fabric of the building itself. Without praising the colonial experience or French culture, these authors are writing about local history from a different historiographical perspective than a purely anti-colonial one. Because they are parsing contemporary experience (the current use of the building) from the original one (the builders’ intentions), they are answering the following question in subtle and nuanced ways: what should be done in practical terms with buildings inherited from the colonial period?
The answers to ‘what is to be done?’ contained in the following essays suggest a range of strategies and justifications for preserving colonial buildings. First, old buildings and parks can be recognised for their practical value, for example in the way they regulated people’s exposure to the daunting heat of the North African climate [Daoudi]. Armed with this kind of knowledge, people can organise to protect the built environment or landscape, thus effectively taking responsibility for where they live [Abdelhak, Metair]. Their caretaking may entail putting pressure on the state to live up to its own laws. Sometimes basic preservationist laws are indeed in place, but need to be backed up by popular pressure in order to be implemented. Associations lobbying for historic preservation are thus not only taking care of old buildings but also raising popular awareness of local history and, more generally, of its multi-cultural Mediterranean past [Madani]. None of the authors suggests that the main motive of historic preservation is to appeal to tourists.
The contributions to this collection necessarily take different approaches, coming as they do from the desks of a practicing architect (Rouissi), three architectural historians (Daoudi, Madani, Metair), and one guide (Abdelhak). Furthermore, the authors do not share the same nationality; four are Algerian, one is Moroccan. Despite their differences in orientation, they are all fascinated by the lively popular efforts being made within the Maghreb to grapple with the challenges of saving and adapting old buildings, ones imbued with the sorrows and the glories of local history, so they can be creatively reused in the twenty-first century. Rather than believing that the ‘authentic’ – a moment frozen in time – can ever be found, they accept that heritage is, in Karim Rouissi’s words, ‘in perpetual transformation’.