The construction of fascist Libya: Modern colonial architecture and urban planning in Italian North Africa (1922-1943)

In this study, I analyze the rise of a new, modernist elite of architects and planners in fascist Italy, and their efforts to transform Libya into a model Italian colony. Libya was under Italian rule from 1911-1943. Under fascism (1922-1943), architects and planners engaged in massive projects of social engineering designed to guarantee Italian dominance and prestige. Tripoli, the colonial capital, was rebuilt as a center of administration and tourism. In the countryside, architects built two dozen new agricultural towns to accommodate a large influx of Italian settlers. To the Italians, these transformations were a sign of fascism's civilizing mission in Africa. Architects and planners portrayed themselves as heirs to ancient Roman traditions, bringing wide roads, civic squares and grand buildings to the former Ottoman province. Influenced by modernist trends in European design, architects also claimed to be purveyors of a new technocratic order and rationality.; I seek to demystify architects' claims, by examining the ideological origins and impact of their work in Libya. Architects, I argue, presented their work as scientific and modern in order to cement their alliance with the fascist regime, and establish their own professional supremacy. In Libya, their work did not so much "civilize" the colony, as provide spaces and structures that benefited a small Italian elite, while marginalizing the Libyan majority. Architects grappled with the problem of how to regulate an ethnically and religiously diverse society made up mostly of Arab Muslims. Their work incorporated chauvinist ideas that both enshrined and concealed the inequality of colonizer and colonized. In the countryside, architects extended state control over Italian peasants and Libyan cultivators and herders. The result was a policed and atomized frontier society. The fascist colonial edifice, I argue, rested on a foundation of mass spectacle and repression.; Using over 100 illustrations, this study analyzes the combination of inventiveness and technocratic authoritarianism that characterized Italian imperial architecture. It challenges the supposed neutrality of fascist-era notions of modernity, raising questions about the legacy of totalitarianism and colonialism for the disciplines of modern architecture and urban planning in the post-World War II era.