ABSTRACT
While some architects in the early 1930s engaged in recriminations about showcase architecture in Tripoli, a handful of others extended their practice into a field that would become especially important under Balbo: new settlements in Libya for Italian farmers. These brought the culmination of Italian efforts at statesponsored “demographic colonization,” which had been implemented only minimally thus far in Eritrea and Rhodes. In substantial part due to Balbo lobbying for greater state investment, fertile areas of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica became a different sort of showcase, of newly built villages. In all, government-sponsored agencies completed between thirty and forty of these (Figures 8.1 and 8.2); but the government intended to increase this number, bringing half a million Italian settlers to Libya alone by mid-century.2
