| Summary: | The German concrete blockhaus from the Atlantic Wall shall be tentatively attached to the interrelated disciplines of military and academic geography as well as to the continuum of castles studies in France. That they reacted on post-War architecture will be seen. As with the earlier community and later urban fortifications of Dieppe, Le Tréport and Calais, it will be shown that their study is not dissociative from their social and urban context. In their second life, the post-War years withholds some lesser-known social consequences for the reuse of the blockhaus. A perpetual field of experimentation manifests their camouflage conceptions; as does a certain regionalism of its application. This study compares two aspects of the landscapes of the coast of the Pays de Caux (Côte d’Albâtre) and the bay of the Somme: their geography and their settlements. Juxtaposed is a sample of coastal towns (most having been walled) with various common identities: Le Tréport and Dieppe, on the Côte d’Albâtre, and Calais, on the Côte d’Opale. That which is relative is their beginnings, physiographic constraints and the challenges of life by the sea. Then there is their urban form and town defences as commonly determined by physiography; their fishing communities; their community dichotomies, indigenous and visitor; their beginnings as important seaside resorts and the coastal fortifications built up until the Second World War that latterly came to degrade these seafronts through their incorporation; the destructions also consequent of the post-War years; the temporary housing erected; and the conceptions of architectural reconstructions realised for the bombed out. It is to also show that Dieppe and Calais were once important seaside resorts. In France, regard is made as to the influence of the geography of the eastern coast of the Seine-Maritime département on the dispositions of a stretch of a line of concrete fortification works set up by the Germans that reached from northern Norway to France, the Atlantic Wall. From various ...
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