Fria New Town

Fria, in Guinea, is a prime example of French late-colonial industrial New Town planning. It was designed and built from scratch between 1956 and 1964 to house both the senior staff and workers of a new bauxite extraction and aluminium production plant owned by the French company Péchiney. The planning and construction of a factory that was projected to produce no less than 15 per cent of the world’s total aluminium stock came, not coincidentally, at the moment when soon-to-be President Ahmed Sékou Touré called upon the Guinean people to vote for total independence, and thus refuse to become part of the Communauté Française. Discursively, Fria was presented as one of the key engines of industrialization and urbanization in Guinea, and as such the locus par excellence of postcolonial social and economic fulfilment. ¹ Simultaneously, however, taking responsibility of the planning of Fria and assuming ownership of the aluminium plant allowed France, through Péchiney, to regulate the modernizing process, all the while protecting its economic interests in Africa in view of the imminent secession. This ambiguity, between emancipatory socioeconomic responsibility and control, translates on different levels of Fria’s planning and design.

Since the aluminium plant was located 150 km from the nearest city – the capital Conakry – it was essential for the new town to be entirely self-sufficient for its 20,000 projected inhabitants. The master planning of the town was entrusted to famous French planner and architect Michel Écochard. In line with the modernist principles of functional zoning prescribed by the Charter of Athens,² Fria is located on a plateau at about 1.5 km south of the factory.³ The administrative, commercial and recreational functions are grouped and placed centrally between four distinct housing pockets each providing for about 5,000 dwellers. Circulation is strictly subdivided according to speed and volume.⁴ Finally, a system of radiating green zones connects the housing units with each other and links them to the town centre, which is marked by three high rise apartment buildings designed by the office of French architects Guy Lagneau, Michel Weill and Jean Dimitrijevic (Atelier LWD).⁵ The low-rise dwellings for African workers were, in turn, designed by the young architecture collaborative of Michel Kalt, David Pouradier- Duteil and Pierre Vignal (KPDV).

KPDV designed three different plan types for African worker families. Within each housing pocket, the dwellings are organized around a secondary commercial centre and a primary school, and lavishly surrounded by open space and greenery. While a Type B dwelling is designed as a typical Western European terraced house, with living spaces on the ground floor and bedrooms on the first floor, Type A and Type C dwellings are designed so as to mitigate the process of social modernization by providing space for traditional habits and social customs. On one side, they give out onto small public spaces concentrating social and civic life, while on the other side the private gardens open onto green espaces libres where more informal encounters and domestic activities can take place. By thus providing a double orientation to the individual housing unit, male and female living areas are explicitly demarcated. This sensitivity and attention for the local can be traced back to Michel Kalt’s experience as a dissertation student at the Paris Beaux-Arts Academy. In 1949, he undertook a six-month study trip to Cameroon with six fellow students, documenting traditional ways of building and living.⁶ Besides the double orientation of the houses, the arrangement of rooms around a centrally positioned veranda or living room, for instance, mirror Kalt’s observations of dwelling compounds in northern Cameroon, while the semi-outdoor kitchen opening onto the private garden is inspired by African female customs in the preparation of food.

Both Écochard’s master plan and KPDV’s design of the different dwelling types reflect the ambiguity of the promise of social fulfilment and welfare embedded in the New Town project of Fria. While Écochard’s scheme neatly separates the villas for the senior staff from the workers’ housing by a green zone neutre that is in some ways reminiscent of prewar urban planning in the colonies,⁷ KPDV’s dwelling designs play their part in a carefully orchestrated mediation between the inhabitant and his environment, modernity and tradition, inhabitants of different social standing, and different ethnic groups. Despite this apparent ambiguity, Fria was a bustling city, a ‘petit-Paris’, until not so very long ago. In 1997, however, Péchiney left the aluminium plant to the Guinean government, leaving Fria behind as ‘une ville désormais asphyxiée, manquant de tout: d’eau, d’électricité, de nourriture et d’espoir’.⁸