One of the best ways to discover a place is simply to get lost in it. Fortunately, this is easy to do in Marseille. Compared to Paris, the street patterns of Marseille seem indecipherable, lending the city a kind of intimidation. But for the architect who relishes urbanism, the city presents a welcome challenge.

Food seems like a good key to start unlocking a place, so after reading in the New York Times about Marseille’s various pizzerias, my search for the city begins with a desire to visit its oldest one. Until this point, my experience of this venerated metropolis had been relegated to Le Corbusier’s Unité housing and the gentrified old port, Vieux Port, to the west. These areas marked the limits of my comprehension of Marseille as a place—a rough reputation, bounded by my uninformed understanding. 

I avoid digital mapping when exploring; monodirectional directives work against the spirit of discovery. Instead I go analog, printing out a map of the pizzeria’s neighborhood, one referred to in the article as the Cours Julien, about a 20-minute walk east of the Vieux Port, where I would park. But I exit too early off the A-50, right into a midday traffic jam. The usual traffic habits ensue: yelling, honking horns, waving hands and fists, “allez-y!” Sandwiched between nebulous social housing blocks that France is infamous for, I take a left to exit the situation. With the aid of street signs, I wind my way down to the Vieux Port, the flapping laundry on balconies waving me onward. 

Parking my car, I scramble up to the plateau at Place Notre-Dame-du-Mont, accessing it from the south. The traffic jam has pushed me off the lunch hours, and La Bella Pizza has stopped serving. Fixed eating hours at restaurants being one of the community reinforcing aspects of French life, I make a dinner reservation. Still hungry, I wander north, looking for options. I find an Egyptian street food café next to an esplanade and settle into a plate of kofta, hummus, and falafel, cuisine not found in my hometown region of Provence. Satisfying my need, I look around. As it is after lunchtime, the esplanade is empty. A transit sign calls out Cours Julien. All the surrounding storefronts are painted in lively colors, competing for attention but together forming an ensemble of distinct visual character. But the open space dilutes the color that has piqued my curiosity. What is this place? 

I get up and begin to wander. Colorful storefronts give way to graffiti, interspersed with vivid murals on what would otherwise be blank party walls. Soon I find myself atop a wide staircase with metal picket guardrails that descends to a bridge that leads back down to the Vieux Port. I look closely at the pickets; each is covered in the expressive words of the street artist. I continue on. Security gates are expressively painted to accompany their equally spirited facades. Cafes and teahouses are brimming with graphic life. Even the neighborhood French U chain store has joined in on the act. I turn up a narrow street and the tight space concentrates the color, heightening its vibrancy. I’m immersed, starting to feel lost in the enveloping folds of the Cours Julien.

Residing on the lines of the walls built by Louis XIV during the expansion of Marseille that were destroyed in 1800, the Cours Julien was once home to the Marché Central, the city’s central wholesale fruit and vegetable market. In the mid 1800s, a grand staircase and footbridge were erected on the Cours’ north end to provide a more direct connection between the surrounding hilltop neighborhoods and the port, today the Vieux Port. The 1970s marked the relocation of the Marché Central, similar in timing and consequence to the destruction of Les Halles Centrales in Paris. The aftermath in both quarters seems to have faced similar challenges, and perhaps responded similarly by using art to redefine the neighborhood. But whereas Paris responded with formal institutional solutions in the form of the Centre Pompidou and Ircam (and a giant mall), the Cours Julien seems to have pursued a grassroots approach, taking art informally out into the streets. Today, it’s considered by some to be the single best urban gallery in Europe.

I know none of this while discovering this part of Marseille. I am simply mesmerized by what I am witnessing: vintage shops, homegrown specialty stores, weed dispensaries, galleries, ice cream parlors, bars, clubs, all sharing a similar visual spirit through their front surfaces. And the various eateries are as diverse as the street art that adorns them: Peruvian, Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Syrian, Japanese, Thai, Brazilian, Basque, and Indian food offerings litter the various streets I stroll. Conspicuously rare are traditional French bistros.

My journey takes me through a large park square: Place Jean Jaurès. The graffiti continues. It’s on every vertical surface available, save for the trees: columns, planter walls, faces of all ancillary park buildings, vent stacks, benches, signposts, and bollards—and even on parts of the lower levels and roofs of the many surrounding buildings. Amid this, teenagers gather, parents push baby strollers, kids play soccer and ride their bikes, skateboarders sail and grind. Shaved trunks of trees form a colossal jungle gym that supports screaming kids who have just been let out of school. Swings sway and slides shudder with the kinetics of small moving bodies as parents and nannies dutifully look on—a menagerie of joy and diversity—that belies the “hipster enclave” coined in tourist guides I will read later. 

South of the square, I walk into what appears to be the residential part of the neighborhood, narrow, one-way streets defined by 19th century housing interspersed with converted warehouses. The graffiti continues but is reserved for roll-down gates, garage doors, and building walls at intersections. What in the commercial area is a continuous surface now becomes tactically located to maintain presence without overwhelming the domestic temperament still desired. The graffiti adapts to the context and program—very architectural. I see a mother holding the hands of two small children as they walk along. An adolescent whisks by on his electric scooter. I peer into a community bike repair shop, another for motorcycles. They all feel at home here. 

I remain taken by all the graffiti and start to think about the power of street art at this scale of application. Typically, graffiti appears as intervention and (like the subway cars of 1970s New York City) a sometimes threatening disruption to our everyday lives. But here in the Cours Julien district of Marseille, it’s context. It becomes a pulsating texture, surrounding one in its energy. Here, where budgets are presumably limited, paint becomes a material, paint becomes power. When finances grow low, one still has color—and how unusually dynamic it is when applied like this. Unusual because, here, it transcends intervention to become vernacular; dynamic because it transforms the common area into a collection of individual expressions. Graffiti is certainly the most urban of folk arts, a type of environmental art suited for cities. It’s where urbanism, populism, the rebel spirit, and art intersect. It’s a random communal means to mark territory. And at this scale of infiltration, it extends beyond mere statements to become story. Before social media, we had graffiti. Thankfully, we still do, providing the public with the sensory empirical to counterbalance the disembodied virtual. This is what it feels like to be in mass creativity when it is set free. 

All photos by the author.