Precarious Modernities

Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco

Cristiana Strava

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350232556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using rich ethnographic detail, Precarious Modernities offers an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca's margins as part of ongoing and contingent processes of 'modernization'. Focusing on the everyday lives and spaces of a mythicized community, and its interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas and technocratic planning regimes, the book documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders. The result is a unique account of the political continuities, security logics, economic ideologies and competing forces that shape the possibilities open to precarious communities in a storied and sprawling metropolis. As marginalized inhabitants develop pragmatic ways of appropriating or resisting powerful agendas, unanticipated and novel forms of political engagement emerge. These signal the revival and reconfiguration of notions of class and open up creative and alternative spatial avenues for participation in an era of increasing authoritarianisms.

1

Genealogies of the urban margins

On a bright Saturday morning in early 2013, I was met by Salim at a bus stop along one of Hay Mohammadi’s main arteries. A young, underemployed man in his late twenties, who like many motivated inhabitants tried to fill his time with different grassroots activities, Salim had been tasked by the leaders of the local community organization (jamʿiyya) with delivering me to a meeting with Mohamed Sakib. Si’ Mohamed, as everyone addressed him, was a former leftist militant and political detainee, and one of the elders considered to have ‘important memories’ about the area’s history. As I travelled from downtown Casablanca to a meeting meant to offer me glimpses of a lived past, I also traversed a spectrum of gradually changing spatial scales and symbolic landmarks.

First, the tall and monumental office and residential architecture of the city’s core gave way to large, disused industrial infrastructure crumbling amid brownfield lots, wide boulevards where the traces of dismantled train tracks were still visible in places, and the smell of chemicals from a local plant mixed with a distant briny sea breeze hung heavy in the air. Salim pointed to the hunkering figure of the Anciens Abattoirs, Casablanca’s main slaughterhouse from 1920 until 2002, an Art Deco complex of buildings linked to the emergence of a budding heritage circuit in the area. After passing this buffer zone where few pedestrians could be seen, smaller, four-storied buildings and wide avenues busy with people and commerce appeared and assembled into the vibrant street life of Hay Mohammadi. Walking towards what Salim pointed out as the neighbourhood’s core, we saw the streets beginning to pulse with life, as work and leisure co-mingled with domestic and commercial activities that spilled into the street. Moving along the wide Ali Yaata Avenue,¹ we passed a café that occupied the corner of a busy intersection. Lines of men sat in chairs arranged to face the spectacle of the street as they sipped mint tea or read the paper. Continuing along I could see groups of small children improvising games in a rare, small patch of grass, while women of various ages supervised them sitting on blankets or woven plastic mats. Behind them the squat, dilapidated shape of informal housing amid heaps of rubble signalled that a slum-relocation programme was in full swing. Buffering the buildings on one side of the main avenue from heavy traffic was a kilometre-long band of freight tracks, which Salim believed had been cemented over and fenced in during the early 1990s, a visible marker of the industrial lifeline that had shaped the lives of inhabitants for decades. Clusters of young boys were busy playing football on this stretch of paved tracks. They shared it with two men who deftly threaded colourful silk yarn for use in the local textile workshops, using fence posts to secure one end and working the fine filaments across a distance of a dozen metres. Further along, an ad hoc car wash operated from another section of the former tracks, the smell of window cleaner marking the space more effectively than a store sign. Old men sat along the low cement fence that marked this space, warming their limbs in the sun while across from them shop owners waited for customers, seated on broken plastic chairs. Small, white Honda vans lined the sidewalk, their passenger doors left open while drivers dozed inside, waiting for a delivery job. Fresh laundry hung on lines stretched across the width of the tracks, billowing in the breeze, as we turned a corner and reached our destination.

* * *

I begin with this evocation of Hay Mohammadi’s heterogenous and seemingly unruly spaces not only because I believe it captures the rich social and economic life typical of urban lower-class areas across Morocco but also because its elements could be found in the visual tropes that city administrators and reform-minded upper classes frequently employed when describing to me the deficiencies and dangers of the area: omnipresent litter and informal vending signalled the backward, not-quite-urban character of the neighbourhood, and men’s constant presence in the street was apprehensively judged as either a marker of wasted time or a vector for crime. Such tropes cut across class and geography, as was evident in Salim’s task of chaperoning me. Beyond being a mere polite gesture, his presence had been considered necessary for warding off any potential dangers posed to me as a foreign young woman, walking alone to my meeting. Although I was aware at the outset of my research of Hay Mohammadi’s general ill fame and was regularly offered disparaging opinions about its spaces and inhabitants by a variety of interlocutors, these maligning tropes would be almost simultaneously accompanied by declarations meant to impress upon me the celebrated history and unique architectural heritage of this mythical neighbourhood. As I continued to meet with such conflicting ways of describing Hay Mohammadi’s space and inhabitants, I began to inquire into the relationship between these two identities. What are the historical conditions that continue to contribute to the perception of Hay Mohammadi as both the emblem of a maligned urban periphery and the celebrated birthplace of Moroccan modernity? Who are the actors responsible for the continued production of these conflicting stories? In this chapter I address these questions by examining the key historical forces and protagonists that participated in the neighbourhood’s creation and, later, degradation. In framing this chapter with the term ‘genealogies’, I draw loosely on Foucault’s work (1975) as a way of signalling that the processes I retrace are not (always) the outcome of rational planning, and should thus not be read as a linear account of Hay Mohammadi’s becoming. Instead, I focus attention on the highly contingent but also power-laden configurations that have contributed to contemporary popular discourses and state practices aimed at the urban margins.

Morocco’s urban development during the colonial era, and to a lesser extent its de-development in the decades after independence, has received significant attention and led to exemplary accounts from cultural and architectural historians, and geographers (see Wright 1991, Rachik 1995, 2002, Cattedra 2001, 2003). Drawing on this foundational scholarship and the ethnographic accounts gleaned with the help of local interlocutors, in this opening chapter I set out to connect these colonial histories to the conditions and narratives that structure Hay Mohammadi’s image in the present. I do this by reading historical and political developments through the emergence, celebration and slow decay of the neighbourhood’s buil t and lived environment, and vice versa. Opening with a foray into Morocco’s past to a moment when colonial policy began a reordering of local time and space, I chart both the physical construction and discursive production of this site since the early days of the French Protectorate. In doing so, I aim to show how the development of socio-spatial marginality has not been an arbitrary process but a crucial aspect of different politically motivated agendas of social engineering, albeit with uneven and unintended consequences at times (cf. Scott 1998, Harvey 2009). As it will become evident, the post-colonial Moroccan state not only inherited the colonial organization of urban space, but also did little to develop new tools for urban planning and governance. Seeing the city’s margins as a dangerous threat to political and social order, the state’s stance towards these areas, while at times ambivalent and lacking a clear direction, became increasingly framed in terms of security and control. This is not to say that Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi in particular are the static materialization of malignant ideologies or that they are the benign terrain upon which political forces sought to imprint their power. Rather, the argument I put forth in this opening chapter is that the space of the urban margins and its governance do not exist in some unchanging, pregiven state, but have developed and continue to do so in a dialectical relationship whose balance has encountered shifts and transformations over the course of time as a consequence of historical, political and economic forces (cf. Lefebvre 1991, Soja 2000). In the contemporary moment, a surge of heritage and commemoration agendas have also entered this fold, playing an increasing part as cultural brokers and mediators of how Casablanca’s margins are perceived, both locally and internationally. By unpacking these dynamics in succession, my aim is to unsettle the facile and normative understandings of Hay Mohammadi’s association with material and social decay, and render visible the contingent and conflicting ways in which the neighbourhood has been construed as an emblem of urban marginality and historical effervescence at the same time.

‘A laboratory for modernity’: Colonial interventions and the birth of the urban margins

After I was introduced to Si’ Mohamed that day, he launched almost immediately into an energetic listing of the various sub-quarters of his birthplace, Karyan Central – Hay Mohammadi’s central slum – or simply the karyan as locals referred to it: ‘You must know already that this is the birthplace of the bidonville’, Si’ Mohamed exclaimed not without pride. Although some claim that the term might have originated in Tunis, many local and international sources credit the French author of a 1932 article about Casablanca with popularizing the word that was initially a toponym for the quickly growing sheet-metal quarter on the north-eastern periphery of the white city.² Si Mohamed’s statement also gets to the heart of Hay Mohammadi’s foundational relationship with both colonial forces and housing informality: born from the gaping holes of an industrial stone quarry whence it borrowed its first name – Carrières Centrales – the neighbourhood quickly became a magnet for rural and urban dwellers alike, displaced or lured by the advent of French and European ventures in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Arriving in 1906–7 to ‘pacify’ the locals, the French gradually established a presence that would become a formal Protectorate lasting from 1912 to 1956.³ Due to its favourable position on the Atlantic coast, the once sleepy fishing village of Anfa – rebaptized Casablanca by Spanish traders in the eighteenth century – grew rapidly and haphazardly into the Protectorate’s commercial capital. Of a mind that ‘a construction site is worth a battalion’,⁴ in 1914, the first governor of Morocco, Hubert Lyautey, assigned Henri Prost the task of designing a comprehensive urban development plan (Wright 1991, p. 99). Upon arriving in Casablanca, Prost’s first impressions were of an ‘unbelievable chaos’, leading him and many others to liken the city to a Wild West, where rampant speculation was already avidly consuming every available plot of land (p. 100). The following year, Prost had produced the city’s first comprehensive urban plan whose functionalist principles would later be replicated across Morocco. It proposed a spatial division of the city along an east–west corridor, designating the north-eastern parts that would become Hay Mohammadi exclusively for industry, based on a study that showed that the prevailing winds would blow the factory smoke away from the lush residential area hugging the beaches of current-day villa neighbourhoods Anfa and Ain Diab to the west.

Beyond organizing the city based on these functional principles, Prost went on to create the dual city for which the French became known in Morocco (Abu-Lughod 1980). In a scheme legitimized with the thin veneer of Orientalist views on zoning in Arab cities,⁵ Prost separated quarters for ‘Moroccan Muslims’ from those for ‘Jews’ as well as the new European quarters – the famous villes nouvelles – using circular roads and wooded areas, which doubled as a cordon sanitaire meant to keep disease like measles or malaria at bay from urban centres. Beyond any aesthetic or hygienic agenda, this spatial organization also indexed in highly visible ways ideas about social and political contagion, essentially operating as a riot-proof measure buffering the European quarters from potential ‘indigenous revolts’ (Bogaert 2011). Prost and his successors eventually had to contend with a diminished version of these zones due to the lack of available land (Wright 1991, p. 142). Still, this strict zoning has been identified as the most striking manifestation of the segregation, or in Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1980) provocative term ‘urban apartheid’, implemented by the French in North Africa (cf. Celik 1997). By allotting the majority of available land to the colonizer this policy effectively fenced in the so-called indigenous areas, causing serious overcrowding which persists to this day, particularly in the case of the old town cores of Rabat and Casablanca (Sakib 2007).

Already at the time, though, the problems generated by the colonial presence were increasingly evident. Largely owing to the extensive new harbour built in 1913 by the French, Casablanca grew at breathtaking speed in the following decades. The fast pace of industrialization between 1926 and 1932 and the large-scale building projects that gave the city its now fetishized Art Deco look attracted unprecedented numbers of labourers from the countryside. The agrarian reforms (1917–31) meant to transform the country into a ‘bread-basket for France’ (Swearingen 1985, p. 351) led to mass land expropriations among peasants. The severe droughts of 1936 and 1937 amplified the already existing housing shortage by pushing destitute migrants from rural areas to settle on the outskirts of major cities like Casablanca (cf. Kaioua and Troin 1996, pp. 73–4). Overall, Morocco’s urban population increased by 232 per cent between 1930 and 1946, while the Protectorate’s housing policies vis-à-vis Moroccans remained unchanged (Écochard 1955a, p. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Map of Hay Mohammadi and Casablanca, Morocco
• Note on language and transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Genealogies of the urban margins
• 2 Iconographies of the margins: Plans, maps and affective spaces
• 3 Disciplining the margins: Streets, youth and social development programmes
• 4 Dwelling on the margins: Housing architectures, gendered skills and the ‘unhomely’ in Hay Mohammadi
• 5 The future on/of the margins: Relocations, aspirations and emergent mobilities
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright