With just over 800,000 inhabitants, Marseille is France’s second-largest city. Its location at the gateway to the Mediterranean has fostered a long history of immigration, from Italy in the late nineteenth century and from North Africa during and after decolonization. This city also has little in common with Paris. If in the capital’s elegant, imposing Haussmann-style buildings renting a room costs at least €800 a month, Marseille’s city center remains popular and multiethnic.
According to a 2020 study by Elisabeth Dorier and Julien Dario, the city’s first arrondissement (district) has a very high poverty rate, affecting over half population in some areas. One of its neighborhoods is Noailles, crossed diagonally for almost half a kilometer by Rue d’Aubagne. This street, with its historic buildings of three, four, or five stories, many of which already existed at the time of the French Revolution, leads down from Notre-Dame du Mont, an area of bars and nightclubs, and then joins the Canebière, the city’s main artery. On each floor of each building there are three windows, with laundry hung out or else wooden shutters. The repetition conveys a sense of regularity and order to those who walk through Marseille’s far-from-orderly center with their noses upturned.
Abruptly, this regularity in Rue d’Aubagne is interrupted by a gaping void between nos. 61 and 69. A void that was not always there. A gap that has only recently appeared — and which reminds the Marseillais and passersby of a date etched in the city’s memory, even giving its name to a small square in the street: November 5, 2018.
That morning, at 9:07 a.m., buildings 63 and 65 on Rue d’Aubagne collapsed within minutes — perhaps even seconds — and became a pile of rubble. At first, some thought it was an explosion, a bomb. However, this hypothesis was quickly discarded. The two buildings had collapsed, pulling each other down, raising huge clouds of dust and…
Auteur: Francesca Ru
