New waterfront cities in contemporary Tunisia: Behind the scenes of design industry from above

This book is a follow-up to our recent essay, New waterfront cities in contemporary Tunisia: portrait, classification, and genealogy. It delves deeper into the phenomenon of producing and developing these urban artifacts, revealing their inner workings.The book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter discusses "coastalization", which is a by-product of this phenomenon stemming from three interdependent factors: natural, historical, and political. The second chapter draws a schematic portrait of these new cities, emphasizing their three main characteristics: extroversion, modernism, and utopianism. The third chapter highlights the discrepancies between the media and regulatory discourses involved in crafting these artifacts-which promote an illusory horizontalism by labeling them as "urban projects"-and the actual design practices-which derive from a vertical logic that disregards the spatial and social nuances of their contexts. The fourth chapter explores the intricacies of the two tools that implement this transcendental logic: the grid and the enclave. Together, they form a hybrid apparatus. It also investigates how designers use these tools and their intended purposes.