During the Algerian war for independence, architecture became an active agent, as evidenced in the defining spatial dynamics of the Casbah (especially as they were rendered in iconic visual form in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film Battle of Algiers) and in the colonial administration’s concerted construction of modern housing estates explicitly designed as means of pacifying, acculturating, and controlling their inhabitants. Challenging prevailing accounts focused primarily on self-contained building projects and their architects’ design intentions, this paper aims to resituate new apartment blocks erected in Algiers as defining nodes within the broader urban landscape as it was radically rewritten by war. In this context, housing functioned simultaneously as target, weapon, and battleground. Architects and colonial authorities seized upon housing as the linchpin of ambitious planning strategies focused on the systematic reordering of the capital and the strategic displacement of inhabitants. Monumental mass housing projects, whether conceived as permanent apartments or temporary “transit” units, were, in their design logic and location, deeply entangled with the unauthorized and adhoc constructions they were supposedly intended to replace, including temporary barracks erected to accommodate forcibly “regrouped” rural residents and bidonvilles, or shantytowns, rapidly proliferating in the capital and on its outskirts. In the later stages of the war, the urban periphery became the site of intense contestation. Battles over housing were defined by multiple borderlands, since the most aggressively publicized new developments in Algiers were rooted in designs first developed in Marseille and, as the war continued, housing forms and policies developed in Algiers were reabsorbed into the city of Marseille. In Algiers, the strategic targeting of housing by planning experts and the ever-present French military apparatus was powerfully challenged by inhabitants, who actively rewrote buildings as battlegrounds. Through ephemeral tactics of graffiti, sound, light, and collective protest, urban spaces––streets, courtyards, walls, rooftops, balconies, and even apartment interiors––became conjectural sites for imagining new conditions of citizenship.