Camouflaged Power

Representation, Tradition, and Colonial Urbanism in Algiers and Cap‑Haïtien

Abstract

“Tradition” in colonial and postcolonial urbanism emerges less as a stable inheritance than as a representational achievement: a set of plans, drawings, captions, itineraries, and heritage scripts that make certain spaces appear legible, picturesque, and therefore governable.¹ By comparing French Algiers and northern Haiti, this paper treats representation as an architectural practice rather than a secondary interpretation added after the fact. In Algiers, mapping and preservation rhetoric helped transform the Casbah into a curated object whose authenticity was defined through visibility and controllability. In northern Haiti, plans and images first produced Cap-Français as a rational colonial grid, later translated revolutionary rupture into an intelligible spectacle, and eventually stabilized post-independence monuments as a global heritage display. Read together, these cases show how representational order can camouflage violence: domination comes to appear as stewardship when “tradition” is framed as something only colonial or heritage institutions can preserve. Just as importantly, these images did not merely circulate ideas about place; they shaped interventions on the ground, influencing what was demolished, restored, monumentalized, or protected, and teaching viewers to understand urban space through carefully staged relations between history, authority, and visual order.