This paper explores the potential offered by deploying a settler colonial critique in Algeria. Issues around sovereignty constitute its central topic, as I consider the following questions: What did sovereignty mean for Algerian Arab and Kabyle communities subsequent to independence? How has colonial urban design historically shaped – and continued to shape – power relations? Under the theoretical umbrella of Frantz Fanon’s lieu en ébullition (boiling place), this paper analyses the mechanisms by which Algiers had become bifurcated by the 1950s and how urban architecture served not only as a tool that reified antagonistic colonial power relations, but also as a site where demands of sovereignty took tangible form. I consider the notion of permanency, both that of colonialism and urban architecture, to elucidate the role of the built environment in instituting an antithetical order of coloniser versus colonised. Following the scholarship on the built environment of colonial Algeria that has grown in recent decades, this work demonstrates that the seeds of alterity sown by the French architectural and urban practices persisted beyond independence, embedding spatial hierarchies that continue to shape lopsided power relations well into the twenty-first century.

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