This study takes up the history of modernization and urban planning in Algeria. Through description and analysis, it assesses the clash between the country’s historic, architectural, and built environment. Looking initially at the context of France’s settler colonial rule and France’s hegemonic rule over society and its space, art, and built environment, the paper goes on to consider the context of independence, in which colonial cultural heritage came to confront a variety of alternative perceptions from diverse Algerian perspectives. This period has come to be associated with the dismantling of the authentic colonial architectural models, represented by the “madina” or “old city,” with its functional, aesthetic, and social divisions, all anchored in time. However, the colonial model also produced newer socio-political divisions that met the needs of the colonizer more than they did the needs of the original inhabitants— in the process bringing about distortions in values and aesthetics within the overall architectural fabric of the country. The research highlights how recent decades have witnessed urban planning attempts to surmount this historical legacy and thus bring the debate back to the modernization crisis in urban planning in the Arab city.