trialog 135
Editorial
Since the turn of the millennium, Maghreb countries have experi-enced scores of ambitious housing and urban redevelopment pro-jects of national as well as international scope. Housing programmes which attempted to address the chronic housing shortage through the construction of new towns and the implementation of reset-tlement and upgrading projects have exacerbated an urban sprawl that continues to put pressure on urban and peri-urban land. These dynamics have also triggered an aggressive competition for land be-tween ‘world-class’ urban redevelopment projects and the politically undesired populations threatened by forced eviction. Thus, the rela-tionship between the city centre and the periphery is shifting. While city centres are being beautified and renewed following global ‘world-class’ aspirations, thousands of citizens are being pushed to spatially disconnected new towns at the urban peripheries.
In this issue of TRIALOG, we focus on these urban contrasts as evi-dent in the Maghreb, and particularly visible in Morocco. They are representative of new urban realities in a region that struggles to cope with a volatile economic, political, and social context. Almost ten years after the beginning of the Arab uprisings, govern-ments throughout the Maghreb region are still under pressure to respond to people’s demands for access to human rights and social justice. In response, Morocco’s state authorities made access to ade-quate housing a constitutional right and, likewise, uses social housing policy as an effective governmental tool to prevent further uprisings. As such, housing and urban redevelopment throughout the Maghreb region play a primary role in renegotiating the role of the state and in producing new imaginaries of development and modernity at the level of everyday urban life. In this context, the articles focus on three major topics: 1) the making and promotion of ‘world-class’ urban megaprojects, 2) the failure of housing programmes to achieve their own policy objectives, and 3) the everyday life experience in rapidly changing urban contexts.
Regarding the first theme, the article by Wippel offers a detailed analysis of the redevelopment of Tangier from a secondary city in the long-neglected north of Morocco to the country’s second most-important economic hub, now hosting Morocco’s largest internation-al harbour. Following the expansion of its port and Tangier’s renewed economic significance, the city has become a site for political invest-ment, as evidenced by the redevelopment of its waterfront and the construction of new large-scale infrastructure. However, Wippel also illumines the shadow of these world-class aspirations, emphasising the forced evictions, enhanced socio-spatial segregation, and injus-tices of opaque top-down planning. In a similar vein, the contribution of Aljem and Strava on urban megaprojects in Casablanca empha-sises how urban megaprojects tend to overlook local needs. Driven by global neoliberal forces, planners do little to hide that prestige projects such as the waterfront development Casa Marina and the luxurious Casa Anfa are exclusively addressed to a wealthy upper class. Consequently, these projects enhance socio-spatial inequalities within the metropolitan area. Looking at patterns of spatial inequality, the contribution of Frikech and Tenzon offers a more-historic per-spective. Focusing on the Kenitra-Meknes corridor, the authors look at the development of top-down urbanisation under colonial rule. They argue that historic planning continuities must be considered as elementary conditions of today’s urban centralities and capitalist urban growth.
The article by Beier examines the second major theme of this issue, namely the failure of housing projects to achieve the objective of delivering affordable and formal housing to shantytown dwellers.
Focusing on a case study from Casablanca, Beier argues that although many residents could afford moving to new houses, their new legal status remains contested. Most new home ‘owners’ lack full property titles, and many still access basic services and infra-structure in an informal way. Another failed housing policy is the concept of social mixing, which Chinig addresses in his paper. Using rich qualitative and ethnographic data from a resettlement project in Salé, Chinig argues that moving people of different backgrounds to the same neighbourhood does not necessarily produce a socially mixed neighbourhood. Instead, everyday interactions and differen-tiated ways of spatial appropriation, as well as segregating building and planning structures, can create multiple subdivisions and barriers within a neighbourhood.
Spatial appropriation also plays a crucial role in the establishment of street markets, which is shown by Grüneisl. Exploring the third major theme of the issue, the author offers ethnographic insights into everyday practices of place-making in the Bab El Falla market in the medina of Tunis after the uprisings and argues that market-making is an ongoing process based on social networks, interdependencies, and competition. The contribution of Belkebir looks at how social networks and everyday interactions among neighbours are impacted by forced resettlement. Focusing on ethnographic fieldwork in the peri-urban town of Ain El Aouda in the metropolitan area of Rabat, she argues that many resettled residents would have wished to stay with their former neighbours. As found in Chinig’s article, mistrust is common among people of differing socio-economic status and resi-dential background. Behbehani, Bassett and Radoine focus on re-settled residents’ everyday practices in the new towns Tamesna and Tamansourt. The authors’ special attention is on economic informali-ties that have appeared for both reasons of survival and as a form of urban co-production. While authorities keep fighting urban informal markets, many residents see them as a distinct aspect of Moroccan culture, a source of urban prosperity, and a means of appropriating uniformly designed housing blocks.
Table of Contents
04 Re-Developing Tangier: The Globalisation of a Secondary City and its Local
Consequences
Steffen Wippel
12 Casablanca’s Megaprojects: Neoliberal Urban Planning and Socio-Spatial
Transformations
Sanae Aljem and Cristiana Strava
20 Historical Perspectives on the Emergence of Dispersed Urban Growth in
Morocco: The Kenitra-Meknes Urbanisation Corridor
Sara Frikech and Michele Tenzon
27 Resettlement and Persisting Informality in Casablanca
Raffael Beier
34 Strategies of Social Mixing and Social Distance in a New Neighbourhood:
The Case of Lotissement Said Hajji in Salé, Morocco
Soufiane Chinig
42 From Fruit to Fripe Trading: Exploring Urban Change in a Tunis Marketplace
Katharina Grüneisl
48 Neighbourhoods and Post-housing Territorial Appropriation(s) in a Peri-urban
Context: The Case of the Attadamoune Neighbourhood in Ain El Aouda, Morocco
Salma Belkebir
57 The Role of the Informal Sector in New Town Development: The Case of Morocco
Fatmah M. Behbehani, Ellen M. Bassett and Hassan Radoine
66 Editorial (Deutsch)
67 Forthcoming events / Veranstaltungen
Housing and Urban Redevelopment in the Maghreb
Volume editors: Raffael Beier, Gerhard Kienast, Yassine Moustanjidi and Sonja Nebel
trialog 135
Casablanca’s Megaprojects: Neoliberal Urban Planning and
Socio-Spatial Transformations
The first decade of the 21st century marked a change in the design and implementation of urban strategies in Morocco through the intro-duction of sectorial policies and reforms of various kinds aimed at encouraging investment and stimulating economic growth. Megaprojects have emerged as the preferred implementation tool of these urban strategies. In this article, we examine this development through the case of large-scale projects in Casablanca, Morocco‘s economic capital. We argue that these changes are as much a result of structural reforms as they are indicative of global and transnational neoliberalisation logics. Together, these act as the main drivers for the city‘s ambitions to increase economic productivity and become a regional business and financial hub. We further argue that this is being effected through a pro-liferation of ‚supply‘ strategies that have led to a standardisation of urban development policies and planning forms at the expense of local needs. We follow these developments on three levels: megaproject governance, influence on regulatory frameworks, and the transformation of local socio-spatial fabrics.
Die Megaprojekte von Casablanca: Neoliberale Stadtplanung und sozialräumliche Transformationen
Das erste Jahrzehnt des 21. Jahrhunderts markierte einen Wandel in der Gestaltung und Umsetzung städtischer Strategien in Marokko durch die Einführung sektoraler Politiken und Reformen verschiedener Art, die auf die Förderung von Investitionen und die Stimulierung des Wirtschaftswachstums abzielten. Megaprojekte haben sich als bevorzugtes Umsetzungsinstrument dieser städtischen Strategien herauskris-tallisiert. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir diese Entwicklung am Beispiel von Großprojekten in Casablanca, der wirtschaftlichen Hauptstadt Marokkos. Wir argumentieren, dass diese Veränderungen ebenso ein Ergebnis von Strukturreformen sind wie sie auf globale und transna-tionale Neoliberalisierungslogiken hindeuten. Zusammengenommen sind sie die wichtigsten Triebkräfte für die Ambitionen der Stadt, die wirtschaftliche Produktivität zu steigern und zu einem regionalen Geschäfts- und Finanzzentrum zu werden. Wir argumentieren ferner, dass dies durch eine Vielzahl von „Angebots“-Strategien erreicht wird, die zu einer Standardisierung der Stadtentwicklungspolitiken und Planungs-formen auf Kosten der lokalen Bedürfnisse geführt haben. Wir verfolgen diese Entwicklungen auf drei Ebenen: die Steuerung von Megapro-jekten, die Beeinflussung der rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und die Veränderung der lokalen sozialräumlichen Strukturen.
In recent decades, Casablanca has emerged as Morocco’s most emblematic metropolis. As the country’s largest city, with more than 4 million inhabitants, it is also the de facto economic capital: its metropolitan area concentrates im-portant infrastructure provision – the country’s main air-port and secondary air-port, and a newly built high-speed rail terminal – with large-scale industrial, tertiary, banking and commercial service facilities. Considered a ‘laboratory for modernity’ during the colonial era (Rabinow 1989), Casa-blanca has not escaped the problems of industry-driven, fast-paced urban development. Owing in part to its rapid growth in the second half of the twentieth century, the city is plagued by several urban deficiencies that present significant problems for administrators and inhabitants alike. Uncontrolled urban sprawl, a large deficit in public facilities, the proliferation of substandard housing, and in-sufficient public transport are but a few of these issues. In response, the state authorities have launched several new ‘visions’ and metropolitan strategies that aim to en-hance Casablanca’s attractiveness while also controlling and guiding its development. Megaprojects have emerged as the preferred implementation tool of these urban strategies. Defined by their global ambitions, considerable cost (and risk), and complex legal-financial provisions, megaprojects involve multiple public and private stake-holders, a wide range of professions and expertise, and promise significant social, economic and environmental impacts (Flyvbjerg 2014, Datta and Shaban 2016). Implant-ed in prime real-estate locations, they operate with a logic
of legal exception and economic opportunity, which in turn produces significant re-ordering at various scales. Drawing on research conducted by the two authors in Casablanca from 2013 to the present, in this article we examine the emergence, proliferation, and incipient socio-spatial impact of megaprojects in contemporary Morocco (see Fig. 1). Our data includes qualitative interviews con-ducted with urban planners, officials, developers, and in-habitants in Casablanca; ethnographic observation of the urban spaces under discussion; and public documents outlining land-pricing and reforms to planning regulations. Our analysis of this material leads us to argue that there has been a shift in the logic driving and informing local planning and governance towards a markedly neoliberal approach to urban space and its users.
We use neoliberalism both in the sense of a structur-al force and as an ideologicstructur-al agenda that prescribes models for economic and socio-political action (Ganti 2014). In the context of Morocco, structural adjustment policies and market liberalisation reforms introduced in the 1980s have led to a hybrid institutional assemblage characterised by public-private partnerships and a re-working of the frameworks dictating the management and governance of urban space. By tracing these shifts at the level of policy, governance, and the architectural forms and socio-spatial arrangements they foster, we aim to show the misalignment between local needs and the logics currently driving megaprojects. The long-term
Sanae Aljem and Cristiana Strava
Figure 1: Location of main
megaprojects meant to 'revi-talise' Casablanca's fabric via tourism or business-focused developments. Source: Aljem
socio-spatial consequences of these urban interventions are not only significant but also increasingly contested.
From plan to project – a brief history of Moroccan urbanism
The current push for megaprojects is not unprecedented, either globally or in the context and history of Morocco, but embedded in longer genealogies of planning and building (Scranton 2014, Aljem 2017, Strava 2018). In Mo-rocco, monumental urban works have been employed by various regimes to signal different aspirations and values (Rachik 2002, Ossman 1994). Starting in the early 2000s, however, urban planning and urban management char-ters underwent several significant changes and reforms. This period corresponds to the regime change occasioned by King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne and his privileging of urban areas as sites of policy reform and tar-geted intervention. This has led to several administrative reforms, among which three deserve particular mention. Firstly, the government’s launch of a nationwide reflection on territorial planning in 2001 aimed to redress dispari-ties between urban cores and their adjacent regions. This resulted in the elaboration of new regional territorial plan-ning schemes, or Schémas régionaux de l’aménagement du territoire (SRAT). Reflecting their status as the coun-try’s preeminent urban centres, Casablanca and Rabat were subsumed by a special central metropolitan plan-ning scheme, or Schéma d’Organisation Fonctionnelle et d’Aménagement pour l’Aire Métropolitaine Centrale (SOFA). The SOFA has since set the main agenda for Casablanca’s development around key economic con-cerns such as: increasing competitiveness of maritime
infrastructures, tourism development as motor of job cre-ation, and a renewed focus on marketing the Casablanca-Rabat corridor as a business-friendly region (MATEE 2005). Secondly, in 2002 the existing Charte Communale – the legislative framework for city governance – was reformed to strengthen local democracy and streamline the man-agement of communal resources. This was done by advo-cating ‘city unity’ for municipalities of more than 750,000 inhabitants. With the goal of achieving a more rational and efficient management of large Moroccan cities, a greater integration of administrative structures and functions was enacted. Following this reform, Casablanca changed its administrative division from twenty-seven urban com-munes to a single municipality, assisted in its mission by sixteen municipal districts, regrouping the former com-munes. This re-centralisation diminished the power of local administrations by subsuming most of the decision-making concerning large projects to a central body that was meant to reduce deliberation times and accelerate projects deemed economically beneficial to the city. Lastly, starting in 1999 and throughout the first decade of the 2000s, a new practice of ‘exemption’ (dérogation) in urban management and planning was introduced by min-isterial circulars on the authorisations to subdivide and build.1 Arguing that the strict and over-regulatory
charac-ter of existing land-use plans was responsible for the lack of facilities and infrastructure provision in Casablanca, the exemptions were seen as a tool to address these lacks and encourage investment. The practice made it possi-ble to incorporate into real-estate economies previously neglected, or inefficiently managed sites, now marketed
1
for their great landscape, natural, geographical or heritage potential.2 Given their topographical and zoning nature,
these sites lend themselves easily to the legal and finan-cial arrangements employed in exemption mechanisms. As a result, derogation has become a fully fledged plan-ning tool, employed almost as frequently as conventional planning mechanisms. Ministerial memos stipulated at the time that in order to benefit from such exemptions, projects would need to demonstrate the economic, so-cial and urban added-value they would bring to the city. Overwhelmingly, however, studies have shown that ex-emptions are awarded to large real-estate projects that employ low-skilled and low-paid labour on precarious contracts and do little to create sustainable opportunities for either the inhabitants or the city.3
The first decade of the 2000s thus marked a slow but steady shift in the design and application of urban public policies in Morocco. Through the implementation of vari-ous types of reforms aimed at encouraging investment into and development of urban areas, this period played a fundamental role in facilitating the emergence and prolif-eration of megaprojects as tools of new strategic planning carried out alongside existing regulatory frameworks.
Megaprojects as neoliberal projects
The generalisation of the ‘project’ approach as part of strategic planning is partly related to the economic and political reforms mentioned so far, and partly owed to global logics driving the financialisation of urban space in the region (Buckley & Hanieh 2014). Casablanca’s megaprojects are thus meant to signal its competitive-ness, and powerfully convey an updated image of Morocco as a modern and progressive country (see Fig. 2). Megaprojects, in this sense, have become signifi-cant drivers of foreign investment.
Figure 2: The new tower,
or burj, of the Casablanca Finance City Authority, part of efforts to establish Morocco as a regional financial and business hub on par with places like Dubai. Photo: Strava
Morocco, like the majority of states – resource-rich coun-tries excepted (see Kanna 2011) – must rely on a combi-nation of funding mechanisms to bring such ambitious schemes to fruition. The emergence and proliferation of megaprojects has thus partly been fuelled by the avail-ability of financial capital coming from regional tors and clients. In order to court and host these inves-tors, Casablanca is enhancing its metropolitan strategies, among them land policies that are oriented towards gradually increasing availability of land supply. According-ly, investors in the sector benefit from several advantages in terms of tax incentives, business facilitations, urban density, floor area, number of floors, or change of zoning through the above-mentioned ‘exemption’ practices. These developments point to the fact that megapro-jects represent an acceleration of neoliberal logics in the management and planning of Moroccan urban space. The country’s desire to open up to international financial markets, attract foreign investors and improve its attrac-tiveness and international influence has led to the rise of such ‘supply strategies’. This, in turn, has led to a stand-ardisation of the content of urban development agendas and strategies, which often lead to neglect or side-step specific local needs in favour of global economic com-petitiveness.
This process can be observed on three levels: the gov-ernance of the projects, the policy-making, and the archi-tectural forms that emerge. While intertwined, we elabo-rate on each sepaelabo-rately below.
Governance of megaprojects
The management of major projects in Casablanca tes-tifies to both a new trend of project governance with partnership-based modes (Bourdin 2003) as well as shift in the governance of urban social orders (Bogaert 2012). As part of this shift, from urban government (as made up of coherent institutions and processes of democratic decision-making) to governance (partnerships of various forms including private actors or corporations), contrac-tual and managerial mechanisms have become dominant (Le Galès 1995). In the context of Morocco, this shift has meant the marginalisation of traditional actors such as local councils and neighbourhood associations, and a nar-rowing down of conventional channels for participation in urban governance at the local level.
Studies on neoliberalism in Europe (Pinson and Morel Journel 2016) link these changes to transformations in modes of production and division of labour on cities and urban policies. These studies relate the transformations that reconfigured the shape, social structures, economic functions and governance devices of Western cities since the 1970s to more profound and structural transforma-tions brought about by the forces of post-Fordism, globali-sation, or flexible specialisation (Moulaert et al. 1988, Peck and Tickell 1994, Brenner 1999).
As these processes and transformations spread to the Global South, similar developments can be observed in places like Morocco. Megaprojects have thus become noticeable catalysts for the financialisation of operational structures devoted to steering urban (re)development. In Morocco, this has been achieved through the creation of
3
The effect this leads to can be likened to Murray’s ‘urban-ism of [...] exception’ (2017). Also see Giorgio Agamben’s work on ‘states of exception’ (2005).
2
financial institutions such as the Caisse de Depot et de Gestion (CDG), a state-owned pension and investment fund created in 1959. In 2004, the CDG created a subsidi-ary company, ‘CDG Development’, as a private holding company with a board of directors. CDG Development is currently one of the most powerful development holdings in Morocco (Barthel 2010), with several operational activi-ties deployed across various sectors including tourism, sustainable development, and real-estate promotion. In 2005 alone, CDG Development was assigned, by mu-tual agreement, the management of three megaprojects at national level: 1) the Marina of Casablanca by the sub-sidiary Al Manar; 2) Casashore in Casablanca and Tech-nopolis Rabat-Salé; and 3) the project Amwaj in Rabat as part of the Agency for the Development of the Bouregreg Valley (Sabr Aménagement) in partnership with Dubai Holding. Since then, CDG Development has further ex-panded the volume of its business by becoming involved in the steering of several strategic projects through its subsidiaries or mixed-capital companies in partnership with local authorities.
These shifts in the governance of megaprojects be-come clearer if we examine more closely the practices of contracting already mentioned in the previous section. Embedded in a general context of strong criticism of the bureaucracy, its heaviness and its disempowering char-acter, contracting was meant to address the frozen and iterative nature of regulatory planning (Gaudin 1999). The contract is then the means to elaborate new rules and to determine the respective commitments of the various partners as well as to specify possible sanctions. In the-ory, a contract is also a participatory instrument that can provide adequate regulatory methods and give a large measure of responsibility to the various stakeholders. In practice, developers like the CDG were subjected to fewer controls and sanctions than conventional actors in the sector, and exempted from consultation and concer-tation with local administrations. This can be seen most clearly in the case of the contract drawn up in March 2006 between the Moroccan government and the CDG for the Marina development.
In article 19 of the investment agreement closed on 17 March 2006, it is stated that ‘as long as the inves-tor respects its contractual commitments it enjoys total
operational, technical and financial latitude in the modes of realisation of its obligations, which the Government recognises expressly’ (our emphasis).4 During a second
agreement signed with the Casablanca municipality on 26 March of that year, the CDG was given further dispen-sation to unilaterally decide on significant aspects of the project. Under the auspices of a megaproject-friendly government, the rising popularity of such contracting practices and the proliferation of PPPs have further erod-ed the already weak institutional frameworks governing urban space in Morocco, and led to a situation in which policy is adjusted ex post facto in order to comply with megaproject contracts.
Forming Policy
Casablanca’s megaprojects are as much a result of struc-tural reforms as of global or transnational flows attract-ed by the city’s ambition to become a hub of economic productivity, international commerce, and tourism. As in the case of other forms produced by neoliberal devel-opments, the standardisation of management practices goes hand in hand with the proliferation of generic urban and architectural forms. This standardisation is touted as an asset that allows for the easy implantation of foreign capital and international actors, but can also have an im-pact on existing policy-making regimes.
4
In the original French: ‘pour
autant que l’investisseur respecte les engagements contractuels résultants des présentes, il bénéficie d’une totale latitude opérationnelle, technique et financière dans les modalités de réalisation de ses obligations, ce que le Gouvernement reconnaît expressément’.
Figure 3: Located in the
Bouregreg Valley, which separates Morocco’s capital Rabat from its twin city Sale, the Grand Theatre, designed by Zaha Hadid, is set to be completed in 2020. Source: Agence du Bouregreg
Figure 4: Casablanca’s
In terms of practices, megaprojects combine several types of knowledge and skills and require new practic-es of engineering management and new legal arrange-ments (Pinson 2009). In Casablanca, megaprojects are managed by dedicated agencies. These new structures can be public institutions, public-private partnerships, or subsidiaries of large developers’ holdings. These institu-tions practice new forms of urbanism that value feasibil-ity and focus on means rather than ends. They explore innovative procedures and concepts that emphasise financial and economic strategies (such as business plans, feasibility studies, ex-ante and ex-post evaluation). Operating procedures are mainly arranged by the means of new generation of contracts such as ‘memoranda of understanding’, ‘investment agreements’, or ‘partnership agreements’. By frequently combining these practices with those of dérogation detailed earlier, megaproject planning and management not only operate outside of established policy frameworks, but often shape them into their image after the fact, as regulatory frameworks need to be later adjusted in order to harmonise such practices with planning policy (Aljem 2016b). In terms of urban and planning forms, in Morocco megaprojects have popularised the use of generic urban layouts that can be found in places like London or Dubai (imposing axes, careful landscaping, waterfronts) with mixed-use functions mainly oriented towards commerce, luxury housing, hotels and leisure (Cattedra 2010). In terms of architecture, megaprojects claim to feature innovative aesthetic concepts meant to confer a hyper-modern image to both the projects and the wider city but which, in reality, proliferate what by now have be-come generic architectural objects, defined by imposing verticality and materials like glass and steel. The use of ‘starchitects’ such as the late Zaha Hadid (for the Grand Theatre in Rabat, see Fig. 3) or Christian de Portzamparc
Figures 5: Residential and
office buildings of the Marina project, April 2019. Photo: Strava
Figure 6: Vis-à-vis of the
Marina project, April 2019. Photo: Strava
(for the CasArts centre in Casablanca, see Fig. 4) is fur-ther meant to signal the global pedigree of such projects and attract international investors and buyers.
These dynamics clearly index Casablanca’s aspirational ‘internationalisation’ and testify to the use of a generic ‘liberal urbanism’, which is reflected in the integration of consumption logics into the urban planning and produc-tion methods. Thus, we can observe in Morocco that policy-making has shifted from deliberative, consulta-tive, multi-stakeholder processes of integrative-planning towards designing regulatory frameworks that accommo-date after-the-fact, project-based, top-down implementa-tion of urban upgrading. This is also symbolically indexed by privileging certain urban forms: Casablanca’s recent iconic projects display a shift in urban planning towards a strategy of branding. While this can be seen as an align-ment with policies of ‘entrepreneurialism’ born in Europe in the context of post-Fordism, and whose main goal is to attract mobile capital in order to maintain growth in a context of global competition (Harvey 1989), their conse-quences take specific socio-spatial form in Morocco.
Architectural forms as socio-spatial reordering
Casablanca’s coastline was the first territory in the city invested by megaprojects in the 1990s (Aljem 2017). These first coastal projects acted as experimental sites for new management practices, which, after initially failing, were restarted a few years later. Casablanca’s coastline is now full of ambitious projects that seek to reconcile the city with its seafront (Aljem 2016a). The Marina project, the new train station of Casa-Port, the refurbished Corniche, or the Sindibad amusement park are some of the projects that have been envisioned to transform the coastline’s image and support the city’s international ambitions (see Fig. 1).
These projects contrast strongly with the lower-class ar-eas abutting them: composed of old dilapidated houses at risk of collapse, the extra-muros extensions of the old walled town (medina qadima) of Casablanca are home to predominantly disadvantaged populations economi-cally reliant on small trades. The high-end Marina project partly completed in 2018 is not only socio-economically dissonant with this vis-à-vis, but also creates a spatial and functional discontinuity along the axis of the coast. This discontinuity is noticeable in the dominant pres-ence of monumental high-rise buildings now blocking the view of the promenade, which contrast strongly with the dense built-up areas and parking lots adjacent to the site (see Fig. 5 & 6).
The difference in heights and density, which was granted as an urban ‘exemption’, allowed investors several hun-dred square metres of additional floors at close to no cost. The risk of over-densification, or the additional costs for public facilities, infrastructure, superstruc-tures and basic services, have to date been borne by the local community. Moreover, as observed elsewhere, megaprojects are also drivers of social homogenisation as informal communities and the urban poor become displaced from central areas either due to price increas-es or expropriation (see Fig. 7). The Marina’s building was no exception, requiring land-clearance operations that resulted in the relocation of vulnerable communities, such as shanty-dwellers, to the urban outskirts (Bogaert 2018, Beier 2019).
Figure 8: View of the Anfa
development’s building site, April 2019. Photo: Strava
Waterfront projects could have served as a vector for upgrading the old medina, the surrounding urban fabric, and the conditions of the population living there. From a planning perspective, the projects lent themselves to a visual and functional opening of the city towards the sea. By failing to take into account the local social fabric, the character and history of place, or architectural continu-ity, the Marina exacerbates rather than addresses urban fragmentation along the coast.
Similar dynamics can be observed at the site of a more recent redevelopment project. Adjacent to the popular district of Hay Hassani, the ‘Casa Anfa’ megaproject was launched in 2004 with the ambition of becoming the city’s new centre. The Anfa project is a mixed-use development of more than 400 ha including high-end housing, green areas, a special economic and business zone (Casablanca Finance City), and state-of-the-art educational, health, commercial, hotel and cultural facilities (see Fig. 8).
Figure 7: The displacement
Table 1: Real-estate prices
per built square metre inside the Anfa project are twice that of adjacent areas, tradi-tionally associated with mid-dle and lower-midmid-dle classes. Based on field surveys car-ried out in 2016. Source: Aljem
Figure 9: A rendering giving
a general impression of the built density of the Anfa busi-ness and residential district
The Anfa project stands out from its surroundings with its regular layout and the prevalence of green space in-cluded, especially in the central and eastern areas (see Fig. 9). This project also presents great disparities with the surrounding neighbourhood in terms of density, urban morphology, and public spaces. The comparison between the price of real estate (in Moroccan dirhams) in the new residential projects in Anfa and the residential projects in their immediate environment shows that the price per built square metre in Anfa is close to double that in the adjacent districts of Hay Hassani (see Table 1).
Mirroring developments elsewhere in the region (Kup-pinger 2004), these new residential projects are config-ured as highly secure, socially and spatially exclusive urban forms. During a recent research visit to one of the partially-completed high-end housing estates, a devel-oper described the attractiveness of this spatial arrange-ment: ‘Residents can arrive by car, get scanned through a number of securitised gates, they enter the subterranean garage space, and from there elevators deliver them to their doorstep, or in some cases directly inside their resi-dence.’ 5 Combined with resident-access-only spaces and
services like playgrounds, gyms or spas, the effect is one of enclavisation from the surrounding neighbourhood.
Price/m2 Adjacent Districts Anfa Project
North Sector CIL – Beauséjour: Between 14,000 & 16,000 dh/m2 27,000 dh/m2
East Sector Oasis North: 15,000 dh/m2 22,000 – 26,000 dh/m2
West Sector Oulfa- Hay Hassani: 11,000 dh/m2 26,000 dh/m2
South Sector Hay Laymoun: 13,000 dh/m2 n/a
This gentrification effect is not only implicit, but can be linked back to visions contained in the policy briefs of such projects mentioned earlier. That is to say, the archi-tectural forms espoused by new urban areas like Anfa are seen by their urban planners as explicitly encoding social exclusivity, and often cited as a desirable effect by the project’s management: during an interview, a plan-ner emphatically emphasised the fact that the new resi-dences will not include any standard of housing below ‘haut-standing’.6 This was also acutely evidenced in the
choice to move the inhabitants of a middle-class resi-dential zone of state-subsidised housing from the Anfa site, although in situ relocation would have been feasible. Despite the resistance of this population, made up pre-dominantly of military reserve engineers, the project’s management refused any negotiations, motivating their refusal on the basis that the standard of the new project was ‘too high’ for the previous inhabitants of the area. By excluding the middle-classes, the Anfa project intensely showcases the highly aspirational and symbolic nature of such developments. As they try to attract buyers and in-vestors from the highest income brackets, such projects leave little room for reflection on their long-term impact and sidestep questions about a more inclusive social vi-sion for the city.
Conclusion
Project-based urbanism in Morocco illustrates that ter-ritorialisation of urban action is strongly related to land opportunity. Its operating methods and practices are part of a global repository dictated by the new imperatives of globalisation and mobile capital. Embodied in the form of megaprojects, they point to the emergence of new logics that are driven by global forces (financialisation, search for new markets, ‘city worlding’) with little considera-tion for local needs. The urban and architectural forms produced by these projects frequently engage in a kind of ‘mimicry’ (in a North-South and South-South dynamic), without adaptation, that generates a gap between the aims of the projects and local desires or aspirations. The resulting effect, we argue, is the highlighting of ine-qualities and exacerbation of various processes of socio-spatial differentiation present in large urban agglomera-tions. In Casablanca, megaprojects directly contribute to increasing ‘enclavisation’ and spatial fragmentation of the city. By moving into spaces that marginalised and lower-class communities previously inhabited, megapro-jects generate new socio-spatial forms from which the former are excluded. In the absence of collective and genuinely participative approaches to project design, social contestations inevitably arise during the different
6
In the Francophone nomen-clature of housing standards,
haut standing is a short-hand
for ‘luxury’ or ‘high-end housing’. Aljem – Fieldnotes, May, 2014.
5
stages of a project’s implementation. To date, this resist-ance has come from populations directly affected by such projects through dislocation or exclusion to the pe-riphery, but has lacked the power to halt or alter ongoing processes. In the absence of a profound re-evaluation of
this governance and planning model, in the near future new forms of urban protest are likely to emerge, stem-ming from a deepening sense of social injustice related to the territorial effects of infrastructural neglect and ex-clusive redevelopment.
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Cristiana Strava
PhD, is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University. She is an urban anthropolo-gist (Harvard ‘09, SOAS ‘16) interested in how hegemonic discourses and power circu-late and are actualized – but also contested – through eve-ryday spaces and practices. Contact: <C.strava@hum. leidenuniv.nl>
Sanae Aljem
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