La Rouviere

This is one more post praising Marseille as an amazingly beautiful city. Obviously I'm talking about the architecture and the natural landscape, and keeping aside the "Human landscape": criminality, drug dealing, Islamism, vandalism, far-left Fascist scum (calling themselves antifascists...). If you get to Marseille by train when you get out of the pretty nice Saint Charles Station probably the first thing that you'll see (apart from some Maghrebian and Sahelian dealers) is a small mountain not so far away crowned by a gorgeous Neo-Bizantine church. That's Notre-Dame de la Garde, the magnificent church that dominates the whole city, looking after its inhabitants (well, I hope only for those that deserve it). Additionally the stairs that go down from the station to Boulevard d'Athens to take to you to the city center (the station is in a slightly elevated position) are just imposing, with those two mesmerizing female sculptures representing the African colonies and the Asian colonies of the good, old France (the day some indigenist-anticolonial-"so called antifascist" scumbags will try to damage them "je vais peter un cable").

When you climb up to La Bonne Mere (as the Notre-Dame de la Garde is commonly known), it's not just the building what will marvel you, it's the amazing views. I'm used to cities, Lisbon is the perfect example, where you climb up to some view point to see from there one part of the city. Then you climb up to another one with a different orientation to see another part of the city, and so on. But the 150 meters high mountain hosting Notre Dame de la Garde is just in the center of Marseille, and you can walk around the church to see the whole city, the sea and the islands to the West, the massive city to the North and the East (surrounded by an important mountain range), the imposing Calanques to the South... it's just outstanding.

Looking South-East you'll see some groups of high-rise residential buildings (grand-ensembles) that seem to climb up the mountains. For an urban freak it's a beatiful image. There are several groups of them (each group is a "cité") but one one of them is really massive. I had always assumed it would be some HLM (public housing) nightmare, totally controlled by Islamists and dealers, like a sort of Afghanistan only that dealing cocaine and weed to the locals (infidels from other neighbourhoods) rather than exporting opium to far away countries. Some days ago I decided to investigate and to my total surprise it's not like that at all!

That grand-ensemble is called La Rouviere and is not a public housing mess, but "normal housing", with most of the flats being owned by those living in them. The access to the residential area (or at least to the buildings themselves) is controlled by guardians, so it's a peaceful community of almost 9000 people. The area was built in the 60's and filled mainly by Pieds noir, the French population that had to flee Algeria when it gained independence, after having lived there for generations, after having built a modern and well functioning society and economy that would collapse in just a few years of "independence".

It's not surprising to find an "article" in that left-wing propaganda pamphlet called "Le Monde" where the people living in La Rouviere are called racists and fascists for doing their best to keep their cité peaceful and European by promoting that the new inhabitants that get there when some flat becomes vacant have the same "cultural codes" that those living there. Oh, yes, it's terrible. Moreover, bearing in mind that many of the current inhabitants descend from the Pieds Noirs that first got to the cité, one should for sure ask them to welcome Algerians into the community. It would be a very progressist way to respond to the "la valise ou le cercueil" (the suitcase or the coffin) choice given by Algerians to the Pied-Noirs in 1962... Hopefully some people still have common sense, have learnt lessons from recent history and do not accept the woke, progressist crap.

By the way, this wikipedia article about Marseille's urbanism is really interesting.