In his notebooks and in his novel The Plague, Albert Camus often describes the city of Oran in negative terms. He stresses the qualities or characteristics Oran lacks, seeing in this absence a source of inspiration.

In Camus' universe the cities of North Africa, Oran and Alger, serve an essential function. They are not only the background for his works but they are the embodiment of man's relationship with his environment. The topos of Camus' world revolves around a desert-city dichotomy. (p. 75)

In all of Camus' fiction, the city imposes its own personality and attributes upon its inhabitants….

Camus' initial impressions of cities are visual and organic. He focuses on minutia…. Camus mentions the city's spiritual indifference and climatic excesses such as Oran's autumnal "deluges and floods of mud."… Oran is not in coordination with nature; it is a city which has denied its natural boundaries with the...