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Empire, Architecture and the City French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914

In many ways, Zeynep Çelik’s new book is a tour de force. In discussing the complex and sometimes intertwined histories of two empires, an emerging French one and a dwindling Ottoman one, she spans a time frame of almost a century and covers a large geographical area stretching from Algeria and Tunisia to Iraq and Yemen when they were part of the Arab Provinces under Ottoman rule. Without losing sight of local specificities, Çelik explicitly opts for a comparative analysis that focuses on more dominant tendencies, and questions if a ‘‘shared universal imperial culture’’ existed in the nineteenth century. As a result, the book demonstrates how the particular French and Ottoman perceptions of modernity shaped notions about their respective colonies. Drawing on an impressive number of sources, the book fundamentally questions some of the frameworks by which colonial urbanism and architecture are commonly understood, replacing the bilateral axes of east–west and north–south with more complex multidirectional patterns of influence, communication, and transfers of expertise. In line with Çelik’s earlier publications, such as Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs (1992) or Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (1997), buildings and urban form are understood here as ‘‘social-political documents’’ (p. 10), and the author gives large attention to visual culture. Her thematically organized discussion brings to the fore a wide array of cities on the ‘‘periphery’’ of both empires, with Çelik arguing that such a perspective is more productive, as building and planning practices become more ‘‘transparent’’ and ‘‘direct’’ in the margins than in the imperial centers of Paris or Istanbul (p. 4). The book adds to our understanding of major centers such as Algiers, that ‘‘trial and error case of French colonial urbanism’’ (p. 95), as well as Beirut and Damascus, Ottoman cities that have already been the subject of some scholarly research (including that of Jens Hanssen and Stefan Weber). It also sheds new light on Ottoman planning and building in Trablusgarb (Tripoli) before it became a colonial city under Italian rule (a period documented in recent books by Mia Fuller and Brian L. McLaren). Some lesser-known localities such as Constantine in Algeria receive equal focus here, supporting Çelik’s case that overall strategies of city building were at work throughout both empires, albeit with attention to local specificities. Çelik analyzes cities in relation to both a larger, regional scale and the smaller grain of the urban square and the individual building. She organizes her chapters accordingly, discussing first how the introduction of infrastructural networks of mobility and communication created ‘‘changed landscapes’’ in the empire. The following chapters present an analysis of urban planning strategies and the introduction of new typologies of public buildings. Especially in the Ottoman context, such operations created an urban décor representing the emergence of a secularization of society and onto which imperial messages were inscribed via ceremonies and visual mediation. Generic buildings such as military barracks, hospitals, or schools receive as much attention as projects with more ambitious architectural design. As ‘‘signs of modernity,’’ clock towers occupy a particular position in the book. Empire building, Çelik argues, was not only a matter of controlling and organizing space but also of regulating and synchronizing time in a vast geographical zone. By giving priority to the politics of architecture, Çelik’s discussion of aspects of architectural form and appearance remains limited, however, and especially for the Ottoman empire, her critical comments on built production only rarely go beyond the ‘‘reductive vocabulary’’ of the contemporary sources. Via often intriguing cases of cross-cultural exchange, Çelik maps the complex trajectories of architectural and urban models, ideas, expertise, and practices, as they were disseminated within a large territory, thereby re-assessing the conventional ‘‘center ⁄ periphery’’ framework. The echoes of Viollet-le-Duc’s unrealized project for a memorial to Napoléon III in Algiers (1865) in the design by an Italian architect for the Telegraph Tower in Damascus (1902) are a case in point. The book also highlights the different perceptions of the role of the urban park in French and Ottoman discourse. Viewed by the French as beneficial ‘‘lungs of the city,’’ parks were understood differently by Ottoman administrators who, as late as 1918, critiqued the practice of spending money on such ‘‘superfluous’’ things at the expense of ‘‘public health’’ (p. 157). Here, Çelik provides a forceful reminder that