Marseille: From transit city to urban isolation Part 2 Dissertation 2025 Sacha Trouiller Architectural Association London | UK Marseille has remained, at least in part, more Mediterranean than national, escaping the idea of a common identity with a unique history and language. After Algeria's independence in 1962, the port city initially conceived as a simple transit point quickly became the main destination for French repatriates and North African immigrants.Against the backdrop of Algerian decolonisation, this work investigates the dynamics between migratory flows and the built environment in Marseille. Through archival research and a visual essay, the dissertation traces a history of social and spatial violence and examines the current practices of enclosure in the Phocaean city. The aim is to better understand how the urban, economic and social policies of the last sixty years, at the crossroads of colonial heritage, segregation through housing and Algerian war, have shaped the current fragmentation of Marseille.This work does not pretend to resolve or even to grasp in its entirety such a vast subject, but rather to recount from an architectural angle the urban and human reality of a lasting stigmatisation in a city of transit and immigration, of strangers and foreigners. Tutor(s) Eleni Axioti