The smell of cement dust and freshly caught fish wafts through the harbour of Marseille, to a backdrop of pneumatic drills and high-pressure hoses. Everywhere you look, the city is being polished and scrubbed, renovated and repainted. Roads are being resurfaced, trees are being planted, and vast new museums are rising from the ground in preparation for the European Capital of Culture 2013 – which began three months ago. “Marseille is never in a hurry,” says my taxi driver, describing how the city has been a building site for the last 10 years. As he speaks, he takes a diversion around three huge holes in the ground that will soon boast a cluster of teetering towers, part of the city’s new business district. The first is complete, a brooding 140m-tall edifice by Zaha Hadid for the port’s largest shipping company. It stands incongruously on the low-rise skyline, a great stack of offices squeezed into a glassy, sharply curving corset of a building. It is a good metaphor for how this unruly city is trying to adjust to its slick new clothing. A bubbling bouillabaisse of Mediterranean cultures, France’s second largest city has long suffered from its seedy reputation as a… Read full this story
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