This nineteenth-century map of the area around Collo, on the coast of Algeria, shows a “Ville projetée,” a proposed town. With a regular grid of streets, including a church, a market and several unidentified buildings, it looks orderly and regular, fitting into the comparatively flat and empty plain between the hills and the sea. To the north of the town is an area set aside for “manoeuvre et bivouac” – presumably a military site. It appears on a sea chart of the area, surveyed in 1869 and published in 1874.

As this is a navigational chart, most of it is taken up by sea, which is shown in some detail with many recordings of depths and the locations of rocks that could be a hazard to ships. There are two lighthouses, marked in hand colour on the otherwise monochrome map; the more remote one, at the end of the Djerda peninsula, is connected to Collo by a road along the coast. The map was surveyed under the direction of Ernest Mouchez, a captain commanding the ship Travailleur, in 1869, assisted by several of the ship’s officers, as part of a wider survey along the Algerian coast, producing many charts which were published by the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la marine (the French hydrographic office).

France had been taking control of coastal settlements in Algeria since 1830, so the plan to establish a new town at a useful port is unsurprising. As is often the case, the earliest detailed map of a coastal area appears on a navigational chart, as previously mentioned here. An earlier sea chart shows that the land was not uninhabited as it’s made to look here. This chart surveyed in 1851 (also a French survey, by C. Bouchet-Rivière) shows the same area with three small clusters of buildings, one identified as a mosque; there are roads, trees and cultivated land around them. This was not empty land.

The modern layout of Collo suggests that the grid of streets was built as planned on the 1874 chart, presumably erasing the settlements that were there before. Subsequently the town seems to have developed more organically, as most of the surrounding streets follow a more irregular pattern. The earlier buildings closest to the sea may not have been affected, and there is still a mosque on the same site.

Algérie: plan de Collo / levé en 1869 par Mr. Mouchez. [Paris] : Dépôt des cartes et plans de la marine, 1874. B1 a.61/25 [17]

Plan du mouillage de Collo / levé et dressé en 1851 par M. C. Bouchet-Rivière. [Paris] : Dépôt général de la marine, 1852. B1 a.61/25 [18]