ABSTRACT
While their debates on architectural form flagged, colonial architects shifted their attention to city planning. As described in Chapter 4, the “new” field of urbanistica began to gain professional ground in 1932, and architects focused increasingly on problems of urban organization. Furthermore, on the international front, the French conference of 1931 on “urbanism in the colonies and tropical countries” established separation of European and native quarters as the sine qua non of colonial urbanism.3 Despite these new developments, though, Italian architects could not apply such principles in the colonies quite yet. Tripoli was virtually the sole site of architects’ theorization in the early 1930s, and by then it was far too late to alter the city’s overall plan. Thus Italian architects did not begin fully to incorporate ideas of segregation into their theorizations until 1936, when those ideas might conceivably be practicable: the new Empire, inscribed as the site of greatest difference between Italians and natives, now promised vast expanses of “virgin” territory for urbanists and the necessary government commissions to match.4
