ABSTRACT
The legacy of the past two centuries represents today a significant, often essential, share of the built landscape in almost all cities on the Mediterranean shore. It is the product of diverse urban transformations: European expansion across the Mediterranean, local policies of modernization, and the structural reforms of the Ottoman Empire known as Tanzîmât. Architectural and urban features of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are nowadays spatial markers shaping the downtown landscape of North African cities. Even if the experiences were based not only on the cultural and technical projection of European means and wills, those quarters are largely associated with the colonizers way of governing the countries of the southern Mediterranean.
