In downtown Marseille, one cannot walk down the same street twice. They are French or new arrivals, originating from all over the Mediterranean, West Asia, and Africa, mainly working class, but many from diverse social milieux.
Everyone gets to be here. It all unintentionally forms a performance space of sorts, like a French Jemaa el-Fna, if it were not for the grand, neglected buildings, that particular light and briny balm streaming upwind from the Mediterranean Sea, or its Vieux Port and blanched sails. If attuned and a traveler even at meters from your home , this experience can be participatory. Seemingly insignificant scenes or anonymous people can take me, in turn, elsewhere, to other lives.
It is a downtown that allows for improvisation, simultaneous lives, for places and people to peek through from the distances of time and recollection.
Such engagements with other times and places β meaningful, sometimes baffling or emotive β exist in private thoughts, forming a separate awareness.
Homogenous human gatherings, choreographed movement of people and vehicles , uniform architecture and structured urban space, which can be coherent and pleasant to the eye, do not allow diverse people to fully exist and coexist. You can remain on the curb looking on, as if at a postcard, and as if you are not quite there, not yet part of the world around you.
