Gaining the title, designated by the European Union annually since 1985, is something like winning the Olympics. It gives Marseille, France’s second-largest city, a chance to remake itself, reclaim its gorgeous port for ordinary citizens and to reshape its image — from a poor, rough, crime-ridden and corrupt crossroads whose economy declined with the end of colonialism to an attractive tourist destination of sun, sea, seafood and culture. That is the intent, certainly — to make Marseille not just a commercial center, but a destination.
With a budget estimated at nearly $135 million, raised from public and private funds, the organizers hope to attract an additional two million visitors and lift the economy. “It’s a shock, a cultural earthquake,” said Jacques Pfister, the head of the local chamber of commerce and director of the association that organized Marseille-Provence 2013, known as MP2013. “We’ve created a cultural offer unique in Europe,” he said. “We want to tie together France, Europe and the Mediterranean.”
More concretely, Mr. Pfister said, “we want the people of Marseille to be able to take back the seacoast and the old port,” which is already mostly car free and is undergoing a multimillion-dollar face-lift.
The city has established 10 new sites for cultural activities, many of them a repurposing of old or abandoned buildings, like the sanitation station and an enormous tobacco factory surrounded by graffitied walls and exhibiting contemporary art on the theme of immigration and exile.
The city has also built some stunning new buildings. There is a huge glass Museum of Civilizations from Europe and the Mediterranean, financed by the state and due to open in June. And the Villa Méditerranée, an international center for dialogue and exchanges about the Mediterranean and its peoples. Paid for by the regional government, it juts over the water.
Good use is being made of some of Marseille’s existing museums, like La Vieille Charité, a 17th-century alms house and hospital in the Panier quarter that was saved some years ago. Transformed into an exhibition space, it is showing “Vestiges,” Josef Koudelka’s haunting black-and-white photographs of Greek and Roman remains from around the Mediterranean.
Zineb Sedira, a photographer and videographer born in France to Algerian parents, said that the city was “trying to break the cliché of Marseille as the gateway to the Orient, to Algeria and colonialism.” Marseille “has for a long time been neglected in France,” better known for crime than for culture, she said. “Marseille now has a chance to put itself on the map.”
Ms. Sedira’s work in Marseille, on the theme of emigration and loss, focuses on the movement of people around the Mediterranean, the main theme of the Marseille year, which is trying to embrace multiculturalism without hiding the scars of colonialism.
“To live together is vital for European life, and Marseille is a good example of it,” said Nicolas Mazet, who owns the Hôtel de Gallifet, an art gallery in what was a large private house in Aix-en-Provence. “MP2013 reminds us of our common European heritage, the result of cultural intermingling from Athens to Grenada.”
Marseille hopes to claim a place as the link connecting northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. A city with ancient Greek and Roman roots, founded in 600 B.C., it is trying to embrace the Italian and North African experiences of its many immigrant citizens. As many as 30 percent of its 850,000 residents are Muslim.
“Marseille created itself, strata upon strata, with foreign populations,” said the city’s longtime mayor, Jean-Pierre Gaudin. “We’ve been privileged by proximity to the countries of the Maghreb. We’re a multicultural city and must remain so.”
Yolande Bacot curated an exhibit about the history and artifacts of the cultures of the Mediterranean, from ancient to modern times, at the J1, a huge seaside warehouse turned exhibition center. “History reopened itself with the Arab Spring, and we want to confront the past and present” Ms. Bacot said, while modifying what she called France’s “very ethnocentric and Franco-French vision of things.”
In 2004, the Marseille City Council decided to apply for the European Capital of Culture designation for 2013. It was chosen in September 2008. In the time since then, Marseille mounted a sometimes frantic effort to raise money and get itself ready for prime time.
The result is sprawling, involving scores of venues here and in nearby towns in Provence, including the wealthier Arles and Aix-en-Provence (with its famed Musée Granet, which has an exhibition of 15 artists from 14 countries). The celebration will last a year, with a cycle of about 400 performances, exhibitions and concerts, as well as events including boat parades, guided treks and a five-day street-food festival.
Unlike most of the big cities in France, Marseille lacks a sizable middle class to supports art and culture. “Here, those who succeed leave,” Dominique Bluzet, the director of several Marseille theaters, told the newspaper Le Monde. “And why? Because there is no pride in the city. This city doesn’t know how to create bourgeois reflexes, to transmit them.”
The region is hoping for a surge in civic pride that endures, as well as a stronger economy and an increase in tourism similar to what Avignon experienced in 2000 and Lille in 2004 after they were designated European Capitals of Culture. This year, Marseille is sharing the title with Kosice, in eastern Slovakia, which boasts beautiful churches, three universities, a historic city center and a big steel mill. No one here mentions Kosice, although presumably no one wishes it ill.
To be sure, there is harsh criticism, too. Minna Sif, a novelist from Marseille, born to Moroccan parents, compared the festivities to a “sardinade,” a traditional Mediterranean dish of grilled sardines, lined up and covered in olive oil.
“It’s hard for me,” she wrote in the newspaper Libération, “to recognize myself in this sardinade, stamped as the capital of right-thinking, feel-good culture, run by a mess of preening cultural morons, of those assigned to the uncultivated and of ambitious people with their mouths stuffed with words.”
