Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco 9781350232549, 9781350232570, 9781350232563

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Precarious Modernities

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Precarious Modernities Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco Cristiana Strava

Zed Books Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY and Zed Books are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Cristiana Strava, 2022 Cristiana Strava has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x-xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Cristiana Strava All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Strava, Cristiana, author. Title: Precarious modernities : assembling state, space and society on the urban margins in Morocco / Cristiana Strava. Description: London; New York: Zed Books, [an imprint of] Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021028265 (print) | LCCN 2021028266 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350232549 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350232556 (epub) | ISBN 9781350232563 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781350232570 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Marginality, Social–Morocco–Casablanca. | Urban policy–Morocco–Casablanca. | Casablanca (Morocco)–Social conditions. | Casablanca (Morocco)–Economic conditions. Classification: LCC HN782.M8 S77 2021 (print) | LCC HN782.M8 (ebook) | DDC 307.76096438–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028265 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028266 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3254-9 PB: 978-1-3502-3258-7 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3256-3 eBook: 978-1-3502-3255-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures Map of Hay Mohammadi and Casablanca, Morocco Note on language and transliteration Acknowledgements

vii viii ix x

Introduction 1 Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca: Between myth and reality 3 Moroccan urban spaces: Some conceptual anchor points 5 Background of the study and fieldwork context 13 Plan of the book 24 1

Genealogies of the urban margins 29 ‘A laboratory for modernity’: Colonial interventions and the birth of the urban margins 32 ‘Marginalize it, to punish the people’: Political violence and post-Independence struggles 37 Instrumental commemorations 42 Conclusion 48

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Iconographies of the margins: Plans, maps and affective spaces 51 Seeing like a grid 53 Mapping memories of violence 55 Gameboard tensions 62 Affective cartographies 68 Conclusion 77

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Disciplining the margins: Streets, youth and social development programmes 79 The street seen through moral and policing discourses 82 ‘Responsibilizing’ marginal youth 85 Pacification by ‘artification’ 90 Posing dissent: Rebellious youth and neoliberal class affects 92 Conclusion 98

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Dwelling on the margins: Housing architectures, gendered skills and the ‘unhomely’ in Hay Mohammadi 101 Homes as social and cultural facts 103 Domesticity as ‘unhomely’ 106 Spaces of embodiment and enskilled routines 112 Conclusion 120

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The future on/of the margins: Relocations, aspirations and emergent mobilities 123 ‘Cities without Slums’: From marginalization to the periphery 127 Ideal homes: Investing in dreams and securing local moral futures 135 Mobilities, reparations and aspirational ‘non-places’ 140 Conclusion 146

Conclusion 149 The centrality of the urban margins in contemporary Morocco 152 For a renewed anthropology of post-colonial urbanity 156 Everyday politics in everyday spaces: Finding hope for the struggles to come 159 Notes Bibliography Index

163 174 198

Figures 1.1 The Écochard housing grid 35 1.2 Archival image of colonial-era housing 47 1.3 View of the same social housing unit, with ‘appropriations’ and adaptations 47 2.1 Commemorative map unfolded (front and reverse) 58 2.2 Hay Mohammadi gameboard laid out before the event 65 2.3 Event banner reads: ‘Hay Mohammadi: A Playful History. Play and discover Hay Mohammadi’ 65 2.4 Sara’s geometrical rendition 71 2.5 The ‘real’ Hay Mohammadi, two-page spread by Asma 72 2.6 Dar Lamane by Adil 73 2.7 Fatna El Bouih’s future-oriented mapping 75 5.1 Promotional rendering of new Casablanca megaprojects 124 5.2 Real-estate ads collected by Amina 125 5.3 New tramway crossing a low-income neighbourhood 140

Map of Hay Mohammadi and Casablanca, Morocco

Map of Hay Mohammadi’s location within the wider Casablanca area. Sketch map by the author.

Note on language and transliteration I write Moroccan personal names and place names as they would most commonly appear in the Moroccan context (i.e. Hay Mohammadi, Mohammed V, Echouhada, Ain Sebaa). This transliteration is the outcome of a long history of Francophone scholarship in North Africa (see Wagner 1993). Similar to other not officially transcribed languages, transcription of Darija – colloquial Moroccan Arabic – has varied greatly. I follow a logic adopted by ethnographies of Morocco, albeit with three exceptions. First, for words that Darija shares with Modern Standard Arabic (fuṣḥā) I transliterate according to the IJMES system (i.e. jam‘iyya or ‘aroubiyin). Second, I signal words that have been imported from other languages, such as French, in brackets (Fr.). The meaning and provenance of words are explained when a term is first introduced in the text. I do this as a way of staying faithful to the local context of vernacular language production and its usage (see Introduction for further elaboration on language and terminological choices). Third, I employ Anglicized plurals for words that appear frequently in the text, such as djellabas or suqs. Finally, Arabic names of prominent political groups or figures are transliterated according to the IJMES system (e.g. al-‘Adl-w-al-Ihsan). For words that have entered English discourse (‘Qur’an’ or ‘medina’), I follow the common English spelling. Translations from Darija and French into English are mine unless otherwise noted.

Acknowledgements It takes a global village to raise an anthropologist. Similarly, this ethnographic book owes a debt of gratitude to a significant number of people. First and foremost, the research it is based on would not have been possible without the generous welcome and participation of Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants. I would like to thank all those who have opened their homes to me and allowed me into their lives, even though I cannot name them here. Above all, I would like to thank the women of Hay Mohammadi, who have helped me reflect on the complexities of life, and whose wisdom, good humour and companionship have been crucial to the realization of this study. Several other people and groups made my research in Casablanca and Morocco a wonderful journey of discovery. Fadma Ait-Mous helped me secure official credentials as a research associate of the Centre Marocain de Sciences Sociales (CM2S) at the Hassan II University in Casablanca. The staff and volunteers of both Casamémoire and the local welfare association mentioned throughout the book provided me with gracious help that often extended beyond the principal concerns of this study. I am extremely grateful for their assistance. Asma Issam was a wonderful companion and occasional research assistant, helping to pry open doors where bureaucratic hurdles seemed impassable. Sara Benabachir housed and fed me many a time, shared her hopes and anxieties about Casablanca, asked difficult questions and offered her cheerful energy when it was most needed. This book is largely based on long-term, in-depth research I carried out as part of my doctoral training. At SOAS, Trevor Marchand acted as an exceptionally dedicated teacher, mentor and kind friend. His thoughtful comments and questions provided me with many insightful reflections, which have hopefully found their way into the text. Edward Simpson and Marloes Janson pushed me to think about the ‘difficult questions’ before setting out on my scholarly journey, and also helped me find my way through the thicket of post-fieldwork thoughts. Bringing this project to fruition in an era of deepening austerity measures and the corporatization of higher education in the UK, as elsewhere, was a trying process at times. I am therefore grateful to the funding bodies that financially supported me at various stages in this process. During the pre-fieldwork period I

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was supported by a SOAS Master Bursary. A UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship covered the tuition for the entirety of my doctoral programme. The generous support of a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant funded the sixteen months I spent in the field; a grant from the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies at Oxford helped me begin work in the early writing stages. A significant part of the dissertation that this book is based on was written at the KHI-Max Planck Institute in Florence where I was a doctoral fellow with the Max Planck Research Group ‘Objects in the contact-zone – the cross-cultural lives of things’. I am deeply thankful to Eva Troelenberg, the group’s director, for taking an interest in my project and for generously extending my fellowship to support the completion of early drafts. At Leiden University, Crystal Ennis, Judith Naeff, Noa Schonmann, Tsolin Nalbantian, Jasmijn Rana, Mark Westmoreland, Christian Henderson, Sanjukta Sunderason and Radhika Gupta offered moral support when it was most needed and aided my writing and thinking in more ways than they are probably aware. Different parts of this book were written and revised in the German cities of Mainz and Munich, and in my Romanian hometown of Cisnădie. In these places I benefitted from the kind words and nurturing food shared by my friends and their families, as well as a few complete strangers. I consider myself immensely lucky to be part of such supporting communities. Old friends, near and far, have provided me with intellectual, technical and emotional support at different stages. I owe special thanks to Issam Lamsili, Maria Larsson, Martin Liby, Najib Rahmani, Katharina Hay, Cristina Moreno Almeida, Thalia Gigerenzer, Henry Agbo, David Hernandez Garcia, Felicity Bodenstein, Franziska Fay, Zoe Goodman, Marta Agosti, Lauren Yapp, Mara Constantinescu, Oana Danciu and my brother, Sebastian Strava. Stefan Esselborn has been my best friend, careful proofreader and listener, editor of misplaced commas and loving partner. He has helped me refine my arguments and made sure I didn’t forget to have an occasional laugh. Any remaining errors and faults are completely my own. Last, but not least, this book is dedicated to my mother, Adela, and her mother, Lucia, two women whose unending capacity for love (communicated through food) and support (communicated by never questioning my choices) have buoyed me along this path since childhood. Their understated strength and resolve in the face of life’s challenges taught me the value of ordinary things and act as a constant reminder of the resilience found in everyday places.

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Introduction

‘We don’t need tourists to come and look at us. We need fluss (money)! Fluss’, he repeated, miming the object by rubbing his fingers together. ‘Fehemtini (do you understand me)?’ asked the man after I had explained to him why a group of about twenty onlookers gathered around a guide were craning their necks to look at his house. ‘This place is a prison. Hadshi lli bghau yshuf (Is that what they want to see)?’ and the three young men standing around him broke into embarrassed laughter. ‘A prison above ground and a prison below ground!’ he continued, visibly animated. Before I could react, he softened his tone and added: ‘I apologize, young lady. I’m talking n’importe-quoi (Fr., nonsense); I’m just a foolish old man. Forgive me.’ This scene took place during the first weekend of April 2013, as I was accompanying groups of visitors to several sites in the neighbourhood of Hay Mohammadi on the outskirts of Casablanca, as part of an annual three-day event celebrating the city’s (colonial) architectural heritage. I had begun my fieldwork in the area a few months earlier, proposing to study how the inhabitants of this historically marginalized, impoverished neighbourhood, targeted by state violence in the past, managed not only to secure their livelihoods, but also to create a sense of place and belonging within the walls of still-standing colonial and post-colonial housing projects originally designed with policing and social control in mind. Over the course of those first months, I often encountered such outbursts from locals, brimming with the strain of an unending daily struggle for, and attendant despair over, economic survival in a visibly precarious context. Understandably, locals were vexed by the preoccupation of outsiders with building facades and architectural details, and the (occasionally rather highbrow) cultural activities staged as part of celebrations of the neighbourhood’s history and built fabric. Activists, for their part, resented being depicted as aloof outsiders, preoccupied only with aesthetic details and niche cultural topics. This did not mean that inhabitants were not aware of the cultural, historical and architectural significance of their homes and neighbourhood, nor that administrators, planners and activists were wholly ignorant of and indifferent to the challenges affecting the former, as the

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material in this book will make amply evident. Nevertheless, overwhelmingly focused on the aesthetic and formal aspects of the neighbourhood’s spaces, the retrospective gaze of heritage activists, international NGOs, government agencies and local elites overlooked, failed to address and occasionally vilified the messy contingency of everyday survival demanded in the face of growing socio-economic insecurity present on Casablanca’s margins. This tension, between inhabitants and outside forces, pointed towards two interrelated developments that have taken place in Morocco over the past decades, and which I trace throughout this book: on the one hand, a significant and growing disconnect between networks of local as well as foreign experts and elites and the daily struggles and pragmatic preoccupations that define the lives of those inhabiting lower-class areas; on the other hand, the progressive delegitimization of social justice discourses, agendas and channels as a consequence of the growing popularity and institutionalization of neoliberal reforms and logics of ‘responsibilization’. At the same time, Moroccan urban spaces have also undergone profound and uneven transformations, transformations which have been fuelled by a state-subsidized real-estate boom and royal ambitions of turning Morocco into North Africa’s emerging political and economic powerhouse. These transformations are not radically new, but part of much longer historical processes set in motion at the beginning of the twentieth century by colonial forces, and later complicated by the intersection of local politics, national dynamics, and international forces and actors during the post-colonial era. This book is my ethnographic attempt to map and disentangle, through the prism of a highly emblematic space, the web of actors and forces responsible for these changes and the ways in which they reveal crucial tensions at work in contemporary Moroccan society in a context of increasing inequality and the criminalization of the lower classes. Anthropologists are well equipped to unpack the relationship between broad structural forces and the experience and shape of life in specific places. I count myself among the practitioners of a discipline that combines attention to subjective experiences with a conceptual proclivity towards critically deconstructing the tensions and contradictions inherent in what may seem like immutable social and political forces that structure those experiences. As a result, in this book I draw on over sixteen months of fieldwork to interrogate the logics and representations that are at the core of urban marginalization processes in Morocco. Taking as a starting point the everyday lives and spaces of Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants, I follow their interactions with heritage activists, international development agendas and technocratic planning regimes, with the

Introduction

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goal of picking apart and documenting how the production and reproduction of Casablanca’s margins have been crucial for the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial and economic orders in contemporary Morocco. The result, I hope, is an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of urban marginality more broadly, as part of ongoing, contingent and insufficiently critiqued processes of ‘modernization’.

Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca: Between myth and reality Once home to North Africa’s oldest and largest slum, Hay Mohammadi (formerly known as Carrières Centrales) is a mythical place in the history of Morocco. Celebrated as a laboratory for industrial and housing innovation during the colonial period, but also famous for playing a crucial role in the anticolonial struggle, the neighbourhood fell into disfavour during the reign of the late King Hassan II (1961–1999), whose response to protest and contestation was violent repression and the creation of an infamous underground detention centre in the neighbourhood (the prison below ground referred to before). During this period, Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi in particular became the scene of grave human rights abuses and state violence. Union and student activists alike were forcefully disappeared, held and tortured in secret for years (El Bouih 2008). Economically, the neighbourhood entered a period of decay starting in the 1980s, as the lifting of food subsidies and the liberalization of trade progressively led to massive job losses in the area. Owing to its colonial origins as an industrial quarter, the neighbourhood continues to be hemmed in to this day by rail and road corridors to the south-west, and defunct industrial facilities and sprawling new peripheries to its north-east, leading many of its inhabitants to speak of a feeling of ghettoization vis-à-vis the wider city. Today, with unemployment on the rise,1 inhabitants have to further contend with an image of the neighbourhood that is coloured by such epithets as ‘open air prison’, or ‘cemented slum’ (bidonville en béton). These maligning stereotypes were particularly re-enforced after the suicide attacks of 2003 and 2007, which targeted upscale hotels, restaurants and night clubs in the city’s core. Perpetrated by small groups of un(der)employed, radicalized youth from the increasingly impoverished and disenfranchised areas east of Hay Mohammadi, the attacks heightened both state and popular discourse maligning the urban margins (cf. Cavatorta 2006).

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In the contemporary Moroccan social imaginary, Casablanca as a whole is frequently associated with urban sprawl, pollution, a high degree of socioeconomic decay and anomie, and at the same time a growing number of wealthy enclaves sporting names like Californie or Prestigia (Fr.), new special economic zones like the Casablanca Finance City, and economic liberalization connected to the city’s semi-official identity as Morocco’s business capital. A twenty-firstcentury ‘neoliberal metropolis’ in Jamal Bahmad’s formulation (2013, p. 17), the history of the city’s development is synonymous with colonial industrial expansion and the extraction of cheap labour; technocratic methods of urban planning; the managing of both rampant real-estate speculation and potentially volatile populations through a ‘militarization of urban planning’ (Écochard 1955a, Rabinow 1989, Rachik 2002). Consequently, contemporary Casablanca bears little resemblance to its Hollywood aura. The city is currently home to more than five million inhabitants living in an increasingly socially and spatially fragmented urban landscape marked by stark economic disparities (United Nations Habitat 2011, 74; cf. Haut Commissariat au Plan 2018). Like many other urban centres in the region as well as globally, the city’s growth has translated into an ever-expanding periphery, where ‘irregular’ and ‘informal’ housing frequently rubs shoulders with high-end real-estate projects. In many ways Hay Mohammadi saliently encapsulates Henri Lefebvre’s groundbreaking triadic theory of the production of space (1991). Lefebvre forcefully and compellingly made the case that space is neither an abstract concept nor the mere sum of buildings and social activities that take place in and around them. Propelled by the aim of unearthing the political dimensions and contradictions inherent in any space, Lefebvre’s theory described three modalities through which space is produced: conceived space (in the form of planning, architectural, statist visions and discourses); spatial practice (living, working, reshaping space); and perceived or mediated space. And, indeed, the neighbourhood is both a physical place remade each day through the myriad practices of its inhabitants, and the ‘objective’ visions of that space found in the drawings and designs of its many planners and architects. But, perhaps most importantly, neighbourhood space has also been and continues to be mediated through a wealth of images and symbols, its identity assembled from competing (hi)stories and aspirations, captured by its many names and identities: al-Hay, as the inhabitants affectionately refer to it, Carrières Centrales as it continues to be addressed by architectural historians of Modernism or al karyan, the loaded term used to describe the now defunct slum quarter at its core.2 In this sense, Hay Mohammadi offers a privileged entry point into how colonial and

Introduction

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post-colonial ideas, images and projects promoting the logics of twentiethcentury ‘modernity’ have fuelled profound – and profoundly unequal – social transformations, and continue to feed into new social realities, while evading critical examination. In this sense, the neighbourhood’s mythical status is something that conceals more than it reveals about the area’s internal complexity and contentious history. Neighbourhoods like Hay Mohammadi are frequently perceived only through incomplete and outdated statistics, romanticized histories, policing discourses and essentialized tropes circulated by mass media. The material and discussions presented in this book aim to both broaden this picture and critically converse with these tropes, in order to reveal the instrumental ‘work’ to which they are put out there in the world. Throughout the text I try to destabilize powerful discourses that have led to dehistoricized, depoliticized and reified categorical terms about the lower classes and the urban geographies they inhabit. At the same time, this book is also intended as a corrective account of a largely academically ignored and politically vilified segment of Moroccan society, and its struggle for survival in an era of increased economic insecurity coupled with the reconfiguration of existing social geographies as part of the ongoing neoliberalization of Moroccan society. While there are heightened moments of activity when these struggles come into the public eye – what might be called ‘significant events’ – I will argue that it is at the level of the mundane, of everyday life, where attention needs to be trained in order to discern the discrete yet concrete ways in which urban space and the reproduction of inequality and social fragmentation are made tangible.

Moroccan urban spaces: Some conceptual anchor points Morocco holds a privileged place in the history of anthropological writing, counted among a handful of ‘prestige zones’ for conducting fieldwork during the mid-twentieth century, the setting and source for a significant number of canonical works in the discipline’s history (Abu-Lughod 1989, Crawford and Newcomb 2013). Anthropology’s most popular figure, Clifford Geertz, was instrumental in this respect. His work in the Middle Atlas town of Sefrou came to serve as both ‘a guide and a target’ (Dwyer 2013, p. 216) to the generation of young anthropologists who came to Morocco starting in the 1970s to work on a heady mix of esoteric Sufi rites, changing gender norms and Berber social organization and political authority (Crapanzano 1985, Rabinow 1977, SchaeferDavies 1982). At the same time, these accounts systematically failed to critically

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address the role and legacy of French colonialism. Owing to the academic ‘division of labour’ in place at the time, it was left to sociologists to study urban spaces in the proximity of central power, and uncover the ways in which colonial administrative and planning policies were responsible for creating what Janet Abu-Lughod (1980) provocatively called an ‘urban apartheid’: a ‘dual city’ segregated along native/European lines, to be later replaced by less rigid postcolonial class hierarchies, leading to new unequal socio-spatial geographies in the contemporary era. Until the early 2000s, urban studies of the Middle East continued to focus on the colonial aspect of this equation, leaving the politics and livelihoods of more recent socio-spatial geographies largely unexamined (El Kazaz and Mazur 2017). The exponential growth of other urban centres in the region and the development of urban anthropology as a subfield in its own right in recent decades has contributed to the emergence of new ‘prestige’ field sites that no longer include Morocco, but are now centred around Beirut, Cairo and Dubai (Singerman and Amar 2009, Sawalha 2010, Singerman 2011, Kanna 2011). With minor exceptions (Bogaert 2011, Peraldi and Tozy 2011), Morocco in general and Moroccan cities more specifically have so far played little part in conversations about the socio-economic changes that have marked urban spaces in the region. At the same time, anthropological discussions of the relationships between ongoing liberalization reforms, the reterritorialization of urban governance regimes and the reproduction of social orders have similarly been concentrated in a few regional urban centres (cf. Singerman 1995, Keyder 1999, Ismail 2006b). Moroccan cities have much to offer to regional and transnational debates about how global phenomena are played out in discrete locales. In this sense, my approach in this book tries to balance an ‘anthropology of the city’ with an ‘anthropology in the city’. On the one hand, I train my critical attention on histories of planning and policing, and the discourses, agendas and actors that are trying to reshape marginal people and spaces. On the other, I place a strong ethnographic emphasis on how ordinary inhabitants understand and find ways to react to the changing frameworks and discourses that target them, their homes and their livelihoods.

Whose modernity/modernism? During my work with a variety of actors within and outside the neighbourhood, talk of difference and the way it was made tangible through urban spaces and practices constantly revolved around particular images and

Introduction

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ideas that conversed in one way or another with what it meant to be ‘modern’ (or not). For this reason, one of the main conceptual points anchoring the discussions that run throughout the book is a preoccupation with understanding how ‘modernity’ and its cognate terms have been conceived, represented, experienced and instrumentalized as the first and foremost an urban phenomenon and experience, at various points and by various actors in the history of Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi. My exploration of these processes starts from the historical and political examination of French colonial modernity as a commercial, political and cultural project, and its unexamined influence through continuities and discontinuities on Morocco’s post-independence era (cf. Rabinow 1989, Rachik 2002, Wright 1991). Seen as a uniquely urban condition defined by the technocratic preoccupation with planning, the ordering of people and space and their policing, colonial ‘modernity’ entailed the management of growing urban populations with the use of both aesthetic and scientific tools such as heritage preservation, cadastral mapping, population censuses and public sanitation campaigns. During the final years of the French Protectorate (1947–53), architectural Modernism came to embody this technocratic approach as evidenced in the planning and building of several social housing estates for the emancipation of so-called indigenous workers, the majority of which can still be found in Hay Mohammadi. Inspired by the writings and designs of figures such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Moroccan Modernism was characterized by the brief but intense period of experimentation of a small group of architects known as GAMMA (Group d’Architectes Modernes Marocains), who saw the urban margins of Protectorate Morocco as the blank canvas for novel social engineering schemes. Writing in the context of the British colonial enterprise, Mark Crinson (2003) has made the compelling case that architectural Modernism not only gave flesh to the abstract ideas of colonial ‘modernity’, but should also be seen as a polysemous term and the conceptual nexus linking colonial enterprise, the global expansion of capitalism and enduring rationalist ideas about social development. This semantic relationship remains a significant one in the current moment, not only for crucial discussions about the intensification and impact of post-colonial heritage-making regimes celebrating colonial Modernist architectures on Morocco’s urban margins – as Chapter 1 will discuss – but also because of its largely unexamined role in both depoliticizing accounts of historical processes and the uncritical recuperation of Modernism’s legacy for a new wave of modernization agendas.

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As is the case with many terms that were part of large theoretical ‘turns’ and debates, the multiplicity of ‘modernity’s’ uses and overuses – in both popular discourse and academic texts – has also come to frustrate its analytical power, generating more confusion than clarity (Cooper 2005, p. 113). But in spite of its doubtful analytical potential, it seems clear that the discursive, affective, political and aesthetic dimensions of ‘modernity’ still attract significant attention and continue to act as an important reservoir for the production of contemporary imaginaries that span past, present and future. This is also signalled in the appeal and widespread support across the Moroccan social spectrum for an ever-growing number of new ‘modernization’ initiatives – be it in the shape of building sites, civic-education campaigns or social development agendas meant to ‘finally’ complete the moulding of ordinary Moroccans into ‘modern’ citizens. In this sense, Morocco’s cities are at the forefront of its ruler’s vision for establishing the country as the most ‘developed’ among its neighbours. Urban redevelopment projects and slum-eradication policies initiated and enacted by Mohammad VI after ascending to the throne in 1999 have been particularly propelled by a rhetoric of removing all signs of ‘informality’, a term frequently glossed as ‘backwardness’ by Moroccan administrators and elites. Completed projects like Africa’s largest mall (2012) and the continent’s first high-speed rail (2018) aggressively aim to reflect such ambitions in their curved, gleaming surfaces of plated glass and steel. Scholarly interventions from around the globe have poignantly argued that informality – and the different types of ‘margins’ where it can be found – is not only not antithetical to ‘modernity’, but should be seen as its necessary complement. Similarly, development projects rooted in capitalist logics inevitably produce unequal socio-spatial assemblages (AlSayyad and Roy 2004, Hart 2009, Roy 2011). In this sense, I have found it productive to ethnographically trace and map out the processual and constantly shifting understandings of ‘modernity’ – as policy agendas, discursive representations and aspirational visions – in the context of Casablanca and its margins. Using the emblematic case of Hay Mohammadi, my main concern throughout the book is to examine how this concept becomes the terrain upon which wider struggles are projected and played out. Following Frederic Cooper, I ask: What kind of work do different understandings of ‘modernity’ (as image, discourse, agenda, etc.) do at different scales and for different actors? Who is able to appeal to it, and who must struggle to be allowed to make use of it? Alongside such official, elite and academic understandings, throughout the following chapters I pay equal attention to the emic uses of vocabularies

Introduction

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relating to the projects and ethos of ‘modernity’ writ large, which are rich and varied across Casablanca’s spaces.3 In daily speech, among ordinary inhabitants the Arabic word jadid (new) was the preferred term for talking of new town development, as well as the historical term used to differentiate the colonial French quarters and towns from the older, walled city core or medina qadima. Inhabitants I spoke with also used temporal qualifiers such as qabl (before) and al-yum (today) in order to portray how things were in the past in comparison to the present of our conversations. Additionally, categories such as urban (haddaryin) and rural (ʿaroubiyin) were frequently employed in everyday speech by many as a way of distinguishing the ‘unsophisticated’ dwellers of the countryside from the more ‘cultured’ inhabitants of cities – a division which was tellingly replicated by Casablancan elites in order to differentiate themselves from the inhabitants of the city’s margins. Others also commonly employed the distinction between rumi (modern, western, lit. ‘from Rome’) and beldi (of the country, traditional) as a way of categorizing fashion and home furnishing styles. These discursive practices together with a repertory of gestural and embodied forms of everyday life were part and parcel of the production, contestation and negotiation of difference and marginalization I discuss in the following chapters. It is important to keep in mind that, although their meaning was flexible, these different terms varied with speaker and context, and were always employed in a comparative and supple way that spoke not only against static understandings of what constituted the ‘modern’, but also in favour of its continued productive potential (cf. Deeb 2006, pp. 14–20).

Classed spaces: Marginality and precarious lives Although the Moroccan urban margins were central to colonial and postcolonial projects of modernity and modernization, the co-productive relationship between these spaces and the social realities and geographies they gave birth to have remained largely occluded and starkly undertheorized.4 Peripheries (at local, national and global scales) have a history of being employed as testing grounds for new forms of capitalism (Brandon, Frykman & Røge 2019), as well as techniques for policing and crowd control, especially when those margins housed the workforce that sustained the commercial ventures implanted through economic colonialism, as was the case in Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi. Providing an account of the margins and the marginalized offers a way of highlighting neglected aspects of large-scale

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Precarious Modernities

processes of change that hegemonic versions have tended to discard or omit. As a conceptual move, then, I have made a choice to privilege ‘peripheral visions’ – to borrow from June Nash (2001) – as a way of disrupting and historicizing normative understandings of contemporary social structures and phenomena marking Moroccan urban space. This does not mean that I assume neat boundaries exist between a constructed centrality and its everexpanding margins, nor that I take for granted that all those who inhabit an urban position of socio-spatial marginality are equally disenfranchised or experience social difference and inequality in the same way across Morocco, although certain patterns can and should be distinguished. Because of this, both throughout the research and the writing phases, I remained attuned to the ways in which marginality can be strategically used by various stakeholders, including the marginalized, as a way of constructing claims and generating multiple forms of agency and symbolic capital. As Anna Tsing’s writing on the Meratus Dayaks reminds us: ‘The cultural difference of the margins is a sign of exclusion from the centre; it is also a tool for destabilizing central authority’ (1993, p. 27). Marginality and precarity are evidently not the same thing. Being marginal does not always translate into being precarious, and vice versa. Etymologically speaking, ‘precarity’ is derived from the Latin root prex or preces, meaning ‘a prayer’ or ‘an entreaty’.5 It suggests a position of vulnerability, finding oneself in disempowering and uncertain situations, at the mercy of others. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis there has been a surge in anthropological writing and engagement with precarity (Graeber 2011, Adams 2012, Hamdy 2012, Holt and Worby 2012, Mains 2012, Bear et al. 2015, Stout 2016). But anthropologists have long been attuned to the historical conditions and cultural specificities of living with economic insecurity, social marginalization and the erosion or ‘loss of state and corporate provisioning’ (Muehlebach 2013, p. 298; cf. Aggarwal 1995). As growing numbers of people around the world experience the affective and psychological effects of ongoing neoliberalization, a heightened anthropological attention to precarity as a structure of feeling can be instrumental for documenting how the term has become a shorthand for the multiple ways in which spaces and people are disciplined and made amenable to novel forms of capital extraction (Muehlebach 2013, p. 299). I employ ‘precarity’ for discussing particular affects expressed by those on the margins, because it has the advantage of capturing the particular contradictions of the contemporary period – both in Morocco and elsewhere – whereby increasing access to education, public services and infrastructures such as health services,

Introduction

11

running water and electricity have not necessarily translated into increased socio-economic security for the lower classes (cf. Cohen 2004; Berriane 2013, p. 23). In this context, marginality and feelings of social marginalization can both feed into the general affect associated with precarity, and function as explanatory schemes for those facing prolonged periods of socio-economic insecurity. In Casablanca, and Morocco more broadly, the emergence of marginalized, socio-economically precarious urban inhabitants as a distinct group can be traced back to the creation of new social structures and relations of production as part of both the colonial drive for industrialization and a post-colonial mix of political violence and liberalization reforms (cf. Montagne 1951, Adam 1968, Escallier 1984, Berriane 2013). Economic investments in industry and agriculture, coupled with commercial exchange with Europe during the Protectorate era (Cohen 2004), constituted the first step in the creation of new social structures. Notably, this included the emergence of what French sociologist André Adam labelled the new ‘subproletariat’ (1968, p. 706): people who were lured by the opportunities promised by colonial urban development but given few social protections to maintain a foothold in the city. The coping strategies and spatial tactics developed by these populations over decades of living with contingency and economic instability, I argue, have led to the production of a particular class-inflected register of sha‘abi (popular, lower-class) spatial practices and senses of place. This reality has been frequently glossed only through the defective lens of ‘culture of poverty’ tropes or approached through the technical lens of development-focused agendas and analyses (Small, Harding and Lamont 2010). This is partly explained by the fact that social class has not been one of the metonyms traditionally associated with the study of Middle Eastern and North African societies and spaces.6 Owing to a historical bias in favour of theorizations based on the study of tribal organization and affiliation, there have been few rigorous and systematic engagements with socio-economic class (trans)formation in Morocco (cf. Cohen and Jaidi 2006, Tozy 2011). But while tribal and ethnic ties to the ancestral village might have played important support roles within the first years of rural migrants’ arrival in cities, they have slowly and progressively been replaced by ‘solidarities’ built around a shared socio-spatial experience of life and the types of work available in marginal spaces (Escallier 2001, p. 20). In this context, embodied ways of being in space, dress, tastes and modes of consumption have become potent markers of class difference, as much-needed recent ethnographies have begun to document (Newcomb 2008, 2017).

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Precarious Modernities

The concept of class has had a relatively long and productive history, although its significance for anthropological theorizing has been on the wane in recent decades (Carrier 2015, p. 28). But, as recent work in the anthropology of labour and economic anthropology has shown (Collins 2003, Donner 2008, Kasmir 2008, Cairoli 2011, Morell and Franquesa 2011, Neveling 2015), class remains a particularly productive analytical concept in an era of increased economic liberalization, financialization and growing economic precarity across the globe. This is because, in its broad conceptualization, a theory of social classes and their organization presents us with a model for studying society. I find this model particularly suited for an anthropological approach, because it regards humans as social beings mutually shaped and constrained by their local contexts, whose everyday relationships predominantly revolve around the securing of livelihoods (cf. Marx 1976 [1867], Weber 1946). Examining the organization of social life through the lens provided by this model allows for an analysis that considers space, and its structuring at the hands of various actors and processes, as a major factor in the production of social relations and broadly defined classes. To return to the book’s title then, my choice of the phrase ‘precarious modernities’ is an attempt to capture the co-constitutive relationship between lived experience and ideological agendas on the one hand, and the historically contingent and sociopolitically vulnerable nature of both modernizing projects and those who are targeted by them. As institutional actors carry out the work of survey and surveillance, planning and policing, building or tearing town, local inhabitants must constantly attend to both these processes and their own struggles, which are often not addressed by the state. It is in the spaces pried open by the tension created between overarching yet contingent forces and the strenuous work of making everyday life liveable, that we can begin to elucidate the dialectic between state, space and society in contemporary Morocco. I trace these tensions across seemingly incongruous situations and locations, from discourses and acts of historical commemoration, to reproductions of neighbourhood iconographies or mundane forms of domestic care. In doing this, my aim is to show how concepts like precarity and modernness colour social realities with polyvalent meanings, colonial histories and constantly shifting alliances between an (unexamined) and incomplete idea of what a (constant) process of ‘modernization’ might entail, and who might be in a position to be a part of it. Finally, it hints at the affective associations and tantalizing promises that such discourses and urban planning agendas produce, while their materialization appears to be in constant danger of either coming apart or slipping out of the reach of the many.

Introduction

13

Background of the study and fieldwork context Most ethnographic studies are in equal parts born out of the intellectual and personal curiosity of their ethnographers. Similarly, my interest in the themes of this book has been a long time in the making and deserves a few words of clarification. I first arrived in Morocco in August 2009 as part of a Michael C. Rockefeller Fellowship meant for pursuing a year of ‘purposeful postgraduate immersion in a foreign culture of choice’.7 After an intensive two-month immersion course in Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and the Berber dialect of Tashelhit,8 I set out to learn about the life of semi-nomadic oasis communities and how they managed to make a living in the increasingly precarious environmental and economic conditions of rural Morocco. As I followed the journeys of several young people I had met out of oases and into urban areas (Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech), the complex and contentious roles that urban peripheries, affordable-housing projects and informal architecture played in this internal migration process began to come into clearer focus. I extended my stay in Morocco and became gradually more fluent in Darija through my close involvement in the conception and production of two documentary film projects over the next two years. It was through working with a team of young Moroccan women to compile a video collection of the life stories of marginalized women that I was first introduced, among other things, to the neighbourhood of Hay Mohammadi, its emblematic colonial and post-colonial housing schemes, and its inhabitants. The second documentary video I worked on during the spring of 2011 was commissioned by an international development agency working with the Moroccan authorities on promoting renewable energy and sustainable architecture. In this second role I got to meet several institutional actors working in the field of urban planning and new town (villes nouvelles) construction, and to learn about the unprecedented socio-economic and urban redevelopment programmes targeting ‘informal housing’, poverty and urban marginality in the country. The completion of the second documentary coincided with the onset of the 2011 Arab Spring revolts, quickly shifting the parameters that had until then governed the limits of public discourse and contestation. The Moroccan king, Mohammad VI, responded to local echoes of the uprisings – known as the ‘February 20th Movement’ – in a proactive manner by agreeing to a referendum and a reform of the constitution, thus avoiding the turmoil that besieged neighbouring countries.9 Although external observers viewed the

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Precarious Modernities

king’s decisions as a step towards increasing democratization (Pelham 2012), internally there is a widespread general consensus that the promised reforms acted as strategic co-optation of contestation, resulting in ‘window-dressing’ rather than any substantial reform. While these political events are not the overt concern of the book, I mention them here because they evidently framed and informed the historical moment and political climate that shaped the context in which I undertook this study. As a consequence, at the time of my field research concerns remained over the limits of freedom of expression, particularly with respect to the voicing of dissenting public demands. Subsequently, as the material in Chapter 3 will show, public space and mundane forms of contestation continue to be intensely policed in Morocco. I returned to Morocco in January 2013, this time as a PhD candidate with a British university affiliation, and a plan to spend the next sixteen months conducting fieldwork. I kept Hay Mohammadi as the focus of my project and set about taking care of the practical arrangements that would allow me to conduct research in the neighbourhood. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now tell that the period of my fieldwork took place at a time of intensified interest in Hay Mohammadi from a variety of ‘outsiders’, fuelled partly by the availability of national and international funding for social development agendas (see Chapter 1). This included foreign, predominantly French or Francophone, volunteers involved in social development and educational projects, as well as architects and architecture students (predominantly French, Dutch or Belgian, but also Moroccan) interested in studying the formal qualities of the neighbourhood’s built fabric. Others included cultural activists and artists (Moroccan and foreign) interested in the ‘raw experience and texture’ of what they described as the ‘mythical’ Hay Mohammadi. In this sense, those I initially encountered could easily place me within this local landscape of professionals, researchers and activists.

The protagonists As a consequence, my initial contacts in Casablanca also came from this local network of activists. This included a rather well-known architectural preservation association, Casamémoire, and a neighbourhood social welfare association, which I refer to throughout the book as the jamʿiyya, that was highly regarded for their work fighting social degradation in Hay Mohammadi. Several of the members and staff of both Casamémoire and the jamʿiyya agreed to be interviewed at various points in my fieldwork, and I was given wide access

Introduction

15

to the archives, grant applications and documentation that both associations collected on the topic of urban planning and the social history of Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi. In addition to volunteering my time twice a week to the jamʿiyya’s various activities, I also assisted at special events, proofread and provided feedback on grant applications, and was occasionally asked by both organizations to photograph or record exhibitions or training seminars. A number of older inhabitants, who were considered by the community to have ‘important memories’ based on their personal history in the neighbourhood, were incredibly generous in providing me with accounts of their lives and considerate answers to some of my more clumsily formulated initial questions. It was in this way that I was able to meet the founder of Morocco’s first labour union (Union Marocaine du Travail, UMT) and one of the oldest residents of Hay Mohammadi, former student activists and political detainees, and other pre-eminent journalists and cultural figures of the 1960s and 1970s. Their life stories were instrumental in helping me gain a better grasp of the events that shaped the neighbourhood’s social and economic landscape in the post-colonial era. While my initial ethnographic observations were confined to the spaces of the two organizations and the different locations where they conducted their activities, the majority of my time was eventually spent in the company of my closest interlocutors as they moved within and outside Hay Mohammadi, depending on what their daily schedules dictated. These were the people who gradually allowed me the greatest access to their homes and lives: a group of about twenty men and women varying in age between eighteen and sixty, and their extended families and friends in and around Hay Mohammadi. Without their friendship, generous hospitality and good humour, this book would be much poorer. Some were members of the activist networks I followed, while others were what might be described as beneficiaries of those networks’ programmes and activities. Others were part of the friend and kin groups of my earliest contacts in the area, while still others were those I met in the comments section of an online article I had published about the neighbourhood’s history. With minor exceptions, then, the majority of the people who feature in the book grew up and lived in and around the neighbourhood’s core. Among them, an alarming number had lost a parent to severe illness or industrial work accidents, or were struggling with chronic ill health themselves. As often seems to be the case with anthropologists’ closest relationships in the field, in certain ways those who became my closest interlocutors were not typical members of their community. For example, Amina was an unmarried orphaned young woman

16

Precarious Modernities

responsible for running her own household, who benefitted from a certain freedom of mobility that was not necessarily shared by women her age in the quarter. While she serves as the main protagonist and guide in my exploration of ‘unhomely domesticities’ in Chapter 4, she was a constant companion and interlocutor as I navigated the different scales and networks featured throughout the book. Fully aware that her community – for better or for worse – ‘kept an eye on her’ as she would say, she conformed to the local moral standards, wore the veil in public and never received men in her home. Owing to this, Amina was highly regarded by her community, and I suspect that her friendship with me was one of the reasons why people in the community also extended their warmth and hospitality towards me. Others of my close interlocutors had grown up near the old core of Hay Mohammadi, where the karyan was slowly being dismantled in 2013. Asma’s family, which also features largely in the text, although of modest means like the majority of the inhabitants, was large and boisterous, numbering ten siblings in total. Some of them had married and set up their own households in the vicinity, but the parental flat was still crammed with those who remained. Even though Asma often complained that they slept ‘like sardines’, the family took pride in their hospitality, and various distant relatives sometimes came for overnight visits. The second youngest of her siblings, Asma also veiled herself in public and enjoyed a fair degree of mobility, partly owing to the fact that she had been working for local charity foundations since finishing her university studies in law. Through my friendship with Asma, Amina and several other close interlocutors, I was introduced to the intimate struggles and dramas affecting low-income households in Hay Mohammadi, but also invited to celebrate in their moments of joy and transition (marriages, births, naming ceremonies, circumcisions, job changes, house-relocations, etc.), and thus to follow over the months and intervening years their experience and interpretations of the changes affecting the neighbourhood. Several other interlocutors appear throughout the book: people I had more casual acquaintances with, or whom I only met briefly due to their own fleeting presence in the social landscape of Hay Mohammadi and the networks I became part of and followed closely. These interlocutors varied in age, income and education, but in general shared a certain sense of belonging to or preoccupation with Hay Mohammadi. With the exception of architects and planners I interviewed, the educational and professional backgrounds that inhabitants reported in our conversations were fairly typical for inhabitants of the Greater Casablanca area (Haut Commissariat au Plan 2018). The majority of my long-

Introduction

17

term interlocutors who were above the age of sixteen at the time of the research were educated to at least high school-level, a fact reflected in the 70 per cent high school-educated population found in the census data. Those who had failed to pass the Baccalaureate examination went on to pursue professional or technical training as shop assistants, mechanics, tailors, bakers, carpenters or electricians, or worked in nearby factories, assembling solar panels or electronic cabling, for example. Among older inhabitants (aged forty to eighty), a small fraction, predominantly male, were or had been employed as civil servants and managed to maintain a certain standard of living owing to facilities they had gained through their professional position – including a relatively decent pension in some cases, rent-controlled housing or state-subsidized loans for buying an apartment. The majority of female interlocutors in the same age range described themselves as housewives (Fr. femme au foyer), although a large number of them also intensively contributed to the household income by taking on sewing and tailoring jobs, baking for neighbours on special occasions or working as independent distributors of cosmetic and household products. For several of my interlocutors, taking on sewing jobs and cosmetics’ distribution were their family’s only sources of income. Many of these people could be described as lower- or working-class, earning monthly incomes at or considerably below the 2013–14 official minimum income wage of 2333.76 dirhams (about £170) per month from either ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ jobs, or a combination of the two – a distinction I discuss in more critical detail in the chapters that follow. A smaller number of those I spoke with described themselves as lower-middle class (in French: classe moyenne), having secured much-coveted positions in local or multinational private companies as accountants, engineers, IT-technicians or entry-level trainees. While their incomes positioned them at a considerable advantage in relation to the majority of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants, these individuals were often expected to and did contribute considerably to the finances of their extended families, thus participating in the broader work of social reproduction through the creation of crucial local support networks, which I look at more closely in Chapters 4 and 5. In order to respect and protect the privacy and confidentiality of all, I have used pseudonyms throughout the text, and in certain cases altered details describing their living circumstances. Exceptions have been made where those I spoke with expressly agreed to have their real names used or spoke to me in their capacity as public figures – such as the well-known former detainee, author and activist Fatna El Bouih, and the local historian and scholar Najib Taki – or

18

Precarious Modernities

as leaders in the community, as is the case of Abdeljalil Bakkar, the director of the jamʿiyya. There is a long history of accounts detailing how ethnographers have encountered situations where their presence was unwelcome or provoked outright suspicion and hostility, and such anecdotal accounts have often been used as a way of acknowledging the power imbalance inherent in many ethnographic encounters to varied effects (Geertz 1973, Rabinow 1977, Dwyer 1982). Owing perhaps to a combination of chance, local context and political climate I did not experience (or was unaware of) any such heightened instances of suspicion and inhospitality during my research.10 Less has been written about our interlocutors’ need for privacy and occasional respite from anthropological scrutiny. As much as anthropological tradition has valued the ideal of ‘total immersion’,11 the purpose and value of ethnographic research is not to record an exhaustive account of our research participants’ lives. This means that there were certain occasions I was not present for. Instead, I have chosen to allow my interlocutors to shape the contours of my inquiry around the themes and topics that were meaningful to their everyday preoccupations with life on the urban margins. The pace of life in the city also meant that many of my interlocutors were often busy working several jobs and attending to family obligations where my presence would have been considered a burden, financially or otherwise. In the same vein, this book should therefore not be read as a complete or exhaustive history and account of either Hay Mohammadi or the Moroccan urban margins – indeed, I believe such an undertaking would be lacking not only in humility but also in depth. One notable omission – religion and its role in the political and social life in Hay Mohammadi – deserves a few explanatory words. Religion evidently plays a significant part in the lives of most Moroccans, as Islamic piety, broadly understood, was central to my interlocutors’ idea of building and maintaining morally good lives. In this context, people’s religiosity informed conceptions of a desirable moral character and was frequently employed as a fluid moral compass in everyday life (cf. Schielke 2009), but was never in my presence expressed as a political project. Although almost all of my female research participants were veiled, they did not attend mosque prayer even during Ramadan, and seldom prayed in my presence or enticed me into conversations about religion. When such conversations did occur with other people in the neighbourhood, they were often focused on comparing and contrasting what they called ‘our faiths’ – I told all those who asked that although I had been christened in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I was not a practising Christian. I therefore see the ostensible absence of religion from the book as a reflection of the themes and social milieu

Introduction

19

of my research. While I was aware of rumours about local inhabitants meant to be involved in charities affiliated with the politically militant Islamist group al-ʿAdl w-al-Ihsan (Justice and Spirituality), and a considerable number of university-aged women I knew took up (and then gave up again) the full body veil (niqab), the role of political Islam was not the focus of my study. At the same time, during the time of my research as well as while writing this book, I have made an explicit effort to address existing stereotypes about the susceptibility of the urban margins to Islamic radicalization (cf. Bayat 2007). I raise this issue particularly in Chapter 3.

Language and/as class politics As a visibly foreign, unmarried young woman speaking Darija in Casablanca, I was often a puzzle for those I met for the first time, and an amusing exception for those who came to know me closely. Darija is the local spoken vernacular of Arabic, part of what is considered the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum,12 making it mutually comprehensible to a certain extent with Algerian and (less so) with Tunisian dialects. Similar to other dialects in the region, Darija incorporates French, Spanish and Tamazight (Berber) words, with the majority of the vocabulary borrowed from literary Arabic. The greater part of television programming and new media predominantly uses Darija, as does publicly available commercial advertising, which occasionally employs a transcription system borrowed from internet chat culture – for instance, ‘3yit fabour’/‘call free’, which mixes Arabic and Spanish in this example. Modern Standard Arabic (fuṣḥā) was not a language commonly used in everyday conversation, although official and administrative bodies, and certain traditional media employ it in their communications. Significantly, the French language continues to have a strong and symbolic presence in everyday speech, acting as a marker of differences in education, economic status and, ultimately, social class. An ability to speak accent-free, fluent French still encodes middle and upper-class status in Morocco (see especially Chapter 3). Given Morocco’s history as a former French protectorate and a continued, though not uncontested, use of the French language in formal education, cultural agendas and business,13 it was generally assumed by Moroccans that foreigners would more readily speak a European language than engage in the ‘difficult’ apprenticeship of Darija. In this context, beyond the quite pragmatic aspect of being able to converse with people freely on an everyday basis, my ability (and in some people’s eyes, willingness) to learn and speak a vernacular

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Precarious Modernities

language was both a social asset and a prism through which I experienced the particular post-colonial social relations that mark everyday interactions in Casablanca. For example, when members of the heritage and NGO sector met in Hay Mohammadi or elsewhere in the city, it was not unusual that entire events were held in French, even though all those present were Moroccan. It should also be noted that, with minor exceptions, the majority of my interlocutors in Hay Mohammadi were largely fluent in French, but in their everyday lives communicated in Darija. Thus, my ability to dialogue with them in Darija and to clumsily pick up local terms (see Chapters 3 and 4) was not only central to my project of studying marginalized everyday practices, but also played a significant part in the process of becoming socialized into the worlds of my neighbourhood interlocutors. Conversely, my access to elite networks and upper-class interlocutors in Casablanca was seldom facilitated by my literacy in the Moroccan vernacular, although it sometimes occasioned curiosity and amused reactions. In these contexts, being able to speak a mostly accent-free French along with my foreign university credentials guaranteed that formal interviews I tried to schedule with local elites and public administrators would almost always be honoured. Although it seemed to provide an advantage with a particular group of people, association with French language and culture was not altogether an uncomplicated matter. Similar to what Amelie Le Renard so poignantly observed about her research in Saudi Arabia (2014, p. 19), being assigned to this ‘class’ of ‘Westerner’, or ‘westernized’ professionals, more often than not facilitated my access to officials and elite actors and spaces. At the same time, my prolonged presence in the neighbourhood and interest in the inhabitants’ perspectives transgressed assumptions made about foreigners living in Morocco.14 I always introduced myself to all those I met while doing fieldwork as a Romanian national pursuing a doctoral degree in London. On several occasions, my upper-class interlocutors became visibly more relaxed upon learning that I was ‘neither French nor Belgian’, as some people seemed to assume based on my ‘hard-to-place accent’. A female urban planner I met early on in my research argued that such reactions might be owing to the fact that as a Romanian – even one with a western European institutional affiliation – I was still perceived as less ‘threatening’ than a French counterpart might have been. Her statement seemed to acknowledge the tense and ambivalent relationship Moroccan elites maintain with France, with facets of this complicated relationship also visible in the dynamics between cultural and social development actors and Hay Mohammadi inhabitants (see Chapter 1). To those who became my close

Introduction

21

interlocutors, I spoke at length about my family and the experience of everyday life growing up in a working-class area. My perceived identity as a post-Soviet Eastern European who had been brought up inside and around the socialist architecture of a now deindustrialized town was often seized upon by my interlocutors in Hay Mohammadi as a way of explaining the relative ease with which the interactions between myself and the community had occurred. I am not offering this information as a way of claiming a superior moral stance or to profess an advantage in gathering ‘more authentic’ ethnographic material due to my positionality – indeed, my research presence was not friction-free and I would not want to romanticize it as such.15 Rather, I point this out as an important reminder about how our own history and personal backgrounds as scholars and researchers not only help to position us in the eyes of our various research interlocutors, but also afford a lens through which we may reflect on both the process of knowledge production and the complex and intersectional realities on which it is based – be it the diffusely classed dynamics of Casablanca or fields closer to our own ‘homes’ (Haraway 1988).

‘Mediated’ approaches It is one thing to academically understand urban inequality and the way it has been co-produced as part of agendas and practices of city-planning and policymaking, and a completely different thing to come to an understanding of how this is experienced as a lived reality. How can we gain access to others’ sense of place, belonging or ambivalent affects of marginalization? One of the core concerns of this project has been to understand how struggles for material wellbeing are deeply enmeshed with the production of a particular ‘sense of place’ (Feld and Basso 1996) even, or all the more so, as they continue to be inscribed within specific historical, political and socio-economic conditions, and physical spaces that are loaded with affective meaning. Recent literature on post-colonial and post-conflict cities, has advanced the idea that it might be useful to consider urban spaces as potentially ‘wounded’ as a result of both colonial intervention and structural violence in the post-independence era (Till 2012, p. 6). Applying this conceptual frame to the case of Casablanca and Hay Mohammadi has allowed me to balance the focus on land and buildings as property in the capitalist sense, with an attention to place as a historically ongoing event invested with affect as well as shifting and contingent meanings (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2012). Attending to how the inhabitants of these places experience these meanings (or not) meant engaging in what others have termed ‘emplaced’, or active participant observation.

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Precarious Modernities

In using these terms, anthropologists and ethnographers of other disciplinary backgrounds have only recently begun to acknowledge that ethnographic fieldwork is not only a deeply sensorial experience, but also one that profoundly informs the ways in which we are able to access and process information about our research (Howes 2003, Ingold 2000, Pink 2009, Nakamura 2013). Sarah Pink suggests that in thinking of ourselves as ‘sensory apprentices’ rather than detached observers, and by attending to both our senses as researchers and those of our collaborators, we are better suited to ‘learn to know’, as our collaborators ‘know through embodied practice’ (2009, p. 70). In this vein, the majority of the ethnographic material presented in the book was gathered through a mix of ‘emplaced’ participant observation, unstructured conversations and formal interviews, as well as a series of multimedia methodologies on which I expand below. Placing at the centre of my ethnographic inquiry the everyday lives of a socially and economically marginal community has entailed the difficult exploration of lives often marked by harrowing economic concerns, political and historical trauma, and personal hardship. Finding the right space and manner for speaking to my interlocutors about the messy and rapidly shifting contingency of everyday life pushed me to consider alternative entry points into such conversations. Some of these approaches such as embodied ways of gaining knowledge through walking, cleaning, shopping, cooking and sharing of meals (Stoller 1989, Sutton 2001) and the results they yielded are directly addressed in the book. Others, such as a ‘photovoice’ exercise and an ambient soundrecording experiment I conducted with a small group of inhabitants, provided background material for my analysis and helped me become attuned to local perceptions of the area’s sensorial landscape, but are not specifically addressed in the text. Although I present and discuss these different approaches separately here, they undoubtedly overlapped and fed off each other in the same manner that our sensorial knowledge of the world is synesthetic (Seremetakis 1991). Within this synesthetic context, however, the visual and its attendant metaphors clearly dominate representations of the city and its margins. Subject to what might be called the ‘scopic regime of modernity’ (Jay 1998), among the most illustrious engagements with the city’s life and fabric are those that concern themselves primarily with iconic visions of Casablanca’s architecture or with the semiotic potential of images which colour its public spaces (cf. Cohen & Eleb 2002, Ossman 1994, Pieprzak 2010). My own approach has been focused on attempts to find alternative ways for unpacking the city’s iconic and romanticized image. Sherry Turkle’s (2007) work with objects served as an inspiration in

Introduction

23

this sense. Starting from her contention that objects, broadly conceived, are ‘things to think with’, I began staging encounters between inhabitants and visual representations of their homes and neighbourhood as they appeared in local and international media. As part of these staged encounters, I brought along on my visits to people’s homes copies of ‘viral images’ of Hay Mohammadi, featured and circulated with enthusiasm within international media and heritage circles, and used them as catalysts for conversation. Initially, I also considered the option of ‘photo-elicitation’ – asking my key interlocutors to show me their own photos of the neighbourhood. However, without my prompting, many of those I spoke to and spent time with, offered to show me photo albums and videos of themselves and their families, dating back to their childhood and youth in the area (cf. Harper 2002, Daniels 2010). On these occasions I was offered intimate glimpses into the lives of my interlocutors, which often led to discussions about changes in the social and material fabric of the neighbourhood. At other times, the photos prompted retellings of intricate family histories that might not otherwise have become conversation topics. I also gathered other visual materials: official maps and urban plans, colonial photographs and recent mass media coverage of the neighbourhood and new social housing projects. Collected and brought together as part of a collaborative process of ‘media archaeology of place’ (Huhtamo 2011), these materials became catalysts for conversations about local identities, social memory of place and the transformation of neighbourhood spaces, disrupting and diversifying narratives found in official accounts and scholarly work on the area (see especially Chapter 2). Among the most circulated representations of the neighbourhood, colonial maps rank second only to archival photographs, which, owing to a growing presence of new technologies and internet literacy has meant their availability to a greater public. Although mapping and map-making have mostly been associated with colonial technocratic efforts at controlling space and the beings that lived in it (Scott 1998; Foucault 1984, p. 239), in the tradition of radical cartography reminiscent of the Situationists (Debord 1977 [1967]), I explored the possibility of employing map-making as a creative, comparative exercise (cf. Patel and Baptist 2012). If maps have generally been construed and employed as objective representations of a territory surveyed, my goal was to encourage inhabitants to think of the cartographic exercise as a creative act that encouraged imaginary and non-representational mapping (Corner 1999). Taking my cue from the works of Kevin Lynch (1960) and Cristina Grasseni (2004, 2009), I saw this collaborative map-making as a way of capturing and exploring a diverse range of ‘skilled visions’ rooted in the local landscape and generated through

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Precarious Modernities

the cognitive and bodily practices of everyday dwelling in the neighbourhood. Both the process and drawings that resulted from this exercise turned out to be particularly helpful for sparking conversations about the neighbourhood and its spaces, as it gave people an alternative conduit to express their sense of emplacement or of exclusion (see Chapter 2). These ‘mediated’ conversations, together with the material gathered through participant observation, made it possible for me to access the richly textured and many-layered experience of the neighbourhood’s fabric and the lives it sustains (cf. Pandolfo 1996, Huyssen 2003). Complementing this ethnographic material are archival and historical sources, as well as formal interviews with architects, urban planners, slum-relocation consultants, managers of public social development programmes, school teachers, cultural and human rights activists, NGO workers, retired civil servants and local officials who in their professional capacity were concerned with or worked in Hay Mohammadi, either in the past or at the time of my research. Primarily though, my methodological approach overwhelmingly tried to address a concern with (mundane) practice and its role in the production of knowledge, through movement and in other ways that are nonverbal. The everyday practice of ‘sensuous scholarship’ – to borrow from Paul Stoller (1997, p. 43) – alongside my closest informants, as we shared meals, words, walks, sights and sounds, allowed me to directly participate in and experience the rich reality of this storied city.

Plan of the book The history and socio-economic transformations of the Moroccan urban margins have been either ignored or instrumentally deployed through partial or hegemonic representations by various actors – something that has led to distorted and normative understandings of poverty, marginality and agency. In response to this, in this book I have structured the ethnographic material and its attendant discussion in a way that attempts to do justice to the contingent and contested nature, as well as multiple facets of life, for those inhabiting such precarious areas like Hay Mohammadi. Consequently, the five chapters, followed by a conclusion, invite the reader on an exploration, analysis and discussion of the ethnographic material at various scales, moving through a succession of conceptual as well as physical spaces. I begin with the ‘historical space’ of the neighbourhood’s creation, and continue through the cartographic representations that have tried to order, police and control that space. The text

Introduction

25

then takes the reader into the physical space of the street, advancing into the ‘alternative’ space of neighbourhood NGOs, entering the intimate space of the home, and finally concluding with a broadened view onto the envisioned urban spaces of the future. Urban marginality in Morocco does not exist in a void, but is instead a condition of socio-spatial inequality that has been produced and reproduced through the actions and interventions of various colonial and post-colonial forces. The first chapter introduces readers to the main historical processes and actors that gave birth to and shaped Casablanca into the sprawling and starkly unequal city it is today. It does so from the perspective of Hay Mohammadi’s role as a ‘laboratory’ for colonial and post-colonial forms of governance and control. It describes how the neighbourhood’s development into an emblem of sociospatial marginality has not been an arbitrary process but a crucial aspect of different politically and economically motivated agendas of social engineering, albeit with uneven and unintended consequences at times. By identifying the growing role that heritage and commemoration actors play in commodifying and depoliticizing this history, this chapter begins the work of mapping the entangled networks of actors responsible for the current objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca’s margins. Chapter 2 advances the discussion started in Chapter 1 on heritage, urban governance and the politics of commemoration by looking at the role that different acts of mapping have played in the production of representations of neighbourhood space. The ethnographic material in this chapter attends to how these various representations of Hay Mohammadi space have come into being, and follows some of the uses and trajectories they have opened up for other mappings of the neighbourhood (Appadurai 1986). If space and its representation are symptomatic of the power relationships governing that space, as Lefebvre suggests (1991), I ask what can be uncovered by considering how the space of a vilified neighbourhood has been and continues to be mapped. I compare these cartographic representations with maps drawn by my interlocutors as part of the mapping exercise described earlier, and suggest that such affective cartographies can serve as alternative points of departure in understanding the lived experience of those inhabiting the neighbourhood at present. In Chapter 3 I move from the surface of the map into the animated street spaces of the neighbourhood and the ‘alternative’ space of local NGOS, to examine the ways in which forms of working-class street sociality are addressed by local administrative and moral discourses. Similar to other places in the region, Morocco is confronted with a growing youth population facing

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almost certain prospects of chronic un- or under-employment and a volatile sociopolitical situation owing to that. I focus in on several social development and deradicalization programmes targeting lower-class youth, and trace the ways in which international funders and a shift towards a mantra of ‘responsibilization’ are contributing to the depoliticization of local struggles. Highlighted by an unprecedented wave of police raids targeting ‘street delinquency’ since 2014, I argue that marginalized, racialized and criminalized lower-class young men and their street practices have become the terrain upon which local, national and global anxieties and agendas about radicalization, citizenship and the ‘right to the city’ are played out. The street has often been imagined in opposition to the home, influenced by Orientalist ideas about the public/private separation of space in the region. In the fourth chapter I turn my attention to lower-class homes and the survival practices they sustain, in order to both critique these ideas and show how precarious inhabitants are often compelled to strategically deploy gendered, patriarchal logics in order to secure a dignified life. With the help of my closest interlocutors, and through their interactions with family, friends and neighbours, I take the reader into the kitchen and the salon, the hammam and the market, complicating existing analyses of conventional spaces of hospitality and female sociality in the region. Focusing on the particularly taxing circumstances of women’s work in the home, I discuss the ways in which lower-class women tactically appropriate gendered ideas and practices to protect themselves ‘against the injuries of class’, while negotiating deeply ambivalent or negative affects associated with domesticity (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2012). Extending the preoccupation with the role of housing, Chapter 5 focuses on the visions of the future as embodied in new housing development plans and billboards, and describes some of the real and imagined spaces they open up for inhabitants of Casablanca’s margins. Drawing on in-depth material provided by former inhabitants of the old karyan, I offer a detailed account of the relocation project targeting the remaining slum inhabitants in Hay Mohammadi, and show that such rehousing programmes run the risk of remarginalizing the poor, both in geographical as well as social and economic ways. Stemming from this are questions about mobilities and the future, which I address through a look at new spaces of consumption (malls) and infrastructure projects meant to reimagine Casablanca as a ‘world-class’ city. The conclusion provides a brief overview of the neighbourhood’s continued degradation, and sets it against the background of intensified social contestation and popular protests from various communities across the country that have

Introduction

27

also been targeted with political and economic marginalization in the past. These current dynamics are portrayed against what has been considered an otherwise exceptionally stable Moroccan sociopolitical landscape in the post-2011 events affecting the region, and the acceleration of billion-dollar prestige-building projects meant to secure the country’s image abroad. I close by suggesting several ways in which activist, policy and media interventions can engage more productively with the histories, shifting dynamics and increasingly diffuse yet articulate forms of contestation present on the margins, and how a critical re-examination of past and present visions of modernity might effectively support these social justice efforts in the long run.

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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

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Precarious Modernities

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

Genealogies of the Urban Margins

31

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 built 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

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Precarious Modernities

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.

Genealogies of the Urban Margins

33

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 (AbuLughod 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).

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Precarious Modernities

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. 38; Rabinow 1989, pp. 303–5). By the 1950s, Casablanca’s edges were becoming a growing mar on the Protectorate’s commercial capital. The swelling numbers of rural migrants had been expected to live either in the old walled city (medina qadima) or to rely on the insufficient housing provided by their industrialist employers.6 In the absence of viable alternatives, the bulk of those who constituted what French sociologist Robert Montagne referred to as Morocco’s ‘new proletariat’ (1951) took up residence in self-built tin shacks in the proximity of their place of employment. For a considerable majority at that time, this meant the industrial district of Carrières Centrales. With the steady growth of the quarter, its inhabitants began to voice demands for social and economic rights on par with local European workers (Rachik 2002, p. 29). Confronted with impending social and political unrest, the French administration began to see mass housing as an urgent security measure. Addressing the governmental council in 1953, Resident General Guillaume could not be more emphatic about the importance of an urgent slum-clearance plan: ‘On va au plus pressé et le plus pressé, c’est la suppression des bidonvilles, après on verra. On construira des logements aussi simples que possibles, le moins coûteux possible et le plus vite possible.’7 This was the context in which Michel Écochard, who became head of the Service de l’Urbanisme (Urban Planning Service) in 1947, was able to experiment with a new approach to urban planning that led to the creation of large-scale, low-cost housing estates (habitat pour le plus grand nombre), based on a standard 8 × 8 metre grid (trame ).8 Drawing on ethnological research gathered by the colonial apparatus about Moroccan settlements, but also from qualitative

Genealogies of the Urban Margins

35

studies of the existing slums (cf. Berque 1959), Écochard (1955b) advocated a solution based on ‘neighbourhood units’, each of which could house up to 1,800 inhabitants. This was a significant number for an administration dealing with Hay Mohammadi’s population of 56,667 inhabitants, making it the densest bidonville in the country at the time. Each neighbourhood unit would be contained inside the housing grid composed of 8 × 8-metre plots or ‘cells’ (Figure 1.1), which could theoretically allow for multiple arrangements and combinations. Loosely inspired by the vernacular architecture of rural Moroccan homes,9 the design was an oblique tool for ‘mediating’ the transition from a rural mode of life to an industrial urban existence, and meant to help Moroccans ‘acclimate to modernity’ (cf. Cohen and Eleb 2002, pp. 320–1). But though these new experimental housing forms were designed to blur the lines between rural and urban, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, they maintained

Figure 1.1 Écochard’s ‘8 × 8’-metre grid. Source: Fonds Écochard. SIAF/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d’architecture contemporaine.

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Precarious Modernities

the paternalist views on ethnic segregation instituted by the Prost plan. Despite all this, the project was hailed at the time as the perfect marriage between culturally specific dwelling (habitat adapté) and technocratic efforts at managing an increasing population of migrants to the city (Alison and Peter Smithson 1955). Even though the project essentially addressed problems created by the disruptive forces of colonialism, Écochard and his team remained silent on the political implications that their work had in Morocco (see Chapter 2). For this reason, on the eve of independence movements across Africa, the famous British architect Alison Smithson could claim that in North Africa, where there was plenty of ‘espace et soleil’, one could see the emergence of a ‘modern France, full of hope’ (Smithson 1991[1953], p. 12). As if to dispel this reverie, not only did many workers boycott the new projects, but the same year that Écochard’s housing grid was completed, Casablanca was also gripped by violent riots following the killing of the Tunisian labour leader Ferhat Hached (Adam 1968, p. 540). Newspapers from the period name the neighbourhood as the theatre of bloody struggles, citing ‘terrorist attacks’ and ‘acts of sabotage’ on factories at Carrières Centrales (Spillman 1967, pp. 159–75). Joining other cities where anti-colonial struggles had already erupted (i.e. Fes, the industrial region of Khouribga), the neighbourhood became one of the focal points from where riots spread across the country, culminating in a negotiated independence from France in 1956 (Storm 2008, Miller 2013). Unlike Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle, Morocco’s break with the métropole was less violent and protracted.10 Similar to other French-African protectorates, the proclamation of independence mostly meant the paced devolution of administrative powers to local elites and did not constitute a radical break with French structures and practices. This became particularly true where urban planning and governance were concerned. Indeed, while Carrières Centrales was rebaptized Hay Mohammadi in honour of King Mohammad V’s return from exile, the newly independent working classes continued to struggle with insufficient housing and precarious livelihoods on the urban margins. The situation worsened not only for the urban poor but also for the lower-middle-classes over the following decades, prompting the rise of several contestation movements, followed by their swift and brutal repression. In this period, whose key moments I trace in the following section, the techniques and tools of governance and urban planning created by the French proved useful to Mohammad V’s increasingly authoritarian successor, King Hassan II. Tracing the continuities between the colonial and post-independence era is thus crucial for understanding the factors that affected the development of Casablanca’s margins into a synonym for poverty, violence and crime (in many forms).

Genealogies of the Urban Margins

37

‘Marginalize it, to punish the people’: Political violence and post-Independence struggles The same revolutionary spirit that had brought the workers of Hay Mohammadi to the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle led the neighbourhood’s inhabitants to voice their open contestation of the Moroccan state under King Hassan II. Taking the throne in 1961, the new monarch ushered in a period that culminated in what is now commonly referred to as the ‘Years of Lead’ (Sanawāt ar-Ruṣāṣ, 1965–90), an era of unprecedented violence during which all forms of dissent were brutally repressed (Slyomovics 2005a, Miller 2013). One year into his reign, Hassan II began consolidating his rule and drafted a constitution that would ensure that ultimate power rested in the hands of the monarchy. These actions, together with the king’s foreign policy, which essentially proclaimed hostility towards the newly independent Algerian socialist state, led to a growing contestation movement organized around the Union nationale des forces populaires (National Union of Popular Forces, UNFP), under the leadership of Mehdi Ben Barka.11 The UNFP was joined by the Union nationale des étudiants du Maroc (National Union of Moroccan Students, UNEP), which led to the quick escalation of the conflict between the monarch and the largely leftist opposition (Miller 2013, pp. 166–8). In this context, the student riots of March 1965 signified a crucial turning point for Hassan II’s reign, as they marked the conclusive emergence of his repressive regime. Sparked by a new education regulation that was meant to limit the access of an estimated 60 per cent of high school students to a Baccalaureate degree, and thus a commonly perceived lifeline out of poverty, the riots began with school strikes and sit-ins and ended in citywide riots that brought together labourers, slum dwellers and students. On the third day of the protests, the crowds were violently dispersed with the help of the army.12 Casablanca and the inhabitants of its urban margins found themselves once more at the forefront of socio-economic struggles, but on this occasion their actions signalled the emerging cracks in the nationalist project (cf. Rollinde 2003). Historians have interpreted Hassan II’s response to this early contestation as a strategic measure of ‘an untried’ monarch consolidating his grip on power and instilling fear in a formidable and growingly popular opposition (Miller 2013, pp. 168–9). However, these internal security concerns came to overwhelmingly define the post-colonial state’s approach to governing lowincome, urban peripheral areas like Hay Mohammadi. During a period in which ‘a good repression’ was seen to buy ‘ten years of social peace’,13 the state’s

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Precarious Modernities

response was predominantly ad hoc, followed by a resumption of ‘management by absence’ rather than a comprehensive urban strategy (Zaki 2008, Bogaert 2013). Measures implemented at the time vis-à-vis peripheral neighbourhoods involved an expansion of carceral spaces and practices, while simultaneously reinforcing existing security infrastructure inherited from the French. In Hay Mohammadi this was represented by a military garrison that occupied thirty acres in the heart of the neighbourhood, rivalled in size only by Hay Mohammadi’s bidonville. The more infamous and shadowy manifestation of this security apparatus was the secret underground detention centre of Derb Moulay Cherif. Beginning in the 1970s, union and student activists alike were forcefully disappeared and sent to secret detention centres across the country where they were either killed or held and tortured for years. While some of these prisons were located in remote desert areas such as the underground Tazmamart prison,14 the Derb Moulay Cherif commissariat became one of the most infamous urban detention centres in the country. Built by the French in the early 1950s for rounding up anti-colonial fighters, the detention centre embodied a particularly perverse manifestation of the continuities linking post-colonial Morocco with the Protectorate era. Enlarged and equipped with underground cells, the commissariat was converted by the Moroccan regime into a chamber of terror for the forced disappearance and torture of political dissidents (Slyomovics 2012, p. 54). Militants were held mere feet away from residential quarters, while their jailers lived in a modernist tower block above ground (El Bouih 2008). Fatna El Bouih was twenty-four when she was forcibly disappeared and taken with several other female activists to Derb Moulay Cherif. Active in the student movement since her high school years, El Bouih was incarcerated due to her membership in the outlawed Marxist group ‘March 23’15 and was held for five years in various prisons across Morocco. Alongside Si’ Mohamed who was a member of the same leftist group, she is one of a number of well-known former detainees, having built her post-detention life around social justice causes. Her connection to Hay Mohammadi and Derb Moulay Cherif remains strong, and she continues to be an active member of several organizations fighting for the rehabilitation of the area and the transformation of the former detention centre into a memory museum (cf. Slyomovics 2008, 2012). I met Fatna El Bouih on several occasions during my time in Casablanca and spoke with her about what had contributed to the neighbourhood’s degradation and ill fame, which was attributed to a conscious state agenda of marginalization:

Genealogies of the Urban Margins

39

Do you know how many significant, muhimin (famous) people were born in Hay Mohammadi? Hundreds. Judges who grew up in the karyan (slum), boxing champions, the TAS football team, actors, journalists, activists, and of course the famous Nass El Ghiwane band.16 They [the State] did not like the spirit of these people rising up and criticizing power. Crushing bodies was not enough, they instituted hissar (siege), you understand? It was like they created an embargo on the hay (neighbourhood), marginalize it to punish the people.

Other former militants I met in Hay Mohammadi who spoke of the ‘ghettoization’ of the neighbourhood at the height of Hassan II’s era of repression echoed this view. While insisting that he was no longer interested in politics, Si’ Mohammad also associated the neighbourhood’s social degradation and ill fame with Morocco’s ‘Years of Lead’. ‘Those were dark days’, he said during a later conversation: It was very different afterwards. As if the spirit was strangled out of the people. And now, look at this place today, no one does anything, they have no ideals. Before (qabl) it was considered an honour to be able to say you come from Hay Mohammadi, now (al-yum) everyone thinks people here are thieves (chefara) who live like animals (hayawanat).

This period of intense state violence converged with several global events that further weakened state-provisioning for low-income communities and soon led to another wave of mass contestation (Cohen 2004, p. 61). The oil and financial crises of the 1970s and repeated droughts in the 1980s led once more to a rural exodus and demographic growth in all major urban areas (Catin, Cuenca and Kamal 2008). Precarious livelihoods materialized into increasingly derelict neighbourhoods, and, as a consequence, urban peripheries across Morocco began to look increasingly like Hay Mohammadi. Aesthetically, this was due to a combination of lax urban policy and straightforward, affordable design, which meant that Écochard’s 8 × 8 grid for mass housing began to spread with immense success throughout Morocco, facilitating the emergence of a uniform appearance for unplanned, low-income quarters (Rachik 2002, Chaouni 2011). The situation reached a turning point in 1981. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, the Moroccan government lifted food subsidies on all vital goods in May that year, causing the price of bread, a symbolic commodity not only in Morocco but across the region, to increase by 40 per cent.17 In response, the two main labour unions – the Moroccan Labour Union (UMT) and the Democratic Labour Confederation (CDT) – called for a nationwide strike on 20 June 1981. Casablanca’s margins were gripped by angry

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‘bread riots’, giving the state a justification for the deployment of armed forces (Clement 1992), who eventually opened fire on hundreds of protesters.18 In Hay Mohammadi, on different occasions locals would point out to me building facades still pockmarked with bullet holes and recounted memories of military tanks rolling down Ali Yaata Avenue. Activists and protesters disappeared once again into communal graves or secret detention centres. In the aftermath of this extreme violence, the state began to recognize the urgency for a new approach towards governing the urban margins (Rachik 2002). While it still operated within a logic of control and security, the state’s solution was primarily defined by an attempt to territorialize its power by making its presence administratively as well as monumentally visible on the margins (Rachik 1995). The first step, enacted a month after the 1981 riots, divided Casablanca into five territorial units subordinate to a newly instated administrative superstructure: the Wilaya (governorate) of Greater Casablanca.19 As the head of the new institution, the Wali, or governor, was now appointed by the king and responded to the Interior Ministry alone,20 exerting greater power than locally elected officials.21 While local power was now concentrated in the hands of the Wali, the state’s presence on the urban margins was embodied by new, monumental urban works. The king entrusted the latter aspect of this intervention to the French architect and urbanist Michel Pinceau. According to Raffaele Cattedra, Pinceau and his team were given the explicit mandate to ‘securitize the city’ by elaborating a new master plan outlining Casablanca’s development over the next twenty years (2001, pp. 130–1). Continuing the tradition of his predecessors, Pinceau’s plan updated the technocratic provisions of Écochard’s designs, which had been used unaltered since Morocco’s independence from France. Referred to by its French name, the new Schema Directeur de l’Amenagement du Territoire (SDAU) was defined by a Haussmannian preoccupation with control over mobility and governability of urban space (Cattedra 2001, p. 143). In 1984 the Agence Urbaine de Casablanca (Casablanca Urban Planning Agency) was created to implement the SDAU. Like the Wilaya, the Urban Planning Agency was put under the tutelage of the Interior Ministry and its director was given a status equivalent to that of the Wali.22 In this way, the Agence Urbaine became one of the chief tools for implementing the territorialization of the state’s power in Casablanca. Investments in planning and housing measures, however, were undertaken only as a way of disentangling the densely populated margins, while still keeping them at a remove from the city’s core (Ossmann 1994, p. 30; Bogaert 2011). For example, one of the main provisions of the new plan, the extension of the road network was touted as upgrading of the existing infrastructure and promised

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increased mobility. In reality it also decreased the possibility for spontaneous mobilization of protests: the new, wide avenues, carved through previously low-income quarters in places, facilitated visibility of crowds and enabled efficient policing. It is telling that the A3 highway linking Casablanca to the country’s capital, Rabat, already under development during the late colonial era, was completed only in 1985. Initially drafted by Écochard, the A3 now cuts Casablanca in two, separating the city’s growing periphery from its core with a six-lane-wide, 3-metre-deep trench. Projects like the highway were evidently not meant to address the root causes that contributed to the violent contestation movements of 1981. Instead, the intensification of structural adjustment reforms from 1983 onwards continued to weaken existing industrial infrastructure and eroded the already struggling educational and health sectors. Once a symbol for housing innovations and booming industry, Hay Mohammadi entered a period of prolonged decay, as factories closed or relocated to areas outside the expanding periphery of Casablanca, and housing shortages led to overcrowding and sanitation problems. If the state intended to crush the neighbourhood’s spirit, its agenda was also facilitated by the liberalization programme imposed by the IMF (cf. Caldeira 2000, Cohen and Jaidi 2006). It was not until the mid-1990s that growing internal pressures as well as international economic and political demands finally pushed Hassan II’s regime to acknowledge the existence of political prisoners and to set up a commission to investigate human rights abuses (Dennerlein 2012). This process culminated in 2004, after Hassan II’s death, when his successor, current King Mohammed VI, created the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC).23 The only truth and reconciliation commission in the Arab world to date, the ERC’s main mandate was to investigate the forced disappearances and arbitrary arrests that took place between 1956 and 1999. In its report released to the public in 2006, alongside acknowledging individual victims, the commission also established the existence of thirteen ‘wounded territories’ (territoires toucheés), which included Hay Mohammadi, and made recommendations for ‘community reparations’, recognizing the public dimension of human rights violations.24 Drawing on international recommendations, the ERC’s report acknowledged that the scarcity and struggle of the present were partially due to the enduring effects of targeted state violence, both structural and political. By officially recognizing Hay Mohammadi as a territory deeply affected by state violence, the commission cemented the already strong link identifying the material space of the neighbourhood with a social geography of repression, poverty and trauma that had shaped the experiences of Fatna El Bouih, Si’ Mohammad

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and that of many of my interlocutors in Hay Mohammadi. In the absence of concrete recommendations for addressing the after-effects of economic and structural violence, heritage and commemoration efforts have emerged as one of the few available channels for attending to the communal dimension of violations. But as these efforts become subsumed by emerging architectural preservation agendas, their unintended consequences range from depoliticizing the neighbourhood’s built and lived forms, to drastically shaping the discourses and platforms available to inhabitants for voicing their struggles for a dignified life.

Instrumental commemorations ‘You know, he’s right. Hay Mohammadi is more like an open-air prison’, Fuad told me after the lights came on. I met Fuad in early 2013 at a training session for volunteer guides organized by the local heritage-preservation association Casamémoire, ahead of an annual architectural heritage festival that took place every spring. As part of this training, we were watching a recent documentary about Hay Mohammadi, produced with the help of a grant from the ERC.25 Titled Ana al-hay, sept histoires et demi (‘I am the hood, seven and a half stories’, 2012), the film traced the neighbourhood’s infamous history through the interviews and testimonials given by seven welad al-hay, or children of the neighbourhood, with the ‘half ’ referring to the unfinished and open-ended nature of collective commemoration. Fatna El Bouih and Si’ Mohamed were prominently featured in the film, alongside other local personalities. Despite having spent most of his life in a different part of Casablanca, Fuad also considered himself a weld al-hay (sing.), a son of the neighbourhood, because his parents had lived there during the 1960s. ‘My father worked at the post office, you know which one?’, nodding proudly as I indicated that I was familiar with the building. Fuad’s opening comment referred to a statement made in the film by a local rapper, Barry. In the documentary, the rapper claimed that Hay Mohammadi was like a prison to its youth, since those growing up there were trapped in a vicious cycle of unemployment, petty crime and drug use, which also meant they physically seldom had the resources to exit the neighbourhood. But Fuad’s observation also seemed to work as a play on the oft-rehearsed line with which we were greeted at the heritage association: Casablanca, many of the members liked to say, was an ‘open-air museum’, littered with the glorious architectural and urban experiments of the Art Deco and Modernist movements. More than the sum of these two

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meanings, however, I found that Fuad’s formulation aptly captured the tense and complicated ways in which the neighbourhood’s history and spaces were in the process of being incorporated into embryonic architectural preservation efforts and memory-politics agendas that interpellated Hay Mohammadi and its inhabitants, with mixed effects. Overall, Morocco’s relationship to heritage, like that of many Middle Eastern countries, is a fraught one (cf. Exell and Rico 2016, de Cesari 2019). Constantly situated in relation to identity-making practices, architectural heritage-making and heritage-preservation in particular, have a charged history in the context of Morocco’s colonial encounter with the French. Anthropologist Abdelmajid Arrif refers to this situation as the ‘paradoxical construction of heritage facts’ whereby France took it upon itself to manage ‘the other’s history’ (la prise en charge de la mémoire de l’autre; 1996, p. 154). Rooted in the paternalist, Orientalist discourse of the time, French preoccupation with the ‘scrupulous respect for the manners, customs and religion of the natives’26 was at the core of official colonial policies for undertaking the preservation of Moroccan material culture. It is worth noting that the architectural heritage worthy of preservation to French eyes was predominantly embodied by the so-called Islamic city, an image that is a particularly French colonial invention (Abu-Lughod 1987, cf. Eickelman 1974). Based on studies of the imperial city of Fez c. 1928 and later abstracted to the level of the entire Arab world by means of a series of questionable chains of authority, which Abu-Lughod likened to the Islamic legal concept of isnad,27 the ‘traditional Islamic city’ came to be defined by a fixed selection of elements (a market, a hammam and a Friday mosque), ignoring the diversity of urban patterns and complex social organization that were present across Morocco’s urban centres (1987, p. 156). Careful historical work has demonstrated the instrumental role played by these French preservationist ideas and practices in the consolidation and spatialization of French power across North Africa (Hamadeh 1992, Celik 1997). Presented as a genuine concern with cultural stewardship, colonial preservation practices rested on the pervasive Orientalist idea that locals were not capable of appreciating the value of their own heritage (cf. Rico 2017). The policies that helped sediment this orthodoxy went hand in hand with the creation of ‘dual cities’. By promoting an ‘exotic, static, yet disorderly people in contrast to advanced and technological European society’ as embodied by the new European quarters (Wright 1991, p. 160), the French were able to justify both the Protectorate’s paternalist claims in Morocco and the assigning of limited rights and space to the local ‘other’ (cf. Mitchell 1988; AlSayyad 1992, p. 13).

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Such was the power of this canonized image of the ‘Islamic city’, however, that in a famous 1986 speech given to the Moroccan Architects’ Association, the late King Hassan II lamented what he saw as ‘[t]he classic form of the Moroccan Islamic city, the flower of our cultural greatness, in the process of disappearing into a nameless and indescribable magma’ (in Garret 2010). It is worth noting, however, that Casablanca was never considered to be among the list of Moroccan cities that embodied this ideal. While Fez, Meknes, Marrakech, Tetouan and even Essaouira can draw on their historical status as imperial cities to legitimize claims to ‘cultural greatness’, Casablanca has often been considered a ‘city without memory’ (Pieprzak 2010), a perpetual construction site (Ossman 1994), and more recently, a place ‘without a soul’ (sans âme) moved only by finance and industry (Cattedra 2001, p. 16). While scholars, administrators, activists and popular media have tended to read these epithets in overwhelmingly negative terms, there is a productive tension at the heart of the idea that Casablanca is an unfinished ‘ouvre’, in Henri Lefebvre’s sense, perpetually reinvented and constantly reassembled from the myriad spatial practices of different agents, inhabitants and formal institutions alike. Architectural heritage practices and preservation discourses in the twentieth century, however, have been slow to incorporate more radical political, experiential or ‘use-value’ conceptions into their frameworks (cf. de Cesari and Herzfeld 2015, Samuels and Rico 2015, Jones 2017). Not least, owing to its subject, architectural preservation practice has tended to be monumental, even museal in its approach (ICOFOM 2010). A focus on conserving buildings as emblematic objects of particular styles, movements and eras, rather than as markers of ongoing socio-historical and political events, also dominated the work of Casamémoire. While this work in its entirety is not my direct focus here, it does bear a sizeable influence on how the spatial histories and the material culture of the urban margins have come to be known and understood in contemporary Morocco. Despite occasional papers and articles in the local media calling for the rehabilitation of decaying buildings in the former colonial quarters of Casablanca,28 the first case of public mobilization for the preservation of a colonial-era building took place in the early 1990s when the Bessoneau building,29 popularly known as the Lincoln Hotel, was threatened with demolition.30 A second protest in 1995 against the demolition of a villa by the architect Marius Boyer led to the creation of Casamémoire.31 Founded by a small group of Moroccan and French architects practising in Casablanca, the association has been at the forefront of the struggle for petitioning the city’s administration to develop a framework for the preservation of colonial-era

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buildings, which the association considers to be unique examples of twentiethcentury architecture.32 Drawing on the landmark work of architectural historians Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb (1998, 2002), in its first years Casamémoire selectively focused on buildings in the former European and central quarters of Casablanca, neglecting at the time the plight of both the decaying old medina and more recently built heritage such as the housing estates in Hay Mohammadi (Garret 2010, p. 6). Expanding its reach in recent years, the association’s stated objective is the identification and documentation of all aesthetically and historically significant edifices, for their future protection by a yet to be written preservation law.33 As a nonprofit organization, the association survives with the help of foreign grants, and through its participation in regional networks supported by funding from institutions like the European Union.34 Its membership is open to the public, and I encountered not a few amateur historians and local architecture students and enthusiasts, like Fuad, who had joined in recent years. Besides its preservation and classification work, Casamémoire has built itself into a prominent cultural actor and broker in Casablanca, regularly organizing public lectures and free screenings. Its flagship event, however, and by far the most well attended, is the annual threeday heritage festival, for which Fuad was training. Since 2009, in the form of free, guided visits that take place over the course of one weekend in early April or May, the Journées du Patrimoine (Ar. Al-yawm al-turath) has become a citywide event, in which selected parts of Casablanca are temporarily transformed into street-level architectural museums – a not insignificant victory in a city dominated by car traffic and highly suspicious of gawping flâneurs.35 Made possible by a small army of dedicated volunteers who, like Fuad, showed up each year to inform, educate and delight, the festival also highlighted some of the concrete ways in which the history of the city’s margins is increasingly becoming packaged for a particular mode of consumption.36 For example, if one pays attention to the language that guides are instructed to use and to the textual materials that Casamémoire distributes to its audiences, an almost complete absence of the word ‘colonial’ becomes strikingly evident. Preferring the less politically charged ‘Art Deco’ and ‘Modernist architecture’– terms that are stylistic rather than political or historical – the association hopes to foster the gradual appropriation of this heritage by locals, as well as the city’s recognition and inclusion in the UNESCO list of world heritage sites (cf. Garret 2010; Kassou and Alluchon 2011). But appropriation seemed to carry different meanings for different stakeholders during the time I was in Casablanca, and many of those involved with Casamémoire and the heritage festival appeared to

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find some forms of appropriation more desirable than others. Nowhere was this made more apparent than in the manner in which Hay Mohammadi’s sites were curated and ‘exhibited’ for visitors. In the spring of 2013, and again in 2014, I joined Fuad and several other guides who had expressed a preference for leading visits in Hay Mohammadi. When the neighbourhood had first been included in the festival in 2011, it had attracted considerably fewer visitors compared to locations in downtown Casablanca. This was generally understood to be a consequence of the area’s reputation for insecurity. Citing lingering safety concerns, in subsequent years buses were hired to shuttle visitors between sites in Hay Mohammadi, in marked contrast to those in central Casablanca where visitors were expected to walk for tours that could last as long as two hours. It was in this manner that I was conveyed, alongside groups of about a dozen visitors, from the disused buildings of the Anciens Abattoirs to the core of Hay Mohammadi, where examples of Écochard’s housing grid were considered to be one of the tour’s highlights. Alighting by one particular building where the original structure from the 1950s could still be discerned among later expansions and additions, Fuad and the other guides would enact a carefully staged act. During his apprenticeship with more veteran volunteer guides, Fuad had been encouraged to create a ‘before and after’ performance for the visitors. With the aid of archival pictures that had been photocopied for this purpose, he would unfailingly exact a communal exclamation from each group as the visitors were confronted with the juxtaposition of past (in photocopy form, Figure 1.2) and present (in bricks and mortar, Figure 1.3). While most visitors found it exhilarating just to be in Hay Mohammadi, several took this performance as an opportunity to pass judgement on the causes of these intensive appropriations, decrying the ‘ignorance’ that had led to them. During one of the visits, Marion, a retired French school teacher, and Karim, a former engineer in the Moroccan national phosphate industry, unacquainted with each other before the tour, struck up a conversation mixing French and Darija, into which I was also pulled: Marion: What a pity that not even one building has been preserved in its original form. Such a loss. Karim: Oh yes (Ah oui)! It’s quite tragic, but what can you expect from the people living here? They can only think of their stomachs (Ar. kuracha), how could they appreciate the value of this architecture? Marion: Of course (bien sûr), one must also make do (se debrouiller) in places like this.

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Figure 1.2  Archival image used by guides depicting colonial-era social housing, 1952. Source: Photothèque Ecole Nationale d’Architecture, Rabat.

Figure 1.3  View of the same social housing unit, with ‘appropriations’ and adaptations, 2014. Photo by the author.

As she said this, Marion appeared to search my face for confirmation as the ethnographer on fieldwork, while Karim, seeming to disagree with the suggested prioritization of everyday survival over art, wandered off towards the buses that would deliver us to the next site.

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In fact, as the families originally (re)housed in the grid dwellings grew and socio-economic conditions for the lower classes did not improve in the years following independence, the grid began to develop vertically (cf. von Osten 2008). The open patios were gradually covered to allow for the building of further rooms and floors, each new level indexing a new generation in the history of the neighbourhood’s demographic expansion. Colourful window shutters and networks of clotheslines now animate the once sparse, blank white walls of Écochard’s geometric designs. Interiors have been equally transformed in response to personal and economic necessity (see Chapter 4). Satellite dishes mushroomed on both the roofs and the buildings’ facades, as the grid developed into a palimpsest and material archive of the community’s growth. But the recovery of Écochard’s legacy and designs during the late-twentieth century as part of emerging transnational heritage-making discourses and practices, such as those enacted by Casamémoire, has moved away from an appreciation of such contingencies and has so far evaded questions about the structural conditions that have led to the complete appropriation and transformation of these spaces. The architectural sketches and models of this housing project have been and continue to be powerfully deployed and celebrated by various stakeholders as emblems of Casablanca’s synonymous relation to modernity, as the discussion in the following chapter will show. When juxtaposed with images of architectural decay, messy appropriation or urban informality, they unvaryingly and sometimes unwittingly assigned the blame for the city’s fall from Modernist grace to the neighbourhood’s presumably ignorant inhabitants. The latter, however, were only too aware of the many complicated and overlapping histories, poetics and ongoing pragmatics that have shaped local spatial developments and their subsequent appropriation. It was in the spaces and moments where room was made for such messy and unfinished histories that a fuller appreciation of Hay Mohammadi’s history and relevance began to emerge, as subsequent chapters will show.

Conclusion By retracing some of the key processes and actors that have played a defining role in Hay Mohammadi’s historical production, it becomes evident that a privileged and foundational relationship between the space of the urban margins, the struggles of its inhabitants and the security concerns of various regimes exists. Defined by their concern with the policing and control of unruly spaces and

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potentially volatile populations, state approaches towards the urban margins, be they colonial or nationalist, have led in the present to the consolidation of official and popular discourses that portray these areas as a potentially threatening, underdeveloped internal ‘other’. Thus, recent celebrations of the neighbourhood have tended to focus on its role as the cradle of a proto-proletariat, a laboratory for Moroccan urban modernity (architectural, economic, industrial and social), and to a lesser, and more selective degree, commemorated as a hotbed of political contestation and countercultural movements. Contemporary struggles and their materialization into decaying, heavily appropriated spaces are not only subject to implicit and explicit vilification, but also risk being excised from the wider historical and political structures that have made their existence a necessity. As discourses that shape perceptions and actions towards Hay Mohammadi’s spaces and the communities that inhabit them are increasingly becoming articulated through heritage and commemorative practices and concerns, attention to the social and economic conditions shaping both history and everyday life has been scarce. The growing role that these actors and their initiatives play in how marginalized neighbourhoods are dealt with in both official and popular discourse is an ambivalent one. As David Lowenthal (1998) cautions, one should not confound history with heritage. In their attempt to appeal to the largest number of stakeholders, heritage-making processes are inadvertently bound to engage in ‘flexible emending’ with the goal of constructing a coherent narrative (Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010, p. 33). This emending can be particularly pronounced in the case of ‘inconvenient heritage’, at sites where certain aspects that are considered ‘unpalatable, incongruent or politically inexpedient’ become either bracketed or erased from the representation of that heritage (p. 34). Similarly, through the particular register chosen for the performance of Hay Mohammadi’s architectural heritage, ‘inexpedient’ aspects of that heritage that would explain its transformation and palimpsestic appropriation at the hands of the inhabitants have so far been left out. The consequences of this type of emending remain relevant, however, as they contribute to the sidestepping of more complex readings and representations of the past. In the aftermath of such heritage and commemoration practices, memory and history of place risk becoming ‘dis-embedded’ from their immediate social and political context, codified, instead, by the technical, architectural terms volunteer guides repeat year after year (cf. Edensor 2005, p. 18), and a preference for the shock effect of the ‘before and after’ performance. The manner in which such visits were organized also suggested that in order to appreciate

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the significance of this built heritage, the buildings needed to be approached as separate from their human inhabitants. But it is only when we begin to explore and document the deeply affective, political and contingent meaning of such richly textured spaces and the everyday practices they continue to support, that we can start to trace an experience-near account of the role that the margins play in urban Morocco.

2

Iconographies of the margins Plans, maps and affective spaces

On my first visit to Casablanca in 2010 I had brought along a printed copy of an internet map. As I sat in the backseat of a red petit taxi, I used the map to guide my driver, who had trouble finding the address I had given him. Navigating the city in this way, we finally arrived at my destination. As I thanked him and counted the fare, the driver pointed to the sheet of paper in my hand and asked if he might keep it. ‘Of course!’ I said, and handed him the printout. Smoothing his thick, greying moustache, he thanked me and said he had never seen a map of the entire city in his thirty years as a taxi driver. When I returned to Casablanca for fieldwork in January 2013, everyone seemed to own a smartphone that featured navigational applications, while the growing availability of high-speed internet and the familiarity with online maps were becoming ubiquitous in many mid-sized urban areas too. Still, the majority of my friends and interlocutors continued to use familiar landmarks to make their way around the city. Street maps seemed to be mostly aimed at tourists, and – like the recently opened tramway network, which also featured displays of the areas it covered – were meant to signal Casablanca’s opening towards global and regional circuits (see Chapter 5). Obtaining an official, topographically accurate map of the city, however, remained a difficult task. Considering that cartography has long been part of statist projects of surveillance and control, this was not very surprising (Foucault 1975, Scott 1998, Mitchell 2002). In Morocco, where the Ministry of Interior supervises the activities of urban planning agencies, the most recent cadastral maps of any given city continue to be a fiercely guarded state matter. Conversely, colonial-era maps and historical planning charts of the city’s peripheral neighbourhoods can be found in abundant supply, both online and via the heritage-making practices set in motion by actors like Casamémoire. Images of Hay Mohammadi’s early street planning proliferate within these spaces, circulated by amateur historians and heritage enthusiasts

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alike. While some appear to appreciate them for their technical and formal attributes, the symbolic dimensions and excessive visuality they also encode cannot be dismissed. In recent decades, these emblematic images and their iconographic power have come to play an outsized yet underexplored role in the (re)production of foundational narratives about Casablanca’s margins and the spatial logics that continue to shape popular and state discourses on these areas. In the previous chapter I reconstructed Hay Mohammadi’s marginalization by attending to the political and economic forces that led to its physical degradation and ill fame, while at the same time documenting the growing impact of commemorative and heritage actions on the neighbourhood’s image. This chapter picks up this thread by looking at how maps have played a role in the (re)production of a particular iconographic representation of Hay Mohammadi’s architectural, social and historical space. Building on the discussion started in Chapter 1, I argue that colonial logics and the tools they produced as part of new Modernist, technocratic modes of governance and planning have resulted in highly specific representations of Moroccan urban space (Lefebvre 1991), dominated by a Cartesian approach towards both people and territory. Specifically, I consider the ways in which maps and plans of the neighbourhood have become reified through various discursive and material practices, and in turn led to important erasures of otherwise ‘thick places’ (Duff 2010). As such, the ethnographic and visual material that follows attends to how dominant cartographic representations of Hay Mohammadi’s space have come into being, and follows some of the uses and trajectories they have opened up for other mappings of the neighbourhood (cf. Appadurai 1986). The questions guiding this discussion are the following: Who has the authority to represent space and create maps of the neighbourhood? How are maps of Hay Mohammadi used and by whom? And if space and its representation are symptomatic of the power relationships governing that space, what can be uncovered by considering how the space of a marginalized neighbourhood has been and continues to be mapped? While most conventional cartographic representations claim to be rational and efficient approximations of space,1 the appeal (and conceit) behind visual objects like colonial-era maps is that they capture aesthetic and cultural dimensions and, hence, are less navigational instruments than records of historical relations to place. However, recent efforts propelled by heritage and commemoration agendas reveal the growing instrumentality of such postrepresentational artefacts in contemporary Morocco and their use as tools of communication, persuasion and authority. I illustrate this by starting with a brief

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look at how a colonial-era planning instrument has resulted in the production of a particular type of ‘gaze’ vis-à-vis Casablanca’s margins. I then explore how this ‘way of seeing’ (like a grid) has shaped not only bureaucratic rationales, but also the results of commemorative projects enacted as part of reparation and reconciliation efforts. In their turn, these inspired the creation of a gameboard which provoked ambivalent responses to (af)fixing memory to space. I add to this genealogy of mapping acts, and in the final section I discuss an ‘affective’ mapping exercise I undertook with neighbourhood inhabitants. In tracing the ramifications and entanglements of several attempts to map not only the physical but also the social, historical and memory spaces of the neighbourhood, this chapter also brings together the main protagonists of this book. As such, it offers a first glimpse into some of the ways in which state actors, local organizations and ordinary inhabitants are brought together as part of competing and occasionally conflicting attempts to represent and reshape both the past and present reality of Casablanca’s margins.

Seeing like a grid Historically, scholars have looked at maps as reflecting a desire for staging, if not always achieving, a sense of completeness and control (Scott 1998). Cartesian cartography in particular has been considered to afford a viewpoint of what Michel de Certeau called the ‘voyeur-god’ (1984, p. 93), and what others have identified as the surveillance-driven, panoptic logic of modern forms of governmentality (Foucault 2007). Through its ‘ontological performativity’ (Ferdinand 2017), cartographic work renders the world as amenable to ordering and facilitates particular logics about governing social reality through spatial design (Turnbull 2000, Mitchell 2002). As the previous chapter documented, in Morocco, colonial approaches towards urban spaces, and particularly Casablanca’s margins, not only constituted an important step in the consolidation of spatial logics behind state action, but also overdetermined the shapes and contours of the city’s social geographies for decades to come. The production of scientific maps and charts have been instrumental in these developments. If a map of Casablanca from the turn of the twentieth century depicts only the medina qadima (old town core) surrounded by squares labelled jardins (most likely vegetable gardens; Weisgerber 1904), within ten years of that date we can find a series of thematic maps created by the new colonial Service de l’Urbanisme, each addressing an aspect of the rapidly

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growing city: types of industry, population growth, bidonville distribution, envisioned zoning and the availability of schools. Such cartographic charts were part of a systematic, scientific approach of piloting new technocratic forms of governance (Rabinow 1989, Wright 1991). This was not facilitated only by newly available tools or the rationalization of state interventions into specific ways of governing colonial territories. To paraphrase Scott’s classical study of the Modernist state (1998), state actors were also socialized into new ways of seeing, in this case like a Cartesian map, treating manifestations that ran counter to this logic of legibility and ordering as stubborn indicators of backwardness, resistance and social decay. Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, urban planning, census taking, measuring and counting were increasingly employed in the process of rendering purportedly ‘volatile’ lowerclass inhabitants into a population amenable to being managed and governed (cf. Écochard 1950). Used in combination with ethnographic surveys undertaken by colonial sociologists, they allowed Écochard to design his famous 8 × 8 metre trame (grid; Chapter 1), one of the purest forms of Cartesian city planning known at the time (cf. Montagne 1951, Berque 1959, Adam 1968, Avermaete 2010a). Developed during a period of growing anti-colonial unrest, the grid and its power to order and control both space and people cannot be divorced from its political context. Architectural historians contend that although Écochard never mentioned the political situation in his writings he could not have been oblivious to it (Avermaete 2010b). Others have argued that he, rather, saw his role as that of a humanist technocrat, responsible for pushing the colonial administration to act on the issue of housing for the local population (Chaouni 2011, pp. 62–3). It is evident, however that such humanist ideals existed alongside the depoliticization of urban planning practices, as Écochard and his team never questioned colonialism as such, only its neglect of ‘indigenous populations’. Écochard would later export the conceptual ideas and formal design of the grid as part of commissions for developing refugee housing in Karachi (1953) and a master plan for a ‘modernized’ Dakar (1963) (Avermaete 2010b). As these later uses demonstrate, the ability of Écochard’s design to articulate solutions to precarious communities – such as slum dwellers or refugees – was a central feature of its popularity. And, indeed, the grid proved to be a very successful framework for structuring sudden urban growth as attested by its spread across and beyond Morocco, and the continued interest it elicits from architectural students and scholars the world over (Cohen and Eleb 2002, von Osten 2008, Chaouni 2011,

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Avermaete and Casciato 2014). During my time in Casablanca, I attended numerous events where I was struck by the grid’s centrality to the iconography produced by heritage activists and their discourses about the city’s past. Be it during public lectures, visits to artist installations or heritage training events like those detailed in Chapter 1, the sketch of the grid was always present. Seductive in its geometrical simplicity and projected numerous times as part of slideshow presentations, the two-dimensional structure emerged as a foundational moment in the narrative constructed around and about Casablanca’s modernity, as well as a key aspect of efforts meant to secure the city’s membership in the Modernist canon. Urban planners and local administrators, for their part, saw the grid as a part of a rationalist tradition that they hoped to honour as they redeveloped parts of Hay Mohammadi (Chapter 5). Celebrated in isolation from both the historical conditions that made its design possible and the complex social reality it gave birth to (see Chapter 1), the abstract reality traced by Écochard’s design has become powerfully reified. In his landmark work, The Production of Space, Lefebvre objected to this type of reification, emphasizing, instead, that spaces are constituted by a triad of social, material and discursive forces: ‘Each time one of these [three] categories is employed independently of the others, hence reductively, it serves some homogenizing strategy’ (1991, p. 369). This homogenization can be seen in both the grid’s continued centrality as part of architectural preservation efforts and the newer cartographically inspired iterations it has bred as part of heritage and commemoration activities targeting Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants and their everyday spaces.

Mapping memories of violence In its role as the most active and visible community organization in Hay Mohammadi at the time, in 2011 the jamʿiyya was invited by Casamémoire to participate in a call for projects launched by the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC, Fr. Instance Équité et Réconciliation), with support from the Moroccan National Human Rights Council (CNDH) and funded by the European Union. As Chapter 1 detailed, following the release of its report in 2006, the commission also recommended instituting a programme for enacting community reparations (jabar al-darar al-jamaʿi). By 2010, the ERC had recognized the claims of 9,779 victims of Hassan II’s repressive regime, disbursed financial restitutions totalling $70 million to 90 per cent

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of them, and led to a growing literature on these processes (Slyomovics 2005a, 2005b, 2009; Dennerlein 2012, Menin 2014, Nikro and Hegasy 2017). Community reparations, on the other hand, have received less attention, mostly because their exact form seemed to be open to interpretation and in most cases entailed longer time scales. Community reparations can take different forms,2 but the ERC’s recommendations primarily defined this as ‘funding for projects proposed by communities that were previously deliberately excluded from development programs for political reasons’.3 Being the only urban territoire touché (wounded territory) out of the total of thirteen recognized by the commission’s report, Hay Mohammadi has both attracted a disproportionate amount of attention from organizations seeking to participate in this rehabilitation process and led to an approach that has become focused on cultural productions and the preservation of memory as a form of heritage (see Chapter 1, cf. Menin 2014, 2019). Popularized in part by the public impact of prison memoirs and testimonies published by political detainees like Fatna El Bouih during the late 1990s, this has led to a privileging of particular approaches towards enacting redress. The project submitted by Casamémoire and the jamʿiyya was titled Traces d’espaces, histoire, mémoire et patrimoines de Hay Mohammadi.4 The funding that was eventually awarded was meant to cover the publication of a monograph blending oral and social history, the production of the documentary mentioned in Chapter 1, and a commemorative map. I first encountered the commemorative map at Casamémoire’s offices, where it was handed to me alongside other information about their activities during a visit early on in my fieldwork. The staff member showing me around reached for a dozen more maps and handed them to me saying I might pass them on to people I knew or would meet in the neighbourhood. Behind her, on a bookshelf stretching from floor to ceiling, tall stacks of commemorative maps still sealed in plastic foil occupied several shelves. Conceived as a foldable map, on its front side a topographic plan points to the location of a ‘lieu de mémoire’ or ‘memory site’, albeit in a somewhat inaccurate rendering of the neighbourhood’s layout. Abdallah, one of the jamʿiyya’s younger members at the time, was tasked with the graphic design. ‘They didn’t give me a proper map to work from, so I had to approximate’, he defensively told me when I asked him about the inaccuracies. Working together with Professor Najib Taki, another self-described ‘proud son of Hay Mohammadi’ (see Chapter 1) and a history professor at the Hassan II University in Casablanca, Abdallah assembled the map between late 2011 and the spring of 2012.

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Folded, the map is approximately pocket-sized, featuring on the cover leaf a picture of the housing block that still towers over the now closed Derb Moulay Cherif detention centre. In a box below the title page, a paragraph summarizes in Arabic and in French the context behind the map’s creation, crediting Casamémoire for its production. The neighbourhood association features only through its logo at the bottom of the cover page. Unfolded, the map measures 15 × 30 inches, is printed on glossy paper and lists the name of each lieu alongside a grid of forty photos, in both French and Arabic. The photos differ widely in quality. Although still standing today, some landmarks are depicted by archival, black-and-white photos dating from the 1940s and 1950s. In the absence of archival photos or when the existing photos were of poor quality, Abdallah took many of the more recent images himself. On the cartographic side, the location of each ‘memory site’ in the neighbourhood is shaded in red, with only a few road names indicated. Numbers, sometimes larger than the landmark they index, can be used to refer to a duplication of the list containing the names of each site. Two of the sites overlap, while the omission of certain roads frustrates legibility and adds to the feeling that the map’s main intended purpose was not to facilitate navigation to these places (Figure 2.1a and b).5 As the two people who spent most time on the production of the map, Abdallah and Najib Taki reconstructed for me the process and ethos behind its creation, but I also spoke to some of the association’s other members who had been involved in various aspects of the map’s making. Benefitting from the support and guidance of local well-known former detainees, according to its members, the jamʿiyya became the main actor in the process of collecting personal narratives from inhabitants and eventually assembling the commemorative map. The process of collecting oral histories took place in 2011 and was organized in the form of cafés mémoire (memory cafes). One of the jamʿiyya’s members recounted how a dozen people with ‘important memories’ were brought together during several sessions in which they could share memories of the past. Mostly men, but also a few women from the neighbourhood, took part in the cafés held at the jamʿiyya’s locale. Fragments of their recollections also formed the basis of the small booklet titled Mémoire et Dignité meant to accompany the commemorative map. Abdallah recounted that Professor Taki and younger members of the jamʿiyya occasionally visited inhabitants in their homes, especially those who were too old or ill to venture into the neighbourhood. During these visits they collected photos and memorabilia for the purpose of scanning them and

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Figure 2.1a and b  Commemorative map unfolded, front and reverse.

including them in the booklet. I was curious to learn whether or not the number of memory sites had a particular meaning.6 During an afternoonlong interview, Najib Taki explained the process involved in selecting the lieux de mémoire.

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Oh, we had a very long list at first, much more than forty. People proposed all sorts of places. But we had to focus on the ones that were historically significant. Of course, we also included the pharmacy and the communal fountain. But places like the Mohammad V Mosque, the detention centre, and then of course, the communal grave for the ’81 victims, these were the significant ones. At the same time, speaking with people from Casamémoire, we decided we would follow three axes: colonial resistance, Derb Moulay Cherif, and urbanism. Which is why we also included the Nid d’Abeille and Semiramis [colonial-era housing blocks].

Taki had added his own choices to this list and curated the suggestions that had been made by people in the cafés memoire, while Abdallah tried to keep in everyone’s mind the constraints of the final printing layout. In the description found on the map’s title fold, production credit is attributed to Casamémoire, with an acknowledgement of the collaborative selection of lieux (sites) which was determined by their ‘historical, social, architectural, heritage and sometimes simply sentimental value’.7 In its final form, however, the map and the featured landmarks were clearly shaped by both logistical practicalities and Taki’s and Casamémoire’s curatorial vision (also see Taki 2012). When Pierre Nora developed the concept of lieux de mémoire, it was in reaction to what he saw as the demise of French national memory. In his definition, lieux de mémoire are meaningful entities of a real or imagined kind, which have become a symbolic element of a given community as a result of human will or the effect of time (Nora 1989, cf. Celik 2002, Halbwachs 1992). The heritage places included on the commemorative map can also be described as falling within these two categories. But while some are the product of both human agency and the passage of time, the curatorial process clearly reveals that the work enacted by the mapmakers’ particular selections sought to reinforce and in some cases create specific memory sites that fit their three chosen axes. Indeed, as a commemorative object, the map appears as a slightly incongruous assemblage of eras and places. It is not unusual within the framework of communal reparations for the visual language of human rights violations to take precedence over the more mundane representations of material deprivation and the much-harder-to-depict forms of structural violence (Farmer 2004). However, the landmarks and histories of the ‘Years of Lead’-era feature less prominently on the map, with considerably more space given over to the (important) markers of the independence struggle and the ‘emblematic housing and urbanist projects’ of the colonial era. Another puzzling aspect of the commemorative map was its relatively limited circulation and popularization both within the community it

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was ostensibly meant for and at a more regional scale. Throughout my sixteen months of fieldwork in Hay Mohammadi, many of the inhabitants I came to know and speak with (outside the jamʿiyya’s networks) had not encountered or heard about the commemorative map. In a telling episode, when I brought the jamʿiyya the stack of maps Casamémoire had given me, the staff were amused. Opening a storage closet, one of the project coordinators pointed to their own piles of folded maps and said: ‘Why didn’t you ask me? I could have given you some as well.’ Seeming to anticipate my question about their (non)distribution, the director stepped in and said: ‘We should leave some of them out by the entrance for visitors to pick up.’ He then instructed some of the volunteers to pin a map to the information board. Who had the map been made for and what sort of interactions had it fostered or foreclosed barely a year after its launch? Looked at through the perspective of the broader sociocultural field (cf. Bourdieu 1983) that both the map and those involved in its making were part of, these questions became easier to answer than if one were to focus on conventional notions of historical accountability and restorative justice alone (Popovski 2000, Roche 2002). From the accounts of those involved in the map’s making, the collaboration between their organizations stands out as a turning point in the emergence of a local microcosm of cultural and social development initiatives for and about historical margins like Hay Mohammadi. Although the lion’s share of this research process seemed to have been carried out by Taki and the jamʿiyya, one of Casamémoire’s project leaders claimed that the map had, in fact, been ‘the brainchild’ of one of their senior members, a French-trained Moroccan architect.8 This was not surprising seeing that by 2011, Casamémoire had become an established and respected organization in Casablanca, whose members were either French experts in heritage and cultural management or part of the local Moroccan elite, both fluent in the language of international funding applications and human rights discourse (see Chapter 1). As such, they possessed the social and cultural capital necessary for attracting and securing international and local funding and support for these kinds of projects. Conversely, they lacked the local contacts that Taki, but especially the jamʿiyya, could access and mobilize. According to the latter’s acting president at the time, the partnership became an important stepping stone for the association: That was the first big project we were part of, the first European-Union-funded project, and it was a great learning experience for us. It also helped us become more visible in the [national] NGO world, and, for a small neighbourhood association from Hay Mohammadi, that was a really important step.

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In private conversations, some of the jamʿiyya staff members expressed mild discontent with the distribution of responsibility during the project, but they too believed that the impact on their professional training and the association as a whole was a positive one. Having started as a small community-based organization that focused on tutoring and after-school programmes (see Chapter 3), the professionalization opportunities that this collaboration afforded them constituted invaluable training in project funding cycles and the wider performative aspects involved in carrying out such public work. The latter is no more trivial than the former. In her book, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005a), Susan Slyomovics notes how beginning in the 1990s, former detainees and human rights activists began to hold vigils, public testimonies, poetry readings and mock trials as a way to open up a public space for the discussion of human rights abuses. While these performances were instrumental in the process that culminated with the ERC’s creation, they have also allowed the monarchy to place the focus on rewriting and memorializing the post-colonial period in a way that has led to a prioritization of form over content (Dennerlein 2012, Hegasy 2017). Thus, with an almost ritualistic eye for detail and documentation, a performative body of evidence had been produced about the Traces d’espaces activities: at the jamʿiyya I was given access to folders containing photographs of the cafés mémoire and minutes of curatorial meetings, clippings of press conferences where the commemorative map had been presented to the press and invoices for the coffee-break catering. While significantly fewer efforts had been invested in distributing the object of memorialization to neighbourhood inhabitants, several members of the jamʿiyya who worked on the project at the time remembered it as their first and only introduction to the violent events of the post-colonial era, given that their own parents had remained silent on the topic. Considering one of the project’s aims had been to give more visibility to the social history of the neighbourhood, it was evident that in the process of producing the map an important transfer of knowledge about the past had taken place, albeit among a small group of inhabitants. Gradually, I made a habit of carrying and showing the map to various interlocutors I met throughout my fieldwork, sometimes using it as a conversation starter to introduce, however obliquely, my research. On these occasions, what drew inhabitants most immediately to the map were the mundane, everyday spaces of the neighbourhood, places they knew from their parents and grandparents. Markers of communal life, like the public fountain, a former flour mill or the oldest pharmacy in the area, were more keenly appraised than

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landmarks straightforwardly laden with political or architectural symbolism. Some people, although having lived their whole life in the neighbourhood, were unfamiliar with many of these latter kinds of landmarks, especially if they were located outside their own sub-division. At the same time, those same people were aware and genuinely proud of the neighbourhood’s identity as home to important historical events and struggles, and would muse as they regarded the map: ‘al hay muhim bezzaf’ (the neighbourhood is very significant). But if the mundane concerns of the present could be related to the material conditions of the past, the way in which the political realities, struggles and traumas of those eras were represented by the commemorative map seemed to prevent them from being viewed as part of the same contingent sequence of events that also produced the present. The closing of the infamous detention centre and the possibility of producing the map appeared to foreclose potential discussions about continued practices of police corruption, limits on freedom of expression or arbitrary arrests (see Chapter 3), and the disappearances of those involved in national protests since the Arab Spring (cf. Bogaert 2011). This was reinforced by the fact that initial proposals for turning the Derb Moulay Cherif detention centre into a memorial museum have been indefinitely stalled by the Moroccan authorities (Slyomovics 2012). Moreover, the relatively swift and uncomplicated making of the map inscribed the individual as well as collective experience of state violence within a clear template for narratives about that experience, leaving little room for ambiguities and lacunae, as the next section discusses. The editorial choices exhibited by the map and their (however limited) proliferation and circulation signalled towards the creation of an emergent hegemonic account of Hay Mohammadi’s collective memory.

Gameboard tensions I could not believe my luck when I met Meryem, a graphic designer in her late twenties with a project to create a children’s game based on the commemorative map. When she walked into the main office at the jamʿiyya in the early summer of 2013, Meryem planned to discuss a collaboration for the production of the said gameboard. We exchanged contact information and planned to meet later at a café of her choice. I learned that Meryem was hoping to complete a Master’s degree in communication and design within the year and the gameboard would be her graduation project. The idea had grown out of an interactive website she had submitted in response to an open competition launched by Casamémoire in

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2011 as part of that year’s Journées de Patrimoine festival. When the proposal was chosen as the winning entry, Meryem decided to improve it and began collecting more information about each historical site. With time, I realized that not only was our meeting not a surprising coincidence, but that it was also inscribed in and emerged from the same network of actors and initiatives that spun a thick web of heritage and cultural activities around the neighbourhood. Meeting Meryem was like stumbling across an important knot in the entangled threads of relationships that governed the most visible ways in which representations of neighbourhood space, in a Lefebvrian sense (1991), were being produced for both outsiders and inhabitants. In fact, Meryem was familiar with many of the central figures in this cultural and social development landscape: she had interviewed Najib Taki several times, and had also spoken to Si’ Mohamed (Chapter 1). After winning the Casamémoire competition and participating in their guided tours, she had also tried to use their documentation centre, but had seemed to run into some friction with the staff there. By 2013, when I met her, she was hoping that the gameboard could act as both her capstone project and a launching pad for a lucrative commercial venture in game design. It is likely that the monetization potential behind her project became the chief reason why both Casamémoire and, later, the jamʿiyya would withdraw their support, leaving unanswered what to many were uncomfortable questions about whether reparations to the community should also include things like exclusive rights over the commercialization of cultural activities. At the time, though, the association welcomed Meryem’s project and allowed her to test the game with children who attended the jamʿiyya’s afternoon activities. On the agreed-upon date, Meryem brought a ‘beta’ version of the game printed on a 15 × 15-inch card. A grid of fifty-five squares, including the start and finish boxes, the game featured the forty landmarks from the commemorative map – now represented with soft cartoonish edges – plus additional ‘trap’ squares drawn as skulls, and ‘booster’ squares represented by means of transport like the recently introduced tramway (see Chapter 5), a bus or a red petit taxi. As the children made astonished sounds and jostled to get a better look at the colourful board, Meryem explained the relatively straightforward rules. Based on the principles of the ubiquitous Snakes and Ladders,9 the Hay Mohammadi game allowed for five players, who had to move their pawns along the numbered squares of the grid according to the number they rolled with the dice. Their advance would be helped by a ‘booster’ square or hindered by a ‘trap’ square. The rest of the squares were arranged in no particular historical or thematic order.

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The game ended when one of the players reached the final square. The children visibly enjoyed the game, and Meryem asked them how she might improve it. She proposed that the game might be played until a second or a third place was decided, but the children thought that was unnecessary. After thanking the jamʿiyya and the children, Meryem said she was content with how the test had gone, and was thinking of organizing a public ‘play event’ to showcase the game to the community. As months went by with no news, one of the jamʿiyya members thought Meryem might have abandoned the idea of a public showcase. During one of our meetings, Meryem had mentioned that once she began researching Hay Mohammadi’s history and heritage, she became genuinely interested in the ludic potential for engaging with what she called ‘a difficult past’. At the same time, she was also concerned that a gameboard using landmarks associated with state violence might be controversial. Several times she expressed unease at delving into these events, and confessed that, although the ERC had made it possible to discuss this history, she was unsure her university evaluators would feel the same.10 Eventually, later that year, Meryem called and said she had been trying to get a sponsor for the game, but had finally decided to use her own savings and had settled on a date for staging the public play event. Meryem called the event Hay Mohammadi, Une histoire en jeu, drawing on the double meaning of the French to dub the game ‘a playful history’ or ‘a history at stake’. The showcase would take place at the Dar Shabab (youth centre) in Hay Mohammadi. The location was symbolic, as one of the landmarks represented on both the commemorative map and the gameboard, and considered by many residents to be a reminder of the fervent political and cultural activism of the 1960s. By contrast, in 2013 the Dar Shabab was just another local youth centre that lacked funding and human resources.11 Meryem had managed to secure the jamʿiyya’s logistical support for the event, and, on the day of the event, an hour before the first guests were expected, I headed to the venue accompanied by the twenty neighbourhood children who were supposed to test-play the game, this time with an audience. At the venue, audio-visual equipment had been installed and Meryem was busy arranging chairs in a semicircle around the gameboard. The latter had been printed in bright colours on a large plastic mat measuring 2 × 2 metres (Figure 2.2). A banner bearing the name of the event was hung across one of the walls (Figure 2.3), and tables were being set up at the back of the room for a small tea and cake buffet. I tried to reassure Meryem, who was visibly anxious, that things would go well. The children diligently took their seats on the right-hand side of

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Figure 2.2  Hay Mohammadi gameboard laid out before the event. Picture by the author.

Figure 2.3  Event banner reads: ‘Hay Mohammadi: A Playful History. Play and discover Hay Mohammadi’. Picture by the author.

the semicircle, and soon more guests began to arrive. The list of people Meryem had invited included the former militants and detainees she had interviewed for her Master’s project, such as Fatna El Bouih, but also Najib Taki and members of Casamémoire. The jamʿiyya had also asked all their members and employees

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to attend, a request that was met with reluctance by some, as the event fell on a holiday right after the Eid al Adha (feast of the sacrifice). Meryem had also invited a crew from the public television channel 2M, who filmed part of the event and interviewed Meryem and several participants. It was evident that Meryem had invested an enormous amount of work and resources in organizing the day. Opening the occasion was a violin recital by an older resident. This was followed by the reading of a poem dedicated to the local martyrs12 and accompanied by an oud player. After this prelude, Meryem nervously took the microphone and introduced herself and the game as both concept and object, welcomed everyone and then handed the proceedings over to the moderator. A group of five girls were called over from the audience. As the children began to play, the moderator commented on their actions to the audience, and each time they would land on a landmark he would encourage the elders in the audience to help the children with information about the place. The game moved at a fast pace, and soon another group of five children went up to play. The children enjoyed the novelty of pretending to be life-sized pawns, hopping in stockinged feet on the colourful surface of the gameboard. They delighted in rolling the giant dice, and shrieked with laughter when the foamy cubes dropped on their friends’ heads. Towards the end of the second round of play, the comments of the neighbourhood veterans began to lengthen and as Meryem stepped in to respond to them it became clear that we had moved into the ‘Question and Answer’ section. The kids took their seats and distracted themselves by using an A4-sized version of the game. Covering the names of places drawn in each box, they tested each other in the knowledge of what each cartoon version of a landmark represented. The discussion between the elders and Meryem had everyone respectfully listening, although some of the jamʿiyya staff had stepped outside, and some of the teenaged youth were milling about at the back. The main point of contention seemed to be over some of the details describing the historical significance of several landmarks. Meryem had not had the time to print information cards for each landmark as she had intended, so she was using several sheets of paper from which she read. Taki took the microphone and together with one of the former detainees present, stressed, among other things, the importance of remembering the martyrs of the independence struggle as well as the survivors of the ‘Years of Lead’. Their intervention was impassioned, if meandering, blending information about the significance of the youth centre with mentions of social gatherings at Cinema Saada.13 Others in the audience were nodding and it seemed that several people were keen on joining the conversation. Before they could participate,

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though, the moderator wrapped up the conversation and invited everyone to enjoy the tea and cake buffet. The children were getting restless and the jamʿiyya staff were also eager to go home. Meryem herself looked drained, and asked me repeatedly if I thought the event had gone well. I said I thought it had, and agreed to send her the pictures I had taken. Meryem later told me she had been upset by the ambivalent feedback and criticism she received from those present. In her view, she had worked with information they had given her, and had consulted repeatedly with many of the veterans who criticized her execution of the idea. ‘I just don’t understand. If they thought the information was not accurate or good why didn’t they tell me before, when I interviewed them?’ she pleaded with me. To understand the tension that the gameboard had generated, I found it useful to view it through James Corner’s work for whom a gameboard can function as a map ‘for playing out potential futures’ (1999, p. 243). Meryem’s game seemed to have flipped the timeline, allowing, instead, for messy alternative understandings of the past to be brought to light. But if in Corner’s view the potential of the gameboard as map lies in its ability to provide an ‘open-ended generative structure’ which can constantly evolve, the Hay Mohammadi game seemed to have been construed as a closed narrative loop. Meryem herself saw the game as a pedagogical tool for passing on to younger generations a certified story about the recent past. Indeed, her choice of a grandfatherly figure guiding two children to illustrate the poster for the event (Figure 2.3) had not been arbitrary. She had even hoped to convince the event’s moderator to costume himself similarly (this did not happen). In this light, the gameboard’s launch appears less as an attempt at fostering dialogue, and more as an occasion to reinforce previously-agreed-upon truths. In contexts marked by trauma and contestation, ludic mapping has been seen as a way of enabling ‘otherwise adversarial groups to find common ground’ in their disputes, allowing for direct personal engagement (Corner 1999, p. 240). While the people who took part in the event that day did not strictly belong to oppositional groups, their respective positions as survivors of a brutal past on one side, and young curators of that past on the other, did appear to strongly orient them in a field that has become increasingly defined by the hegemonic co-optation of commemoration practices. As such, the dispute that led to the confrontational discussions that day seemed to be bred out of a struggle for recognition and the need to be heard. As Harry West’s work with survivors of torture during Mozambique’s war of independence from the Portuguese shows (2003), such victims often struggle to find a public discursive space for speaking

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and making sense of their traumatic experience. West reports that the victims ‘felt a persistent need to tell of what had been done to them’, while at the same time ‘they apparently found narrating the violence done to them recurrently unsatisfying’ (2003, p. 357). Similarly, the survivors who critiqued Meryem’s gameboard might have, in fact, been trying to take advantage of a sparse opportunity to retell their experience and try to reinscribe it in the community’s public memory, demanding recognition of their authority over the telling of this painful part of local history, while also feeling frustrated by the narrative forms imposed by the emergence of a specific commemorative framework for dealing with these memories. The limits of these commemorative forms emerged most strongly in moments like the one catalysed by the meeting between Meryem’s game and those inhabiting places marked by past forms of violence. In many respects, the differences between the gameboard and the commemorative map become collapsed when looked at through the prism of these limitations’ effects. Specifically, the particular iconographies that these commemorative objects produced and reproduced led to a consolidation of an ‘approved’ historical record as well as the creation of a local ecosystem of actors who, over time, have become the exclusive producers and curators of this social and cultural history. In the span of a decade, the initiatives they helped foster have increasingly become a template for remembering and enacting Hay Mohammadi’s collective history. The performative registers through which this history was being retrieved, together with the visual language and landmarks that now authoritatively index it, have given rise to an emergent hegemonic account of the recent past. Although informed by an ethnographic attention to lived history, the way this commemorative ecosystem has shaped such conversations and their products unwittingly leads to a loss of historical nuance as less heroic and ‘less usable pasts’ were not only progressively discarded from record, but also disconnected from their relationships to broader social and political forces (cf. Allan 2013, p. 133).

Affective cartographies ‘I don’t really know how to draw’, was the response that many people offered when asked if they would be interested in drawing me a map of their neighbourhood. Inspired by works like that of Kevin Lynch in his now iconic Image of the City (1960), I encouraged many of those I encountered through my fieldwork to draw me maps of how they saw and experienced space in Hay Mohammadi. Some were

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keener on the exercise than others, while a couple refused outright, suspicious of my intentions. I explained to everyone I approached with the proposition that I was interested in learning which places, streets, paths and landmarks they felt strongly towards (positively or negatively). I stressed the fact that they need not be accurate maps, in the sense of factual representations of space. In fact, I wanted their very subjective experience of space placed down on paper. I did not care if the street lines they drew were straight or crooked. The only limitation was the edge of the paper. I repeatedly prodded by saying: ‘draw me anything about the neighbourhood, your home, your favourite shop, places you avoid, or your childhood path to school. Anything.’ If traditionally maps have been put in the service of hegemonic attempts at survey and abstraction, groups like the Situationists famously attempted to ‘return the map’ to the everyday practitioners of the city by focusing on unexplored ‘repressed topographies of the city’ (Corner 1999, p. 232). In recent decades, such post-representational ‘counter-mapping’ projects have been used to empower marginalized groups in various places and make visible many of the erasures and often violent occlusions instated by hegemonic cartographies (cf. Kumar 2008, Patel and Baptist 2012, Sletto 2015). The participatory and creative ethos behind such projects differentiates between ‘mapping’ and ‘map-making’, praising the former for its ability to neither reproduce nor impose realities, but, rather, reimagine and reimage a given territory in new and diverse ways (Corner 1999, p. 213). Drawing on this tradition of alternative mappings, while also cautious of its more idealistic aspirations, my own attempt to glean subjective cartographies of Hay Mohammadi was driven by the desire to see how the inhabitants’ perceptions and visions might contest and potentially destabilize prevailing images of the neighbourhood. I was also curious to see if and how my friends’ and collaborators’ drawings might incorporate official narratives, as well as the contingent, messy and temporal aspects of their experience, into novel representations of the urban margins. Encouraging people to draw and talk about their favourite grocer or bread seller, places where they might spend moments of leisure or the fastest way to walk to work opened up a trove of corporeal memories stored in the moving body and accessed through the gliding of a pen on paper (cf. Ingold 2000, 2007). Most of all, I wanted to explore cognitive mapping as a way of accessing a detailed and diverse sense of inhabitants’ affective and social experience (cf. Jacob 2005). Consequently, the evocations and subjective cartographies that resulted from this playful and creative exercise varied widely. All those who agreed to participate drew the maps in my presence, but some chose to do so

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swiftly while others took their time and immersed themselves in the process, pulling me into their experience of creative flow. In the ethnographic vignettes that follow, I recount a selection of these occasions as the context for the images featured here. I offer up these ‘mappings’ with minimal commentary, leaving them open for further interpretation as a gesture towards acknowledging their emergent and affect-laden character. * * *

Sara’s mapping Hovering over the paper with the pen I handed her, Sara, a young woman in her mid-twenties, could not decide how to start. In Stefania Pandolfo’s monograph about space in a Moroccan desert village, one of her interlocutors talks about drawing a map of the village: ‘It is easy. First you draw the walls’ (1996, p. 16). The first difficulty most people had in drawing a map of Hay Mohammadi seemed to be the lack of a clear neighbourhood boundary. The individual ideas about where the neighbourhood began and ended were hence illustrative of how the area had grown and changed over the years. At the same time, it also suggested that most people identified most strongly with their particular quarter, while maintaining their proud membership as ‘Hay’ residents. Eventually, Sara decided to draw her quarter, the SOCICA worker’s estate that was one of two estates surrounded by walls in the neighbourhood. Sara had grown up in SOCICA, the fifth and youngest child of a factory-worker father and a stay-at-home mother who supplemented the family income by taking on sewing jobs. Their home had recently been ceded to them after almost four decades of renting, as part of an official decision from the consortium of factories that had built the complex in 1947. According to Sara, this had given her father some peace of mind in his old age, especially now, she jokingly told me, that her older siblings had all married and moved out. After placing her quarter at the centre of the map, she drew two arches to distinguish it from those adjacent to it. Two quarters born out of Écochard’s grid – Derb Moulay Cherif and Derb Saad – flank Sara’s home on the map, and they are in their turn flanked by other neighbourhoods whose name Sara placed in a way that mirrors their actual geographical positioning relative to one another (Figure 2.4). In Assil they had the best orange juice around, she explained enthusiastically, and Dar Lamane was known for its slightly more middle-income housing. Sara then wrote the name

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Figure 2.4  Sara’s geometrical rendition.

‘Hay Mohammadi’ twice towards the edges of the paper, and added the Kissaria (clothes market), because she said: ‘It’s one my favourite places fi al-hay (in the neighbourhood).’ I asked her why the hay was at the margins of her mapping, and Sara pointed out in a pedagogical tone that, although opinions varied, the ‘real Hay’ (al-Hay bi debt) was not the part where she lived. ‘Of course, if I meet someone fi-l medina (in downtown Casablanca) I’ll tell them I’m from Hay Mohammadi, but in the Hay everyone knows SOCICA. The real Hay is fi-l fuq (on top).’ A lot of people referred in this way to the core of Hay Mohammadi, as it sat on slightly elevated terrain from where you could spot a thin slice of ocean stretching behind the buildings of the SOCICA quarter and the industrial infrastructure beyond it.

Asma’s mapping One of my closest interlocutors, Asma (see Introduction) also maintained that the core area around the Kissaria contained the ‘true’ Hay Mohammadi, although she conceded that administratively speaking the neighbourhood encompassed other quarters not contained on her map (Figure 2.5). Sitting with her one afternoon in her mother’s small apartment, only feet away from the Kissaria while the rest of the usually boisterous family was taking a rest, she

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Figure 2.5  The ‘real’ Hay Mohammadi, two-page spread by Asma.

suddenly told me to bring out my drawing pad. At the time, Asma was recently married and lived with her husband in neighbouring Ain Sebaa, a less densely populated extension of the industrial quarter (see Chapter 4). ‘Walakin ana dima bint al hay’ (But I will always be a daughter of the neighbourhood), she declared, recounting how she would run around the neighbourhood in her childhood, playing football with the boys and clambering all over. Asma began her mapping from the Kissaria outwards. She then traced the wide road that separated their apartment building from the market, and, occasionally stopping to consider the placement of a building, she swiftly drew with minute detail the entire surrounding area. Small rectangles populated her rendering, and she diligently labelled all of them immeuble (apartment building). I pointed out how she had differentiated a larger public garden near the food market (marché) from a smaller one (jardin) by labelling it ‘jardins non aménagés’. With an amused smile she said: ‘It’s true though, you’ve seen it too, isn’t it dirty? Because all the vegetable sellers throw their waste in there and the commune (local administration) doesn’t do anything about it.’ After a brief pause for thought, she added the school where she went as a child. Certain spots on Asma’s mapping are represented as they were when she was a child, such as the gender-segregated school, école fille (sic)/garçons, while most of them are drawn in their 2014 state, thus creating small time warps, layering the past with the present in a rich and entangled palimpsest. The two communal ovens (four) she drew were still functional she said, but her family made their bread at home these days as they no longer seemed to trust the four’s cleanliness. Her mapping also included other public facilities such as a family centre, the bus stop she used in her university days, the neighbourhood clinic, the large Mohammad V hospital behind the Hassan II housing projects and a mosque.

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Asma mentioned that they seldom used these équipments (public facilities) anymore, since, thanks to her older siblings’ financial help, family members who became ill could be taken to private doctors and clinics instead of spending long waits at these underfunded and crowded facilities. The ‘grand Friday mosque’ had been squeezed towards the edge of the paper, while a smaller one commanded the centre of Asma’s double spread. Finally, placing the bidonvilles at the edges of her map, Asma marked both their place within her daily routines and her lack of social contact with their inhabitants.

Adil’s mapping Adil’s sketch seemed to be the opposite of Asma’s (Figure 2.6). An English teacher in the neighbourhood and a freelance translator, Adil was in his early thirties and lived in the Dar Lamane housing complex, built in 1983 as part of an earlier attempt at bidonville relocation. Awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Architecture in 1986 for the way in which it provided an ‘elegant, low-income solution’ for housing 25,000 inhabitants across 4,000 units, it included a mosque, a covered market and a festivities hall (Loughran and Lawton 1987, p. 29). Over the years the complex had deteriorated in parts, experiencing different degrees of the

Figure 2.6  Dar Lamane by Adil.

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spatial appropriations seen elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Asma had once mentioned that one of her older sisters had considered moving into Dar Lamane because it was reputed for its spacious and well-built apartments. She had decided against it, however, because of its proximity to the karyane and anxieties about ‘social influences’. Adil seemed to share many of these impressions. Adil and I were introduced by a common friend and met one afternoon, after he had finished teaching at the local community centre. Sitting in the empty staff room, Adil insisted we converse in English, because he enjoyed being able to practise with others. We spoke about what it was that he liked about the neighbourhood and his experience of having grown up there. Speaking of the area around his quarter he said: ‘Bad people were known before, but now the majority of people in Dar Lamane are of bad stock. And this is mostly because of the influence from the shanty-towners.’ He told me in no unclear terms that he did not like the neighbourhood because ‘it is absolute chaos. The future is contaminated because the shanty-towners left their legacy here.’ For this reason, he was hoping to move out, ‘soon, inchallah’, he said, mixing English and Darija. Having recently gotten engaged, he was trying to buy a new apartment on the outskirts of Casablanca in time for his wedding the following year. As he drew his map, he stressed those aspects of his quarter that bothered him most: the way that people had appropriated communal space and turned it into private gardens (jardins), and the fact that many parked their cars and left little room for pedestrians and inhabitants who were trying to reach their homes. I tried to press him about other experiences of growing up in the neighbourhood, but he shook his head and went on to describe how even as a grown man he feared the violent bullies who hung out on every street corner on his way home from work, and warned me to never use an ATM machine in the area, by day or night.

Fatna El Bouih’s mapping During a longer conversation about the neighbourhood and its landmarks, Fatna El Bouih also agreed to draw a map of the area, latching on to my proposition that it could be a fictional one, a vision for the neighbourhood in the future (Figure 2.7). ‘Oh, I really like that idea!’ she said and her hand landed on the page in wide strokes, conjuring up a version of Hay Mohammadi in which the Derb Moulay Cherif detention centre, the landmark intimately and traumatically tying her to the neighbourhood, would become a ‘Musée’. Her commentary scribbled under the ‘Centre de Torture’ as future museum reads: ‘A radical change of the neighbourhood’ (Changement radical sur le quartier). A corridor or path links

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Figure 2.7  Fatna El Bouih’s future-oriented mapping.

the future museum to the Abattoirs, a ‘historical place’ (lieu historique), which could afford the neighbourhood an ‘opening towards the national cultural scene’ (ouverture sur la culture nationale) if converted into an alternative art space. As Fatna narrated her sketching to me, her hand was at work on the paper, and the SOCICA worker housing emerged above the torture centre extending an arm to the Echouhada (Martyrs) Avenue, in a gesture that linked together these spaces of structural and state violence. The Saada Cinema and the health clinic were also added for their significance as cultural and historical landmarks. ‘And, of course, the military housing estate Bechar Lkhair, [next to the old garrison] how nice it would be to transform it into a park?’ and she placed a question mark next to it. At the bottom of the page, the city’s oldest train station, Casa Voyageurs

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pointed the way to the future with an arrow. Sitting back, Fatna exhaled and said: ‘Now that would be a transformation worth seeing.’ * * * The way the Situationists used maps was determined by their performative aspects, placing a particular set of events at the core of that performativity, and grounding it in a particular context (milieu). Similarly, I see my interlocutors’ maps as records of accumulated daily performances and recurring (mundane) events, images of their everyday paths through the neighbourhood, but also of their aspirations and ideas about the future anchored deeply within a local social geography. In their rendition, the neighbourhood emerges not only as a location in space, but as ongoing, mundane histories that give birth to meaningful places, ‘nodes in a matrix of movement [. . .] bound together by itineraries’ (Ingold 2000, p. 19). Richly (like Asma and Sara’s maps) or laconically contextualized (Adil’s map), each mapping record offers a particular angle onto the neighbourhood’s lived spaces and the diversity of positions occupied by those who inhabit them. Performative aspects suffuse both my collaborators’ maps and the cartographic representations produced by heritage and commemoration regimes, but the registers that inform them are marked by relevant distinctions. In distinguishing the performative process of my interlocutors from that employed by heritage and commemoration regimes, I find Deleuze and Guattari’s work on spatiality to be particularly salient. Specifically, the process manifested by my interlocutors’ mappings seems to share an affinity to the process-form of the ‘rhizome’. Defined by having multiple entrances or exits, ‘no beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and overspills’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 21), the rhizome is an apt way of capturing the phenomenological character innate in such experiential mappings. As an alternative mapping process and form, the rhizome stands in opposition to ‘tracings’, which can be likened to traditional survey maps, and which scholars interested in the agency of map-making firmly distinguish from ‘mappings’ (Corner 1999, Wood 1992). Instead, as records of personal histories of being and moving through (or avoiding) neighbourhood space, the subjective cartographies presented here reveal a variety of embodied forms of knowing. Echoing Cristina Grasseni’s idea of ‘skilled landscapes’ (2004), the knowledge contained in these mappings results not from Cartesian ways of ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998), but from a deep and personal anchoring in a particular place. An ambulatory form of knowledge that follows storytelling, this way of ‘drawing with one’s feet’

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(to paraphrase Susan Ossman) condenses and recounts numerous instances of moving along a path and acquiring knowledge through that movement. Indeed, moving alongside Asma or Sara through Hay Mohammadi’s bustling streets and alleys recalled the ‘deft threading of a dexterous movement’ that is at the heart of this way of ambulating (Ingold 2000, pp. 33–4). Some, like Asma, were proud of possessing the literal skill of this dexterous movement as well as the knowledge of place derived from it, while others, like Adil, saw the need to develop such a skill as a nuisance imposed by the chaotic, illicit character of a place they had grown to dislike. Asma and Adil’s diverging attitudes are but two of the myriad types of ‘affect’ associated with Hay Mohammadi’s lived spaces. For Fatna El Bouih, whose experience of the neighbourhood was tainted by her traumatic detention at Derb Moulay Cherif, the mapping exercise allowed her to give tentative contours to a hopeful, redemptive vision of the neighbourhood’s future. Looked at alongside the commemorative map, Fatna’s drawing appears to brave that crucial extra step needed for restoring dignity to the community by rethinking its central lieux de memoire in a way that keeps the past open and close to the present, as a way of making room for the future.

Conclusion The power of maps seems to reside in their ability to capture our imagination. Whether their claim to authority is based in scientific accuracy, rational planning, historical truth or creative reinterpretation, maps can convey a great deal about their makers, users and interpreters. In the case of Hay Mohammadi, cartographic acts of representing neighbourhood space have been inscribed in a history of both colonial and post-colonial statist logics. As part of this genealogy of governing people by shaping the spaces they inhabit, cartographic iconographies of Casablanca’s margins emerge as an important tool in the service of various forms of planning, policing and control. By engaging in a close reading of three mapping acts derived from the tropes instituted by colonial representations of marginal space, this chapter has documented the staying power of these early iconographies as well as the emerging networks and visual vocabularies they have helped mobilize. On the one hand, these networks have made it possible for organizations like the jamʿiyya to become established and recognized as important local actors and mediators between national agendas and their communities, something that the following chapter delves into further. On the other hand, as state-led efforts at historical redress and community

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rehabilitation have been channelled through the tools and discourses made available by heritage and commemoration practices, a shared visual language for representing the space of marginalized communities has emerged. This language, as the making of the gameboard revealed, together with the emergent cultural orthodoxies of representing the social and political past of Casablanca’s storied peripheries, shows a tendency towards the selective enshrining of certain themes and categories instrumental to the logics of local commemorative and heritage regimes. The result of this selective and reiterative preoccupation with particular aspects of the past has in turn led to a particular hierarchy of what is ‘worth remembering’ and whose memories and narratives should be recorded, to the detriment of a more organic, messy and open-ended account of events. Such commemorative activities resulted in corralling the trauma of state violence and its material after-effects on Hay Mohammadi inside a seemingly coherent and closed container labelled ‘the past’. While enacting important and necessary steps in a process of historical accountability that has the potential to valorize personal experiences through the power of direct and collective testimonies, through such processes a hegemonic iconography of the recent past was also assembled. By their nature iconographies aim to produce stable identities rooted in specific spaces. The representations they canonize and circulate try to resist the ontological instability inherent in any act of image-making. Yet, even iconographic maps are not stable ontological objects, and while their makers may be able to sidestep more critical engagements with the political-economic and historical conditions that have shaped their visual tropes and logics, ‘users’ like the ordinary inhabitants to whom I showed such maps were able to read in their presences and lacunae important clues about the forces that have moulded the neighbourhood’s spaces and their own lives. Conversely, the selected subjective cartographies created by my interlocutors appear for the most part to eschew the grand narratives that populate official accounts, and only marginally engage with the landmarks and ‘heritage places’ erected into memory sites by the commemorative efforts. Instead, they offer a radically unheroic vision of neighbourhood space by focusing on mundane aspects of lived experience, returning the act of mapping to a place where storytelling and wayfinding have not been pushed ‘off the map’ or discarded by the totalizing, striated gaze of the modern state (Ingold 2000). As affective and incomplete records of lived space they register both debates about the degradation of the neighbourhood – as illustrated in different ways by Adil and Asma’s mappings – and an appreciation of and concern with the things that continue to condition and enable everyday life in the present.

3

Disciplining the margins Streets, youth and social development programmes

It was a balmy, late afternoon in the spring of 2014 when I was leaving Hay Mohammadi after having spent the day at the jamʿiyya observing the activities of their youth club. As I stepped out onto the curb and headed for home, I noticed that an unusual level of commotion had overtaken the area. Four police vans were parked at the top of the street, and policemen in riot gear were running up and down the narrower alleys that branched out from the one I was on. Surprised, I asked Samir, one of the young boys I recognized from the derb (quarter), what was going on. Seeming to share my confusion, he shook his head, also staring in the direction of the police vans. ‘Maybe they are chasing away the street vendors?’ he mused, as we continued to watch the incomprehensible presence of such a show of force.1 Another boy, from the jamʿiyya, ran up and edified us: ‘They are picking up everyone without an ID’, he breathlessly managed to say. Trying to make light of what seemed like an unusual situation, I said I might get in trouble because I always forgot to carry my ID. But the second boy answered: ‘No. They’re only picking up the boys. Especially the ones who have the banda haircuts.’ What he meant was the fashionable cut all teenage boys had been getting that year, a Mohawk style that emulated football players’ haircuts and had become a signature look, first among the local Ultras (organized football supporters) then for young shaʿabi (lower-class) men around the country (see Strava 2020). In the following days and months, similar raids swept many lower-class neighbourhoods in large cities across Morocco, drawing national media attention. An official report later claimed that a staggering 103,714 arrests had been carried out nationally in the first three months of 2014 (El Affas 2014). Officially, the action was described by the authorities as a fight against a growing ‘sense of insecurity due to delinquency’ (El Affas 2014), which had presumably been getting out of hand in these peripheral neighbourhoods.2 In

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the press, the timing of the state’s actions was linked to the intervention of King Mohammad VI in reaction to the armed robbery of a hair salon in an upscale neighbourhood of Casablanca, followed by the mobbing of a local professional football player (Jaabouk 2014). Although the aforementioned crimes were not unprecedented and there had been no official statement from the monarch, according to speculation in the media, the king had demanded that the Interior Ministry increase efforts ‘to ensure that citizens feel safe in their cities’.3 Before the authorities unleashed this wave of arbitrary arrests targeting male youth in marginalized neighbourhoods, a growing clamour of voices in online forums and internet groups had been demanding an end to what they described as the ‘war’ that was raging on the streets of Casablanca, claiming that a new class of youth were threatening the everyday life of ‘honest citizens’. Anxieties ranged from rather mundane concerns over ‘public civility’ to alarmed warnings over the impending risk that these youths would next turn to radical Salafism. How was it that an apparent youth fad fuelled not only an intense moral panic but also a sweeping police operation? While the raids took on a life of their own, one which I will recount shortly, they also spoke to much larger, pervasive anxieties that follow the contours of urban socio-spatial fragmentation across Morocco. These anxieties are increasingly projected and played out on the bodies and practices of young lower-class men, who are required to either conform to the contradictory demands of hegemonic moral and political discourses, or face a spectrum of disciplining measures. At the time of the police raids, I had been observing for close to fourteen months the youth activities of the jamʿiyya. Over the course of those months I had come to know in particular the small group of youth involved in the ‘street arts’ programme and to learn about their lives in the neighbourhood. With a few exceptions, they were all born and lived in the area adjacent to the jamʿiyya, and came from predominantly working-class or lower-middle-class families. According to the staff at the association, some of the youth were orphaned, while others simply had ‘difficult’ home situations – a euphemism that was used to hint at a spectrum encompassing everything from economic hardship to domestic conflicts. With supervision and mentoring from several dedicated volunteers, in 2011 the group began writing their own rap verses and building an impressive repertoire of breakdance moves. I originally began attending their Saturday afternoon practices as a way of learning about the creative spaces open to neighbourhood youth, and the way in which they used the practice and discourse of ‘street arts’ as both an escape from and a commentary on their life in the neighbourhood. I continued going for the sheer pleasure of seeing them

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engage in those acts of creativity, but also in order to better understand the complex relationship I saw being forged between local NGOs, state discourses about ‘educating’ the urban margins, and the international development agendas that informed and funded programmes targeting local youth. The space provided by the jamʿiyya was unique in Hay Mohammadi in several ways. Beyond a creative space, the association provided a physical arena for a group that was regarded by both the state and older inhabitants as being at risk of falling through the cracks opened by poverty and contingency in the neighbourhood. This group was almost solely made up of teenagers and (predominantly male) young adults. As the two previous chapters have shown, neighbourhood space was a collection of intricately linked social geographies, considered to be prone to transgression and moral decay. Specifically, the ‘unregulated’ space of the street was strongly connoted with immoral activities like substance abuse or delinquent behaviour, a view shared by locals and city officials alike. As a consequence, the jamʿiyya’s stated aim in creating the ‘youth club’ in general, and the ‘street art’ programme in particular, was to provide the youth with a ‘healthy’ (ṣaḥīḥ) space where they could cultivate morally desirable selves, while at the same time voicing (within limits, as I’ll show) a particular mix of what hip-hop theorist Tricia Rose has called ‘social alienation [from] and prophetic imagination’ of the world around them (1994, p. 71). Nevertheless, the social and political context within which the association’s activities were developed and carried out raised complicated questions about the forms, content and limits of creative dissent available to youth in Morocco. In this chapter, I set out to address the complex relationship between neighbourhood activism, national and international development interventions targeting youth, and the ongoing reterritorialization of security concerns on the urban margins. I pay particular attention to the growing number of NGOs operating in the neighbourhood during the past decade and their highly gendered focus on social development programmes targeted at lower-class youth. Such ‘grassroots’ organizations and the work that they do have become crucial sites during the past decade for the ‘socialization’ of (male) youth into desirable models for political (or in this case, perhaps more precisely, apolitical) and economic belonging. In the aftermath of the 2011 Arabic Spring uprisings, they have received surprisingly little attention from scholars and pundits alike, and yet these organizations and the programmes they run can provide profound insights into the deeper workings and anxieties of local elites and national security agendas. A critical examination of the moral and disciplining logics promoted by such programmes on the Moroccan urban margins makes

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it possible to distinguish the emergence of not only a new dominant ideology of societal belonging, but also an entire infrastructure for its naturalization. The effects, I argue, have been the progressive depoliticizing of the precarity and marginality affecting lower-class youth, while concomitantly prescribing conflicting and contradictory models for their development.

The street seen through moral and policing discourses ‘Between one café and another café you find a café. The youth (Fr. les jeunes) waste their time watching football and TV channels from the Gulf [states] that rot their brains. When they are not doing that, they loiter in the street (fi zanqa) doing nothing, throwing away their lives.’ Abdeljalil, director of Hay Mohammadi jamʿiyya

Many of the popular reactions as well as official discourses found in contemporary Morocco vis-à-vis the urban margins tend to be filtered through a common, if contradictory, trope about the shaʿabi street, or zanqa, as Chapter 1 also showed. According to this trope, whose equivalent can be found in many places across the globe, streets in lower-class neighbourhoods are at the same time repositories of an ‘authentic’ Moroccan way of life (see Chapter 1), and a source of petty crime, moral and material urban decay, supposedly dominated by gangs of unruly, delinquent youths.4 In its pejorative sense then, the shaʿabi street is overwhelmingly associated with the shabab (youth) in the street, and their apparent lack of occupation, which is almost always glossed as a sign of individual failure. In her landmark piece on the politics of loitering, Susan Buck-Morss points out that capitalist society has developed the tendency to respond to non-productive forms of being-in-the-street either by ‘stigmatizing it within an ideology of unemployment or taking it up into itself to make it profitable’ through regulated and approved forms of leisure (1986, pp. 112–13). In Morocco, as in other places that have experienced the upheavals of colonial capitalism and neoliberal reforms, non-productive forms of ‘hanging out’ in the street are intensely spatialized. They are associated with dense, lower-class neighbourhoods, and prone to a double-stigmatization, as Abdeljalil’s comment shows: first, as the marker of unemployment or irresponsible youth, and second, as an excessive form of lower-class leisure that takes place in the much frequented and ubiquitous male-dominated coffee house (cf. Collins 2011, Peterson 2011, Deeb and Harb 2013). In Hay Mohammadi, it was common to see teens clustered around street corners, outside barber shops, around improvised football pitches,

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or simply hanging out in front of their house door. They not only used the space on an everyday basis, but also produced a highly territorial form of gendered identity, complete with a repertoire of practice which very often included catcalls, boastful displays of masculinity through body posture and dress, or simply directing a – at times aggressive, at others playful – sexualized gaze at women passing through the space (cf. Ismail 2006a, Ghannam 2013). Hamid, Najib and Walid were three such young men. I regularly passed their preferred corner while on my way to various appointments in the neighbourhood, and occasionally stopped for a chat. Najib’s younger brother and cousins regularly attended the ‘youth club’, which was how we initially became acquainted. When asked about their ‘hanging out’ and their use of the street space, the three offered varying responses. The youngest among them, Walid, embarrassedly confessed that they sometimes engaged in catcalling as a way to show off and ‘test the water’ with certain girls, but that most of the time they were simply interested in getting out of the house and passing time with friends, watching internet videos on someone’s smartphone or commenting on the latest football game. For Hamid – who was in his late twenties, came from a large household, and after his father’s death had been supporting his family through various call-centre jobs – lingering for an hour in the street every evening with his friends was his way to ‘de-stress’ at the end of the day or on weekends. In fact, many of the youth I knew in Hay Mohammadi seldom described their ‘hanging out’ or street corner sociality as either a productive or a wasteful, passive activity. Most of the young men spoke in more ambivalent terms; captured in words like ‘sitting together’ or ‘passing the time’ (kanduzu al waqt), they evoke the deeply shared nature of life on the urban margins, as well as the intense boredom that lower-class youth have to contend with. According to Najib – who was in his early twenties, but had already gone through a string of low-paid, temporary jobs – the sidewalks of his quarter were the only spaces where he could meet with friends and vent his frustration vis-à-vis his employment prospects and the limitations of his everyday life. For many lower-class young men, the streets of their quarters are among the few spaces where they can meet friends outside of work or school, or escape to in the absence of both.5 This is because Hay Mohammadi, like many similar neighbourhoods across Morocco, lacks basic sports or youth club amenities, and local youth can rarely afford the price of a soda or tea in one of the cafes deemed more respectable. Forced in this way by their cramped living conditions and limited by the availability of acceptable spaces for socializing, young men (and occasionally women) in Hay Mohammadi regularly transformed the streets, alleys and shop corners of the neighbourhood

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into microplazas, reclaiming a space for socializing and communal, if contested, forms of being-in-place (cf. Low 2000). Illegal and informal activities, such as the sale of counterfeit merchandise or hashish notwithstanding, such forms of ‘hanging’ out and ‘killing time’ have tended to be approached within academic literature as a way of enhancing one’s economic productivity. In many precarious contexts, what appears as ‘loitering’ may function as a way of ‘keeping one’s ear to the ground’, and can play a significant part in sustaining social networks by staying abreast of the neighbourhood news (Loukaitou-Sideris 2009). In recent years, anthropologists have also begun to look at ‘waiting’ as a mechanism for elaborating future strategies and a form of practice that provides those who engage in it with opportunities for creating and supporting social capital (Elliot 2015), while at the same time allowing them to ‘shape and update their everyday routines in the face of contingency and unexpectedness’ (Ibanez Tirado 2014). These are all necessary and important contributions that have helped question and critique conservative moral and policing discourses aimed against those who ‘loiter’. At the same time, such a focus on the productive aspects of ‘time-pass’ runs the risk of overemphasizing the economic motivations behind encroachment into public space, while ignoring equally valid needs for recreational and social activities, or ones that resist the logics of constant productivity. This becomes important in a context in which neoliberal and morally inflected discourses about productivity and self-worth have been quick to mobilize vernacular forms of economic survival as part of agendas that promote the development of ‘entrepreneurial’ selves. These logics have been aided by the growing presence and popularity of state-sanctioned cultural activities meant to ‘pacify’ marginal youth, coupled with an intensification of programmes promoting their ‘employability’, as we shall see. This development has not occurred in a historical void, however. As we saw in Chapter 1, North African urban spaces have not been strangers to disciplining agendas and their associated policing discourses and actions. Urban lower-class communities and youth in particular have been a privileged target of security and disciplining apparatuses in the twentieth and twenty-first century alike. Indeed, in Morocco current policing discourses and disciplining practices targeted at the urban margins have been heavily influenced by colonial and post-colonial events and infrastructures. Starting with the 1965 student uprising6 and culminating with the 1981 so-called bread riots, Casablanca’s working-class neighbourhoods, and Hay Mohammadi in particular, became the scene of repeated military intervention, political repression and different episodes of targeted state violence. During this period, as security concerns

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came to overwhelmingly define the post-colonial state’s approach towards governing the ‘street’ (in both the social and physical sense), in peripheral areas like Hay Mohammadi youth and the spaces they frequented also began to be seen through the prism of surveillance and security. Through their participation in various unions and political factions alike, starting in the middle of the twentieth century, Moroccan youth distinguished themselves as a formidable force to be reckoned with, in both local and national events (Bennani-Chraibi 1994, cf. Emperador and Bogaert 2011). The creation in 2004 of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC), the first in the Arab world to date (see Chapter 1), eventually led to the recognition of the individual and communal violations of that era, though it stopped short of identifying or prosecuting the perpetrators.7 Significantly, the ERC’s recognition of the deeply socio-spatial dimensions of this state violence, demonstrated by designating Hay Mohammadi as one among several ‘territoires touchés’ (wounded territories), was mostly aimed at enacting a process of reparations for those who were young during Hassan II’s reign. The reconciliation process, however, has not only made it possible to speak about this traumatic past in public but has also made this repressed history widely known to current neighbourhood youth, through state-approved heritage and cultural development projects like those described earlier. Through their participation in heritage training activities or the oral history cafes that led to the creation of the commemorative map, local youth have been at the forefront of appropriating these reparation activities and using them as an opening for discussions about the present social and material degradation of the neighbourhood (see Chapter 2). At the same time, the public acknowledgement of state violence has also been accompanied by an intensification of and systematic efforts at promoting a particular brand of social development programmes. These have either tacitly occluded the link between past violence and current degradation, or managed to sidestep such questions altogether through the popularization of a language of individual agency and responsibility. I discuss these in the pages that follow.

‘Responsibilizing’ marginal youth Similar to other places in the region, people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine constitute almost two-thirds of the neighbourhood’s demographic make-up, posing both local concerns about their proper place and role in society and significant educational, political and economic issues for local elected

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officials. Within this landscape, a strong argument in favour of the so-called responsibilization of lower-class youth and their integration into a range of regulated and regulating activities has taken root, motivating a range of initiatives from cultural activities to entrepreneurship workshop trainings and microcredit schemes (Paciello, Pepicelli, Pioppi 2016). As the hallmark of neoliberal logics that have been popularized by international development agendas (cf. Elyachar 2003, Ferguson 2015), these interventions operate in two ways: on the one hand, they function to shift the burden of providing socio-economic security from the state to individuals, by promoting and encouraging an idea of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency; on the other, they provide the discursive context in which a politics of morality that stigmatizes and blames the poor for their own predicament gains increasing political currency (cf. Hibou 1998, Hache 2007). Moroccan society has not been immune to these transformations. To the contrary, a range of channels ranging from royal speeches8 to local media outlets and administrative bodies has systematically championed and helped institutionalize this ethos over the past three decades. Starting in the 1980s, the Moroccan government slowly dismantled and defunded social-support structures across the country as the direct consequence of the wave of structural adjustment and liberalization reforms negotiated with the IMF and the World Bank (Cohen 2004). During this transformation, among other significant changes in economic policy and the labour market, philanthropic discourses and ‘grassroots’ initiatives modelled on Western NGOs slowly gained a foothold within an otherwise tightly controlled civil society landscape. As the effects of reduced spending on public services came to be felt across the socio-economic spectrum, NGO-type organizations became important actors for social welfare provision. At the same time, they also acted as conduits through which urban poverty and inequality (among other things) became reworked and addressed as ‘humanitarian’ issues rather than social and politically produced realities. Over the past three decades in Morocco, this ‘NGO-ization of impoverished urban communities’ (Davis 2007, pp. 77–82) has led to the standardization and ‘bureaucratization’ of struggles over social and economic issues, as they were progressively neutralized by this rights-based discourse and brought into the mainstream of international development discourses (cf. Berriane 2010). While this did not immediately amount to what Wacquant calls ‘the brutal swing from the social to the penal management of poverty’ (2009 p. 3), the language of social justice became progressively delegitimized and replaced by the mantra of ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘responsibilization’.

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This process has been aided by what Emilie Hache (2007), borrowing from and expanding on Foucault, has called a new neoliberal ‘art of government’ that has crystallized during these past thirty years. In this new ideological landscape, the transfer of responsibility onto individuals has become an increasingly popular move. This shift has led to a distorted political conception of individual morality and action, based on behaviourist notions that have produced an idea of the ‘self that is in theory detached from its historical and social conditions’ (Hache 2007, p. 18) and whose actions are ‘the simple sum [. . .] of free will’ (Wacquant 2008, p. 10). As the episode of the police raids will also show, by 2014 this language had not only gained significant purchase among both the Moroccan authorities and local elites but had also become firmly institutionalized through a vast array of third-sector programmes. Associational work is not a new phenomenon in the region, and as a consequence it needs to be considered within the framework of a local associational history and culture (cf. Bayat 2010, p. 73). In Morocco, like in many other countries in the region, religious charities organized around the Islamic notions of compassion for the poor and focused on the collection and distribution of alms were some of the earliest examples of local ‘community’ associations. In the twentieth century, labour unions and anti-colonial efforts led to the creation of new forms of secular associational life, particularly in urban, industrialized areas like Casablanca, although the unions were subsequently considerably disempowered by the combined effects of deindustrialization and political struggles that took place during the second half of the twentieth century (Clement 1992, Cohen 2004). While many of these traditional associations persist to this day, the emergence of the NGO model in the 1990s, supported by international development agencies and funds, signified a radical shift not only in the distribution of money and power across the third sector but also in the logics and practices aimed at addressing inequality. This institutionalization was particularly aided by the political and social climate following the suicide attacks of May 2003. In their aftermath, the Moroccan state, with the help of international donors, was further able to consolidate this shift to ‘responsibilization’ by drawing on the increasingly popular trope of Islamic radicalization, and redoubled its efforts supporting NGOs that focused on rendering urban delinquency and forms of loitering as not only undesirable but also symptomatic of more radical forms of criminality (cf. Bayat 2007, Khalaf and Khalaf 2011). The history of the jamʿiyya, where I regularly attended the ‘street arts’ programme, offers an apt example of how such shifts presented both an opportunity and a limitation for community grassroots efforts on the urban fringe.

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Abdeljalil, the acting president of the jamʿiyya in 2013–14 (introduced in Chapter 2), had grown up in Hay Mohammadi and was supporting his small family on a civil servant’s salary in 2002, when he decided to dedicate himself to the creation and running of a local grassroots organization for helping neighbourhood youth. He described the context for the creation of the association thus: As young people in the neighbourhood, ten years ago, we looked around us and what we saw was bad. The Dar Shabab (Youth Club) was closed, the cinema Saada also closed, and there were no spaces for youth to study, read, stage theatre plays. My cousins from France came to visit every summer, and they saw how young people just hung around in the street doing nothing. They told me about an association working in their neighbourhood outside Paris, and the kind of things they did there. So, we got together, about ten of us from our street, and decided to create an association, a jamʿiyya, to do something for our neighbourhood.

The early 2000s were, indeed, a favourable time for setting up an NGO in Morocco. With the accession of King Mohammad VI to power in 1999, following the death of his father, a period of social reform and openness towards civil society seemed to ensue. Significantly, in 2005, the king launched the National Initiative for Human Development (Initiative Nationale pour le Development Humain, hereafter INDH). By no means radically new in its scope, the INDH marked a pointed transition towards a clear embrace of the discourse and participatory practices advocated by global trends in development policy (Berriane 2010, p. 94). On a very basic level, the main role of the INDH was to disburse financial support from the state to local NGOs across the country, predominantly in areas identified as priority sites (sites prioritaires)9. Between 2005 and 2010 this amounted to ten billion dirhams (about £700 million), provided in part by the Moroccan state, the World Bank and the European Union, as well as private donors such as the king of Saudi Arabia (Berriane 2010). Through the creation of local INDH committees at priority sites like Hay Mohammadi, the state argued it would be able to identify local NGOs and social development projects that could benefit from its support. In Hay Mohammadi and similar areas, this has meant the growing presence of national and local NGOs focused on helping ‘youth at risk’ (a label that biologizes the issues that local youth struggle with) through programmes that employ ‘street arts’ and the language of ‘children’s rights’ as a way of combatting the pernicious influences of the street. According to the more cynical views of a local community worker, these programmes also had

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the intended effect of ‘pacifying’ disenfranchised youth who might otherwise be swayed by political or religious radicalization (Bennani-Chraibi 2010). In 2003, immediately after its creation the jamʿiyya applied for and received the lease for a building owned and operated by the Mohammad V Foundation, a royal charity named after Morocco’s post-independence monarch and founded by King Mohammad VI.10 The building was shared with a local day-care centre, but the association had its own separate entrance and used the upper-floor space. The stated mission of keeping youth off the street and away from its pernicious influences was what guided the initial programmes and activities offered by the jamʿiyya. In 2005, the INDH granted the jamʿiyya its first round of financial support, which allowed it to run an after-school tutoring programme. Fatima, one of the young women coordinating the youth programmes at the association in 2014, recounted that she was a first-year university student when the jamʿiyya first opened its doors to the neighbourhood youth. She fondly remembered how one of the rooms served as a study library and reading room, where silence was rigorously enforced. ‘It really helped my studies so much’, she reminisced. A theatre group was also formed and one of the rooms was transformed with the help of another small grant into a practice area, with an elevated stage at one end used for staging local performances. A side wall was covered in mirrors, while the others were painted in bright colours. Later, the association also tried to introduce activities for stay-at-home women (femmes au foyer), but these proved to be much less successful.11 What began as a small theatre activity in 2003 eventually grew into the ‘street arts’ programme mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. In 2013, the association started a complementary programme focused on promoting the ‘employability’ of high school graduates with funding from the European Union, the French Agency for Development and the social foundation arm of the Spanish banking group La Caixa, among others.12 Run in collaboration with the National Agency for Promotion of Employment and Skills (ANAPEC), the programme organized resume-editing and sales force workshops, and provided training in running microenterprises. The definition of the target user was ‘youth in difficulty’, although the staff was keenly aware that youth without a high school diploma constituted a much more critical group. The two programmes closely illustrate the two-pronged approach that the Moroccan state has taken towards precarious youth: on the one hand, the (pre-emptive) pacification of dissent through state-sanctioned artistic pursuits, while on the other hand the promotion of labour productivity, however precarious such opportunities might be.

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Pacification by ‘artification’ Bghina al huquq We want our rights Bghina al hayat We want our life Bghina n’aich hna hta al mat We want to live here until we die Mabghitch quf dyali beqa ghir kalimat. We don’t want our rhymes to be just words. - Chorus from the UNICEF-sponsored rap song Bghina hakna (‘We want our rights’)

When I arrived in Hay Mohammadi in early 2013, the jamʿiyya had just celebrated a decade of activity, and the ‘street arts’ programme had been running successfully for almost two years, having become the association’s flagship project. Its full title, as given on various grant application documents, was ‘Les Arts de Rue en Méditerranée’ (Street Arts in the Mediterranean); everyone at the jamʿiyya simply referred to it as Arts de Rue. The initial funding had been provided by the European Union, and the main artistic result of the project, which the jamʿiyya occasionally used to attract further potential funders, was a video of a rap song produced and recorded with the help of UNICEF in late 2011. Written completely in Darija, Bghina hakna was relatively long, at almost seven minutes, and had a two-minute spoken-word introduction to the actual rap part. The narrative conveyed by the lyrics touched on the theme of youth, poverty and urban marginalization, while constantly reaffirming the performers’ allegiance to their country, their birthplace and their home. The demands for a dignified life voiced in the song had been inspired by and purposefully emulated the language and recommendations of the IER (see preceding chapters), according to Abdeljalil, but they also drew on discourses about universal children’s rights, and remained within the limits of propriety by avoiding any harsh language or strong imagery. In fact, the association invested a significant amount of effort in ensuring that their image inside and outside of the neighbourhood remained one of propriety, and tried to project a vaguely middle-class image of civility and outward comportment (cf. Essahel 2015). This entailed various forms of control over the young people’s bodies and their outward presentation. Sandals and flip-flops were not allowed inside the jamʿiyya, as I was informed during the summer of 2013. Boys who arrived wearing shorts were sent home to change, and girls were not permitted to wear visible make-up. Only one of the teenage girls who attended the workshops, however, wore a headscarf, which she matched with clothing that mirrored that of her unveiled peers in

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its youthful, Western style. Punctuality was fiercely enforced, and, on many occasions, I saw upset youths sent home because they had arrived late or had missed a previous practice. The staff also discouraged excessive chatting or unorganized hanging out inside the jamʿiyya outside of scheduled activities (although occasionally tolerated if in small enough numbers). According to one of the theatre instructors, all of these rules and restrictions were necessary, because otherwise the youth would go wild. In this manner they would learn to be proper, well-behaved people, ‘nass mezzianin’.13 Some of the youths occasionally rebelled, refusing to attend the programme for weeks at a time, while the majority of them seemed to accept this arrangement and continued to come and abide by the rules. Youthfulness in this case was constantly renegotiated between the young and those who provided them with a space to engage in the artistic activities that played a large part in the youths’ identity-making practices. For the jamʿiyya, specifically, an image of pacified youthfulness also played a large part in their efforts to maintain state support and funding for their activities. Given this context, the use of street arts like rap and breakdance, cultural forms associated with resistance and contestation vis-à-vis power, was a tense and strategic act (cf. Nassar 2011, Aidi 2011, Errazouki 2015, Moreno Almeida 2017, 2018). From this point of view the marriage between human rights discourses and street arts seemed to be at best an uncomfortable one, needing constant reframing and control. While the arguments in favour of a rights-based approach to social development often stress accountability as one of the advantages afforded by such a method, in Morocco there is no official legal framework that can implement such accountability measures (Slyomovics 2005a, Storm 2008). By focusing funding and support for programmes addressing youth as a behavioural category, the discourse that was constructed and circulated through programmes such as Arts de Rue refashioned this particular group into a self-contained problem. This contributed to occluding the historical, political and economic roots of these problems. The ensuing effect was one of ‘artification’ of everyday realities,14 which led to superficial engagement with problems affecting youth on the margins, promoting and circulating stereotypical images of urban street culture that did not attempt to take a more in-depth look at the grittier reality of those margins. In the next section I look at what happened when the raw and unmediated image of precarious youth, crime and marginality disturbed the sanitized, commoditized aesthetic that has been used to domesticate and romanticize the rough edges of poverty, violence and urban subcultures.

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Posing dissent: Rebellious youth and neoliberal class affects The intensity of Morocco’s anxiety over its growing, and growingly disenfranchised, youth population appeared to have reached its climax during the spring of 2014, as the raids described in the beginning of this chapter swept across the country. At the time of my fieldwork, with the raids unfolding before my eyes, it was difficult to disentangle the ideas and perceptions of those who decried the growing lack of safety on the streets of Casablanca and their identification of a particular typology of the male aggressor, from an actual emergence of a new masculine youth subculture on the urban margins, as official discourses seemed to suggest. Very soon, a term for designating this ‘new type’ of male delinquent appeared, and its repeated use in conjunction with the proliferation of internet images naturalized its presence, occluding even further any originating source or context. This term was Tcharmil. In colloquial Arabic, charmoula signifies a marinade used for the preparation of meat. Most of my interlocutors speculated that the reason why the term Tcharmil caught on was owing to its derivation from the butcher knives used for the preparation of charmoula, and donned by the youth in some of the circulated photos, as a way of impressing viewers. The originally intended audience for the images seemed to consist mainly of youth from similar socio-geographical contexts – which led to the use of tags that identified whether a pose was ‘Casablanca Tcharmil’ or ‘Tangier Tcharmil’. In recent years it has become evident that this kind of internal ‘selfie-economies’ are produced by a complex entanglement of personal, cultural and socio-economic motivations which cannot be reduced to pathologizing labels like ‘narcissism’ (Senft and Baym 2015). Among youth in Hay Mohammedi, ‘selfie’ photography in general was used as a way of both documenting their lives and experimenting with fashions outside of school or parental control. Tcharmil poses, in particular, seemed to purposefully toy with the line between cool and kitsch, or playful and threatening, demanding that the viewer engage in an intense and viscerally visual confrontation. While it was difficult to accurately date the appearance of Tcharmil, its popularization was significantly aided by the use of online social networks for the display and circulation of photos that intended to capture the essence of Tcharmil. As the raids continued for weeks and both online and conventional media continued to report on them, I spoke to the young men I knew in Hay Mohammadi about how they saw the unfolding debates and panic. Youness, one of the young teenaged men from the neighbourhood who regularly attended the ‘street arts’ programme and who favoured a dress style that could have identified

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him as mcharmil, claimed that most of his peers saw Tcharmil as merely a new label for an existing dress style. The banda haircuts were paired with tracksuits, visible white socks sticking out from name-brand sports shoes, and large gold watches.15 Youness concluded it was a rebellious fad and a new one would soon replace it, and thus did not take seriously the boastful self-association with crime displayed in some of the circulated photos. The general consensus of my interlocutors was that at some point in 2013 young men began posing in these ‘outfits’ for photos that they would then upload on their social media profiles.16 As such, the phenomenon was ostensibly defined by its viral and virtual visibility. This is not to suggest that the young men involved in or associated with the Tcharmil image had been invisible either online or offline before. But as increasing socio-spatial fragmentation and ‘enclavization’ has come to mark urban space in Morocco (Newcomb 2017, p. 126; cf. Caldeira 2000), and the proximity of (undesirable) social ‘others’ can be managed by carefully maintained degrees of economic and physical barriers (cf. Schielke 2012, p. 47), young lower-class men in Casablanca have become increasingly confined to their neighbourhoods, carefully curating their appearance when entering spaces that are associated with the (upper) middle classes (cf. Ghannam 2011). The aesthetic effect and look displayed in Tcharmil poses might be seen as a less sanitized version of the image that the ‘street art’ club promoted. Far from novel in their reference to global hip-hop culture, Tcharmil pictures engaged in the ostentatious and boastful display of status symbols such as gold watches, ‘gangsta’ dress styles, and hyper-masculinized poses. Deniz Yonucu’s (2015) and Pascal Menoret’s (2014) work on rebellious youth in comparable regional contexts has suggested that such provocative appropriations and public displays of what the state labels as delinquent behaviour needs to be understood as an ambivalently articulated response and affective reaction to the violence that neoliberal forces, coupled with the local presence of authoritarian regimes, inflict on young lower-class male bodies and lives (cf. Peteet 1994). Certain Moroccan journalists reporting on the raids seemed to share this view, asking that this ‘fad’ be critically read for ways in which it spoke to social inequalities in the country (Majdi 2014). Most reports in the media, however, were more inclined to describe the ‘mcharmlin’ (pl.) as engaging in acts of intimidation by displaying butcher knives and stolen goods (as was speculated about the golden watches). Some of the photos that were circulated online as illustrations of Tcharmil did appear to be connected to illegal activities such as the sale and consumption of hashish. This type of photo never featured people, but depicted exclusively an inventory of illicit and haram substances like cigarettes, alcohol

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and drugs. These photos, together with those in which teenage boys posed with long butcher knives, were, however, a minority among the multitude of images simply depicting young boys, and occasionally girls, wearing tracksuits and ostentatiously displaying status objects like smartphones or name-brand clothing and sports shoes considered fashionable at the time. According to rumours circulated through online groups and also recounted by inhabitants in Hay Mohammadi, the police initially tried to have the images found on the main online Tcharmil group removed. As Luise White has observed, rumours can ‘be a source of local history that reveal the passionate contradictions and anxieties of specific places with specific histories’ (2000, p. 83). Morocco’s recent history is ripe with such class anxieties that have been politically and economically produced, as public education, the main motor for social advancement in post-Independence Morocco, is no longer seen as a guarantee for middle-class membership in an era of unstable labour markets and increasing financialization of urban space (Cohen 2004, pp. 68–70; Emperador and Bogaert 2011, Boutieri 2012). At the same time, the appeal of these rumours points towards the power exerted on the social imaginary by a strategy of dealing with growing inequality by progressively obscuring or concealing those whose precarious living circumstances might belie the official discourses about national inclusion. What did eventually happen was that the raids proceeded to remove from the street young lower-class men who matched the images and gave them ‘disciplinary haircuts’ while in custody. Ultimately, by considering all of these photographic poses to belong to and be representative of a unified youth gang presence, the authorities were able to harness their affective power and unleash a sweeping operation, without having to deal with prolonged evidence gathering and due process. By targeting a specific population – the predominantly disadvantaged, marginalized and racialized poor youth of the urban fringe – these raids echoed Wacquant’s reminder that ‘it is not criminality that has changed so much as the gaze that society trains on certain street illegalities [. . .], their presumed perpetrators, [. . .] and the uses to which these populations can be subjected’ (2008, p. 4). In this sense, the medium used for the circulation of these images became crucial. By encouraging outrageous self-styling and personal display, the social media channels used to circulate images of Tcharmil effectively helped to disembed both subject and image from the socio-historical context of their production, allowing not only for the radical ‘othering’ of those identified as mcharmlin but also for the expansion and updating of carceral logics as legitimate responses to disenfranchisement in contemporary Morocco.

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Newspapers, weekly magazines, TV and internet news sites maintained a regular cycle of reporting on both the arrests and their justification for almost two months. The authors of some of the online articles wondered whether this phenomenon was, indeed, all that new, and not just another passing trend. Indeed, several commentators in a dedicated online group cautioned against reifying it as a ‘gang movement’, when it appeared to be just a ‘fad’. An opinion piece in the French-language weekly magazine TelQuel cautioned against the criminalization of an entire group of already disadvantaged young people. After one young man who had been summarily detained during one of the police raids committed suicide while in custody, the president of the National Centre for the Study of Human Rights stepped in to plead for ‘a more reasoned response’ on the part of the authorities (Crétois 2014). When speaking to former political detainee and human rights activist Fatna El Bouih about these incidents, she echoed other commentators in the press, who reminded the public that such arbitrary measures of enforcing public security were reminiscent of the dreaded, repressive era of the ‘Years of Lead’, and should therefore be reconsidered. The arrests nevertheless continued unabated, while the conversations I followed in the largest online discussion forum dedicated to this topic derided the idea of human rights violations and proposed retaliatory measures against anyone matching the Tcharmil description. A frequent argument put forth claimed that those who took on the style should expect repercussions,17 demonstrating what Stuart Elden calls ‘a disturbing faith in the efficacy of state violence’ to address this sudden outburst of public disturbance (2011). A small number of online commentators suggested that it would be useful to consider the sociopolitical root causes of the emergence of this ‘youth subculture’, but other commentators dismissed their arguments as ‘une foutaise’ (nonsense).18 During the police raids, it was difficult to remain a detached observer of the ongoing debates and criminalization of those associated with the Tcharmil look. On the one hand, someone from an upscale neighbourhood would have described as mcharmil many of the teenage boys I knew from the ‘street arts’ programme and had grown fond of over the year. They wore tracksuits, spent inordinate amounts of time hanging out on street corners neglecting their homework, occasionally engaged in petty theft for fun (cf. Wacquant 2008, p. 205) and were extremely proud of their (counterfeit) Nike Air shoes. On the other hand, several of my adult interlocutors in Hay Mohammadi believed that the urban periphery was, indeed, experiencing a delinquency problem and wished that local youth found ‘better’ models to emulate. An image that was commonly used to impress upon me the difference between a Tcharmil youth

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and an aspirational ideal that parents tried to inculcate was that of the Kilimini child. A popular culture term in circulation for much longer than Tcharmil, Kilimini’s origins and precise etymology are also blurred. One hypothesis claimed that it was derived from the mispronunciation of the French ‘[Qu’est-ce] qu’il est mignon’ meaning ‘isn’t he sweet’, an exclamation that was ostensibly associated with middle-class children who behaved according to social norms, never trailed in the street and spent their evenings doing homework. Close interlocutors from Hay Mohammadi agreed on this etymology, stressing that the Kilimini stereotype implied early bedtimes, never using swear words, speaking good French and dressing in a clean, ‘proper’ fashion. Implied, but not stated, was the fact that in order to be a Kilimini child one needed to be part of a middleclass family with the socio-economic power to provide such things as ‘good’ French education, and clean, fashionable clothes. Trying to bridge this constructed dichotomy, another online group named ‘Anticharmil or the incitation to reading’ was constituted, according to its founders as an attempt to go beyond opposing a Kilimini stereotype in its response to the Tcharmil aesthetic.19 In reaction to the photos of sports shoes, gold watches and illegal substances, the anticharmil encouraged Moroccan youth to post photos of their books, or themselves reading, a majority of the titles displayed being written in French. In an open letter, the creators of the group called for a halt to the criminalization of an entire class of young people who inhabited the city’s destitute urban margins. The words of the open letter did not seem to carry as much affective weight as the image accompanying it, and the solidarity march proposed under the banner ‘We are all Moroccan youth’ did not take place. What the media and public opinion took away were the images of cosmopolitan-looking, seemingly well-behaved upper-middleclass youth, and used them to contrast the images of presumably crass, tracksuitwearing teenagers. Ultimately, as if to echo Bourdieu (1993), it appeared that ‘all Moroccan youth’ were, indeed, not the same, but in the process of engaging with the dynamics provoked and shaped by these images, the differences that separated them had also been reduced to an image. In her work on the construction of white injury and attitudes of fear in the face of asylum seekers in America, Sara Ahmed (2004) develops the concept of ‘affective economies’ as a way of theorizing the modalities through which certain images appear to mobilize intense emotional responses within certain groups (while also contributing to the reinforcement of particular ideas about that group’s identity). Ahmed demonstrates how it is the very ambiguity or lack

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of an individualized identity of the feared ‘other’ that is both produced by and productive of such economies of hate: ‘Such figures of hate circulate, and indeed accumulate affective value, precisely because they do not have a fixed referent’ (2004, p. 123). The stereotypical treatment of the Tcharmil image as the marker of an anonymous, debased and threatening mass of humanity, which denied youth their individuality, became the currency in which the particular affective economy of alarmed Casablancans traded. Those who toyed with the image of mcharmlin as youthful and rebellious appropriation and embodiment of what might be read as an assertion of ‘rough masculinity indexing working class values and forms of sociability’ (Wacquant 2008, p. 205, Mauger and Fosse-Poliak 1983), became subject to the disciplining gaze of local elites and the state, inviting their own ‘othering’. Within this landscape, the reactions and fervour with which the Tcharmil selfies were discussed both online and offline become indicative of both the struggle over the policing, definition and outward presentation of ‘norms of propriety’, and the production of a particular neoliberal ‘class affect’. The latter was shored up by a gaze that sees dissenting lower-class bodies and practices as undeserving, radically ‘other’ and hence incongruent to its logic of deservingness, as Hache also reminds us (2007). As part of this constructed class affect, the valuing by the urban lower classes of material possessions and status objects such as watches, motorcycles or clothing was judged as lack of education. This ironically allowed those who already possessed such desirable commodities to turn to books as a sign of distinction (cf. Bourdieu 1987). As such, the performance and display of different forms of cultural capital and the affects associated with each played a central role in the way the Tcharmil phenomenon was visualized, articulated and dealt with by the upper and middle classes of Casablanca. Despite the collective panic and paranoia that was expressed in online forums, it soon became clear that Tcharmil was far from being a vast, organized crime phenomenon. The minor drug dealers and the relatively small sums of money that were reported as confiscated during the police raids indicated a fragmented scene of street violence and petty crime on the urban fringe. Not quite a subculture, and certainly not an organized movement, the young mcharmlin boys of Casablanca’s margins appeared to be threatening to the sociopolitical order not because they had engaged in a direct form of collective protest but for what Bayat calls ‘collective presence’ (2010, p. 111). Specifically, the visibility and viral online presence of dispersed, atomized individuals became more destabilizing to the hegemonic social order than the actions of

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an organized movement because they tapped into the neoliberal affects of local middle and upper classes and elites whose anxieties had been fed by decades of eroded education and employment opportunities, and what Wacquant calls the ‘dread [. . .], and the anguish’ over the possibility of ‘not being able to transmit one’s status to one’s offspring’ (2008, p. 4). The oft-rehearsed refrain from online discussion forums, echoed by political actors and authorities, claimed that delinquents and the uneducated could not be granted rights before they knew how to also assume responsibilities, something these youths were evidently lacking. Comments about the need to harshly discipline the lower-class male body illustrated this ‘zero-tolerance’ mindset that saw citizenship and rights as a privilege to be granted only to the deserving, a logic which displayed little consideration or acknowledgement of the political and economic production of such ‘deservedness’. While some of the more vituperative comments suggested a new Tazmamart should be opened for this ‘type of youth’,20 many online commenters welcomed so-called preventative arrests as long as this brought some peace to citizens – a comment that perfectly illustrates the exclusionary nature of the definition employed by those supporting the action. Overall, the unfolding of these conversations taken together with the progressive institutionalization of third-sector initiatives aimed at ‘responsibilizing’ male lower-class bodies and practices, poignantly illustrates the entrenching of hegemonic orders which find it productive and legitimate to draw on an increasingly attractive and nationally established logic of carcerality. Aided by conservative public opinion in a city marked by stark inequality and already mired in petty crime for decades, Moroccan authorities were and continue to be able to target the dispossessed with excessive punitive measures, without having to acknowledge or address the structural and historical causes of local poverty and crime.

Conclusion Within increasingly precarious urban landscapes, morally and politically conservative ideas about time and the way bodies mark it – that is by engaging (or not) in socially and politically sanctioned forms of labour – are being increasingly recuperated by neoliberal regimes and reinforced as the measure of one’s moral and social worth. These ideas are highly gendered and spatialized in ways that stigmatize lower-class areas and men in particular. Young, able-bodied men, geographically confined to precarious neighbourhoods and to different forms of boredom and waiting, must constantly address this stigma (cf. Mains 2007,

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O’Neill 2017). In the context of Morocco, where more mundane forms of labour are intensely gendered and very seldom counted as economically productive (cf. Ait Mouss 2011, see next chapter), unemployed or underemployed young men in particular are more likely to be seen as potentially volatile elements, in need of constant disciplining and control. In order to understand the roots as well as the implications of such views when looking at ongoing social developments, I have argued that a closer look at Morocco’s history of policing the urban margins is needed. By paying attention to the way in which different discourses and ideas have been projected onto young, predominantly lower-class male bodies in recent decades, we can begin to discern significant continuities between colonial, postcolonial and the current Moroccan regime’s approaches towards governing the urban margins. Programmes that are seemingly incongruous – rap workshops and breakdance classes, alongside youth entrepreneurship stimulation activities – become distinguishable as the two faces of the same ‘pacification’ strategy. Historical processes are thus crucial for understanding this two-pronged development. While the structural reforms introduced in the 1980s weakened social provisions and made it possible for the NGO model to gain ground in Morocco, it was not until the 1990s and the start of the reconciliation process that a human rights agenda became a popular means of framing the work of these organizations. Couched in the language of ‘human rights and human development’ agendas, the social policies and approaches that have been introduced in the past twenty years have led to the creation of a third sector in which conversations about the historical and political causes of contemporary urban inequality have been progressively masked (cf. Batliwala 2007). Filtered through the increasingly pervasive logic of ‘responsibilization’, the messy and contingent life of the lowerclass street has become a marker of socio-economic dysfunctionality, reminiscent of the ‘culture of poverty’ debates.21 In this context, the refusal of young lowerclass men to conform to hegemonic ideas and discourses becomes an invitation to be viewed as ‘surplus bodies’, amenable to the punitive and carceral measures of the state. It is also important to note that the moral panic and violence of the Tcharmil episode thrived on the affects mobilized by viral images, demonstrating the latter’s capacity to ‘disturb’ and to ‘move in the transitive sense’ (Steedly and Spyer 2013, p. 8). On the one hand, their capacity to make visible an entire class of marginalized youth speaks to the power of visual materials to make known aspects of everyday life that have either been ‘pacified’ through activities like those of the ‘street art’ programme, or which might otherwise be (willingly or tacitly)

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occluded and obscured from mainstream channels. They reinforce Bayat’s claim about the potency of ‘collective presence’, as they demand of both state and elites to reckon with the everyday hardship and (frustrated) desires of disenfranchised youths. On the other hand, the manipulation of this broadly defined ‘corpus’ of images by the Moroccan police and local elites as a way of criminalizing and eventually physically and symbolically disciplining the lower-class male body complicates discussions of how such channels might be productively used to further a politics of recognition inflected by class identities. Questions of space and visibility, both physical and online, continue to be significant for how these struggles are framed, performed and, ultimately, policed. Particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests, the role of the internet (and social networking sites in particular) has been lauded as a new public (cyber) space for popular and political mobilization (cf. Farrell 2012). The Tcharmil raids, however, demonstrate that the same space can serve to polarize public opinion by appealing to criminalizing tropes that dehumanized and rendered as radically ‘other’ the young men of the impoverished urban fringe. While youth continue to play a significant role in organized forms of association that operate both in Casablanca, Morocco, and the region more broadly, in this chapter I have tried to make a case for the need to balance the focus on such conventional (youth) movements and forms of contestation (e.g. Bayat 2012, Desrues 2012, Hegasy 2007, Khalaf and Khalaf 2011, Varzi 2006), with a look at more mundane, ambivalent and ambiguous expressions of their dissent. These also need to be understood as expressions of agency, albeit one that is constantly being reworked as a consequence of being the target of regulatory, disciplining and reformist logics and discourses from a range of local and international actors that concern themselves with precarious youth.

4

Dwelling on the margins Housing architectures, gendered skills and the ‘unhomely’ in Hay Mohammadi

In the spring of 2014, a much-advertised cultural project opened for the duration of one month in the space of the Anciens Abattoirs in Hay Mohammadi, once again bringing together cultural and NGO actors with the neighbourhood’s inhabitants. With the assistance of the French Cultural Institute in Casablanca, the acclaimed French director and producer Michel Gondry had set up a ‘film factory’ (usine de films), where groups of amateurs would be offered the chance to write, direct, enact and record their own film creations. Several sets had been built inside the Abattoirs to provide attendants with a variety of backdrops for their filmmaking. Each space had been composed after careful study and consultation with theatre and film professionals from Morocco, as a way of achieving ‘as authentic a cultural effect as possible’, in the words of one of the project organizers. I visited the space several times over the course of four months, accompanying groups of young people from the jamʿiyya, and on three occasions together with my close adult interlocutors from the area. During these visits I was struck by the different reactions visitors had to one set in particular: the ‘Moroccan home’. Composed of two adjacent ‘rooms’, the set was meant to recreate a typical kitchen and ‘salon’ (living room) area, complete with tagine dishes and floral sofa cushions. During a visit to the ‘factory’ with Amina, one of my closest interlocutors, she was immediately impressed by the décor and proceeded to inspect and admire every piece of furniture and fixture displayed, while comparing it to her own home at the time. ‘It is very nice (Zwin bezzaf!) They did a very good job’, she concluded. Moments later, several young women dressed in clothing that signalled their upper-class background, and speaking in a mixture of French and Darija,

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came on to the set giggling and commenting to one another: ‘Can you believe how kitsch it all is? Grave, quoi! (Seriously).’ The fact that the set’s aesthetic features appealed to Amina while at the same time signalled lowbrow culture to the other women is indicative of the ways in which the Moroccan home can serve as a particularly rich, though woefully understudied, analytical terrain for exploring how social, cultural, economic and political ideas find expression at the level of material differences and tastes that shape everyday life (Bourdieu 1987). Whereas third-sector initiatives like the NGO programmes discussed earlier attempted to socialize local youth into market-based and limited notions of responsibility that vilified shaʿabi practices and the spaces in which they occurred, attitudes and images of the lower-class hearth (and their attendant gendered practices and practitioners) have, instead, been romanticized as repositories of a uniquely Moroccan way of life. For example, when perusing any of the many recent and copiously illustrated folios trying to convey the fascination of ‘Moroccan customs’ to Western audiences, a reader is informed that there are three types of dwellings in Morocco: the Berber tent, the luxurious architecture of old patio homes and urban masshousing (cf. Lovatt-Smith 1995, p. 15). While such books do not attempt to provide scholarly classifications or rigorous studies, they nonetheless beg the question: Is it useful to speak of a quintessential Moroccan home? If yes, who gets to define its image? And would this image be able to capture the social, economic and political realities that determine everyday life for the majority of Moroccans? Like many of the women I knew in Hay Mohammadi, Amina came from a working-class background and had spent her entire life in the neighbourhood, taking her first trip outside its limits when she was nearly nineteen. The space and emotions that Amina associated with her home and its immediate vicinity were synonymous with ideas about personal agency and security, but also communal trauma and an ambivalent sense of belonging. In this chapter, I zoom in on her and several other women’s homemaking practices while remaining anchored in the wider landscape of their extended families, local community and neighbourhood history. In doing so, I document and reflect on the performed and perceived dimensions of dwelling in order to discern how notions of caring for self and others are not only mediated through spaces inside and around homes but also reflect wider processes responsible for shaping the lives of those inhabiting Morocco’s urban margins. While the next chapter considers in greater detail the political and future-oriented dimensions

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of what I refer to as ‘dwelling on the margins’, in this chapter I focus on how an attention to ‘homemaking’ in the economically and socially precarious context of Hay Mohammadi not only illuminates significant local moral and affective registers but also renders visible the ways in which these registers index and reproduce particular ideas about social difference that are not easily captured by normative understandings of middle- versus lower-class forms of dwelling and belonging. As part of this analysis, the link between bodies that are gendered female and the physical spaces of the home emerges as a crucial one. I explore this link through the prism of historical and personal trauma, as well as the embodied performance of skilled homemaking. The rest of the chapter maps and explores the different approaches and forms of routinized care applied to both bodies and domestic spaces. Moving from a consideration of how gendered skills are tactically employed to secure care for oneself and others to the laborious acts applied to bodies and homes, I discuss how such acts work to both keep contingency in check and to reproduce a particular moral and social order that makes dwelling liveable for those inhabiting the urban margins.

Homes as social and cultural facts It is evident that not all Moroccans could or would choose to live in a palatial riad1 the likes of which animate ubiquitous visions of domesticity from commercial advertisements to upscale real-estate projects and popular TV productions. And yet, Michel Gondry’s film factory set excepted, there are few instances where the material culture and everyday practices that embody and reproduce lowerclass worlds can be gleaned with the same ease from either popular culture representations or academic research. When the colonial administration began developing a plan to house Casablanca’s working classes in the 1940s, it approached the task with a seriousness reserved for military campaigns. As part of this plan, a scientific team was commissioned to survey the needs of the ‘new proletariat’ living in ‘indigenous settlements’ (Celik 2005, p. 277). An atelier ambulant (mobile unit) composed of an engineer, a topographer, an urban designer and two draughtsmen collected information about the ‘dwelling culture’ of those who came to settle in the vicinity of the city’s growing industries. Using methods inspired by the long tradition of ethnological research in the French colonies,2 the young architects working under Écochard studied not only built forms but also the organization

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of everyday life in the city’s growing bidonvilles (Avermaete 2010a). Since then, few scholarly engagements have followed this detailed albeit technocratic study of Moroccan working-class domesticity. In fact, the Moroccan home has seldom received scholarly attention, and available publications have been marked by a preoccupation with traditionalist forms and aesthetics. Owing to this, the Moroccan home has become an increasingly reified concept, as illustrated by a growing number of consumer-oriented, high-quality, glossy publications that might be classified as ‘coffee-table’ literature. Invariably titled Moroccan Styles or Living in Morocco, these books are targeted at either a Western, affluent readership of ‘home design enthusiasts’ as one such book recommends itself, or at a small niche of wealthy Moroccans (cf. Bonfante-Warren 2000, Dennis and Dennis 2001, Stoeltie 2003, Verner 2005, Ypma 2010). Without intending to do so, these publications occlude the historical, social and political dimensions of housing in Morocco, with the result of producing an Orientalist and static image of the domestic realm. Part of what by now has become a billion-dollar industry that, according to some, has led to the intense ‘fetishization of the domestic realm’ (Cullens 1999), such publications thrive on a pervasive fascination with romantic visions of an essentialized Middle East and North Africa. While these books sometimes feature inhabited homes, their owners are seldom present in photographs, though often referred to as urban, cosmopolitan elites of European origin, or ‘expatriate aesthetes in the grand tradition of the American millionaire Barbara Hutton’ (Lovatt-Smith 1995; pp. 14, 38). Adding a different angle to this genre of publications are the increasingly popular first-person narratives of foreigners turned homebuyers and ‘refurbishers’ of Morocco’s ‘crumbling heritage’ (cf. Shah 2006, Clarke 2007, McGuinness and Mouhli 2012). This selective preoccupation with traditionalist and Orientalist themes in popular literature also reflects a growing neglect on the part of scholarly and professional authors of widespread mass-housing architectures and the lives, and social and material practices they engender and sustain.3 Several anthropologists of Morocco have done much in recent years to update our knowledge through careful observations that trace the ways in which global and local transformations have produced radical shifts and alterations to ideas and practices of middle-class domesticity and those it depends on for its reproduction (Mernissi 1994 Kapchan 2013, Newcomb 2017, Montgomery 2019). Nevertheless, when it comes to the domestic life and culture of working-class communities, we have significantly fewer accounts of the realities and struggles of homemaking, and even fewer from the perspective of the inhabitants

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themselves.4 The relative paucity of anthropological work on home spaces in North Africa mirrors the wider neglect of the house in the discipline’s literature. Marginal at best, but mostly taken for granted as the familiar backdrop to more meaningful processes and structures, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the house gained theoretical validity.5 This was owed in part to the revisiting of kinship studies as well as economic anthropology’s return to the home as a unit of production and consumption (cf. Kapchan 1995, Singerman and Hoodfar 1996). It was not until the 1980s that anthropologists finally approached the material, spatial and historical dimensions of housing as part of a broader analytical method, propelled by studies undertaken in Southeast Asia and South America (cf. Whorf 1956, Waterson 1990, Lea 1992, Hugh-Jones 1993). Drawing on this significant body of work in the ‘anthropology of the home’ (Singerman 1995, Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1996, Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Züniga 1999, Buchli 1999, Miller 2001, Cieraad 2006, Daniels 2010), I first turn the focus on Amina’s account, who was among the first people I met during fieldwork to completely and generously open up her home-life to me. It was with her help that I was made aware of how the everyday insecurities and historical and political ‘wounds’ of Hay Mohammadi become ‘folded into’ the work of ordinary life for those in socio-economically precarious positions (cf. Das 2008, 2013). While the struggles of everyday life on the urban margins may make themselves known pervasively, they surface in small and mundane details that make up individual experiences of dwelling. In this I follow other ethnographers in taking a biographical approach that allows me to zoom in on such details (cf. Crapanzano 1985, Kleinman and Fitz-Henry 2007, Biehl 2013). Indeed, if I am suggesting that historical transformations and present insecurities colour most lives in Hay Mohammadi, then this is nonetheless a process that is likely to occur in different ways and to different extents from household to household. Consequently, I consider homes as a ‘localizable idea’ (Douglas 1991, p. 289) that takes varied material, spatial, temporal and affective shapes, wherein gender, class and moral norms intersect in complex ways. In this sense, I am acutely aware that to propose a discussion of homemaking practices solely through the prism of women’s experience risks reproducing the very Orientalist ideas that I seek to disturb. I do not take for granted or intend to naturalize the link between women and home. Instead, I follow the lead of my research interlocutors in order to understand how practices that are central to securing a sense of wellbeing on the urban margins simultaneously also function as the terrain upon which ideas and ideals about gendered social reproduction are continuously being negotiated.

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Domesticity as ‘unhomely’ One day in February 2013, early in my fieldwork, Amina invited me to have lunch at her house. Heading off one of the main streets in Hay Mohammadi into a narrower cobblestoned alley, we passed through the arched gates of a workers’ estate I had first encountered through the tours offered by Casamémoire (see Chapter 1). Whitewashed walls and decorative details evoking traditional Moroccan architecture accompanied us for a short while. Stepping out through another arched gate, we arrived at Amina’s derb, or subdivision. The houses there were more densely built, taller and closer together, but still part of a unified aesthetic in their various shades of terracotta. Their floors appeared to be precariously stacked, one above the other, their façade details resembling slices of a layer cake askew. Several houses had bricked in windows, and an overall look of decrepitude. Leaking from a wall, a muddy stream of water gave off a faint sewage smell. Nearby children ran up and down playing catch, hopscotching over the grime and oil of a mechanic’s shop that coloured the sidewalk in dark patches. Amina’s alleyway was neater, as local inhabitants took it upon themselves to sweep and collect the trash left unpicked by erratic municipal services. Amina’s house was identical to the ones lining the alley on both sides. The entrance door was ajar, and I could see a tiled, dark and narrow staircase ascending to the upper floors. Amina lived on the ground floor, her door a few paces behind the main entrance to the building. Stepping inside we were greeted by darkness until she turned on a naked bulb hanging from the high ceiling. With the exception of an air vent above the entrance door, there were no windows, since this part of the building had originally been an open patio before it was closed in in order to build further floors. Modified from one of the many 8x8 houses designed by Michel Écochard in the 1950s, Amina’s ground floor dwelling had become the opposite of aerated and sunny. The ceiling had not been properly sealed off from the apartment upstairs, and Amina remarked that her ventilation system took in the cigarette smoke from her neighbours. Amina lived there with her younger sister, who suffered from a severe developmental disability, making her completely dependent on Amina. I was invited to sit down in the small salon as Amina began to prepare lunch. The glare of the single fluorescent bulb reflected the blue tinge of the tiled walls. The space that made up the home was divided disproportionately between the kitchen, the foyer and two small and narrow rooms. The foyer took up the most space

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in the centre of the house, while all the other rooms lined its sides and opened onto it. A minuscule washroom had been squeezed under the staircase that led to the upper-floor apartments. Separated from the foyer by a wooden door on a latch, the limited space served as both squat toilet and shower room. Amina embarrassedly asked me to ignore the smell that came from that direction, telling me that plumbing was as old as the quarter and in need of repair. To the other side of the entrance door was the kitchen, not much larger than the washroom, its space easily filled by one person alone. In fact, aside from a few dishware items, a small sink and a two-burner stove, the kitchen could hold little else. As a consequence, Amina had placed the refrigerator in the foyer, along with the laundry machine and a plastic cupboard. The salon was long and narrow, connected to the foyer by an opening framed by a gauzy silver and white curtain, with a window on each side. Lining each wall were low, rectangular sofa cushions covered in a velvety, floral-patterned blue fabric whose silvery details matched the curtain. This was the only room in the house that was carpeted, so I slipped my shoes off before stepping in and taking a seat. A low wooden table sporting small wheels on each leg for easy manoeuvring stood in the middle of the room. The TV had been mounted on a high shelf nailed into one corner, which freed up the space, but also mirrored the ubiquitous display of TVs in many cafés. Amina had it switched on to a Turkish soap opera that she liked to watch while eating. Bringing out a bag full of the medication that she usually took with her lunch, she told me that she had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, whose onset she traced back to the death of her mother from cancer a few years prior. Although she was not sure what type of cancer her mother had suffered from, Amina vaguely suspected a link to her mother’s job in the nearby sardine-packing factory. Her father’s death, also from a suspected form of cancer, took place some years before her mother’s. An older sibling had emigrated abroad and had become estranged from Amina. Over the course of my fieldwork I became very close to Amina, staying over nights at her invitation, visiting often, celebrating religious feasts together and occasionally going on outings in the city. It became clear to me over time that while her situation was not very dissimilar to that of other residents who shared her socio-economic background, Amina was uncommon in other ways. Although it is not exceptional for young women from upper-class families to live independently in a city like Casablanca, at the time of my fieldwork it was remarkable that as an unmarried, orphaned young woman in Hay Mohammadi, Amina would live by herself.

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Right after my mother died, my relatives said I should go live with an aunt. But I did not want to. They said I could go live with them, but I didn’t want to bother them. My (female) cousin then told me, ‘You can live on your own. You are old enough and responsible (nti msouliya), you can take care of yourself.’ And I think this is the best thing for me. I don’t have to answer to anyone like this.

Of course, this was not entirely true, as Amina not only had to care for herself but also for her sister, and the pressure of living under the perceived daily surveillance of her neighbours often surfaced in our conversations. On many occasions when she asked me to join her on errands or for a rare leisure visit into downtown Casablanca, Amina would guide us along a carefully chosen succession of streets, arguing that her neighbours need not know her every coming and going. Living on her own also meant that when her landlord tried to increase her rent after the death of her mother, Amina had very little family support to fight the decision. I was very young, twenty years old. And the mul dar (owner of the house) came to say he was going to increase the rent. I had to fight hard to convince him not to do it. I went to the medina where he lives in a big house, and pressed him about it. I brought al-weraq (the documents) my mother left me. He was going to triple the rent! It used to be that his mother was our landlady, but now her son wanted to raise all rents. I finally ended up going to the muqataʿa (public notary) and getting my documents legalised. It was a lot of work but in the end, I succeeded.

In spite of the challenges she encountered when she found herself alone, Amina recounted the story of her troubles not without a sense of pride and empowerment that she clearly derived from her victory over the landlord. The ability to deal with such contingencies and the effects they had on Amina were closely associated with ideas and perceptions of her own physical and emotional well-being. While clearly proud of the way she had handled the situation with her landlord, Amina insisted that the sense of material insecurity that her housing situation created took a toll on her health. Unlike the inhabitants of an adjacent quarter, who suffered from illnesses directly related to the sugar refinery that coated their living quarters in a thin layer of sweet, asthma-inducing dust, Amina’s ill health and that of her sister were more tenuously linked to the material degradation of the area. After completing her story of the rent-increase dispute, I asked Amina if she had fought so hard because she liked living there. Her answer came swiftly: ‘It is a bad (khayb) and dangerous area, poor, ugly (mazwinch) and dirty; but we make do’, she concluded in French (Mais, on fait avec).

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The sense of unrelenting surveillance, the responsibility of caring for her sister, and her own chronic illness were intimately, but also ambiguously, linked in Amina’s mind to her place of dwelling. As her childhood home, the house remained a meaningful place for Amina, invested with happy memories of past times. But homes are not constantly felicitous places, and the work of feminist scholarship has contributed greatly to rethinking previous work on domesticity (cf. Bachelard 1994[1964], Massey 1994, Blunt and Dowling 2006, Hollows 2008). As Amina traced the onset of her illness to the death of her mother, the house and her body became linked by the experience of trauma and loss. An anecdote Amina was fond of retelling revealed the way in which the corporeal senses became linked to this experience of home undergoing a profound transformation: ‘When my mother was in the hospital before she died, my cousin came to cook for us, and she prepared a tagine (stew), but put bay leaves in it. We hated it! My mother never cooked with bay leaves. To this day I can’t eat them.’ The bitter taste of bay leaf connected Amina to the loss of her mother’s care and home-cooked meals. This loss seemed to amplify those material elements of the home whose ‘un-homeliness’ had maybe been ignored until that point. In our conversations Amina repeatedly mentioned how after the death of her mother the home was no longer welcoming: ‘We have no windows, the sun never comes in here’, she said seeming to notice almost with surprise. A place where textures were familiar and whose organization and display were creatively engaged with, as I discuss further in the following chapter, this home was also the decaying “khayb” (bad) architecture that housed her sister who waited everyday for Amina to come home from work. Adding to this was the growing communal awareness of the history of state violence that had left its marks on the quarter, most notably in the continued presence of the underground detention centre. Occasionally, sitting in her salon having a meal or chatting, Amina would hint at this in remarks like: ‘Sometimes I get the chills at night, thinking of all those torture cells under our feet’, or ‘Who knows how many torture cells they have down there?’ Still, there were times when Amina preferred to spend the weekend inside her home, and I often failed to coax her to join me for a sunny walk outside, finding no retort to her emphatic claims that she would much rather enjoy the cosiness of her home, because this made her feel hanya (relaxed, at ease). As I attempted to understand the ambivalent feelings of uneasy well-being Amina expressed about her domestic situation, I began to consider how the idea of ‘un-homeliness’ might help to unpack this paradox by serving as an entry point into how ‘ordinary’ forms of trauma and loss become woven into processes

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of caregiving and homemaking (cf. Das 2006). Starting from an analysis provided by Ernst Jentsch (1906), and based on literary as well as psychoanalytical case material, Freud once proposed to explore the nature of what he called the unheimlich as an affective state that may give rise to feelings of fear, dread or eeriness. Although ‘uncanny’ appears to be the preferred English term, Freud also noted that a closer etymological translation would be ‘un-homely’ (1919, p. 124). To Freud the uncanny was not merely that which was unfamiliar, but also something that had once belonged to the familiar and protected space of the home, but which had become alienating and frightful. As Navaro-Yashin (2012, p. 182) observed in her study of domestic appropriations in Northern Cyprus, thus defined, the ‘un-homely’ can serve as a powerful analytical category for exploring the ambivalent affects evoked by particular dwelling contexts charged with a history of state violence and personal trauma. Homi Bhabha (1992) has argued that the un-homely is a paradigmatic post-colonial experience. In his reading, the un-homely has a definitive spatiotemporal dimension present in historical moments marked by the intrusion of the world into the home, and the inversion of the physical space of the home from a reassuringly intimate place of shelter and resting into a realm that is marked by contingency and displacement. Others have also emphasized the spatial dimension to Freud’s conception of the un-homely by returning to Jentsch’s original formulation (Vidler 1992). Jentsch defined the unheimlich as a ‘lack of orientation’ in a previously familiar situation, a sense of being invaded by something hostile and foreign in a previously comfortable setting. For Amina this intrusion seemed to be constituted by the emotional and financial insecurity opened up by her mother’s passing, coupled with the discovery of the physical spaces of state torture that lay beneath her feet. Where the familiarity of her childhood home once stood unchallenged, there was now a constant tension with the material and affective aspects of her dwelling that had taken on a ‘gloomy’ tint after her mother’s death. Insufficient waste collection services, old and faulty sewage facilities and the crumbling remains of the nearby slum all amplified many inhabitants’ (including Amina’s) sense of general dereliction. Adding to this growing perception of un-homeliness were the compounded financial, emotional and moral burdens placed on Amina during the years following her loss. With no kin to provide her or her sister with financial support, Amina held on to a job that brought her little satisfaction and forced her to constantly devise personal strategies for surviving on a limited income, something I will return to in the next section. Although she had received the encouragement of her female cousins in deciding to live without a kin guardian, Amina was also

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keenly aware of the moral and social pressure and surveillance placed on her by her community. But what if – beyond the direct impact and influence of historical and political forces, as Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) and Veena Das (2008) have contended – rather than being a counterpoint to a bourgeois notion of homely cosiness, we acknowledged the un-homely as a central feature of domesticity? And, indeed, while Amina was aware of and sometimes complained about the un-homely aspects of her domestic situation, she had also managed to develop a set of practices that allowed her to keep the un-homely in check, as I shall discuss. Nevertheless, the material, moral and affective burdens and challenges placed on Amina not only impacted her ability to care for herself and her sister but also affected the way she perceived offers of help from her community. Specifically, in dealing with such daily chores and duties as caring for her disabled sister, cleaning, cooking or simply maintaining her own emotional and psychological well-being, Amina drew on her local social networks of friends, neighbours and distant cousins. The loss of her parents and the estrangement of her older sibling meant that Amina had to develop alternative support networks. Both at work and in the neighbourhood, her friendships to a large extent came to supplement traditional ties of kinship. Unlike familial relationships, she would sometimes stress, Amina felt that her friendships provided her with a more honest form of support because they were not defined by the social codes of kin reciprocity, but, rather, by mutual sympathy and shared life views. These relationships, however, were also characterized by their externality to the home and overwhelmingly defined by their affective weight, which meant that Amina’s friendships, to the extent that I was aware of them, could be quite volatile. As it would eventually be the case in her friendship with Asma (see Introduction), during my time in Hay Mohammadi, Amina’s ties with several friends became strained because of various perceived offences or emotional injuries. These incidents concluded with the breaking off of said friendships, and Amina’s resolute conclusion that she could count only on herself in the end. Similar to what Clara Han discusses in her ethnography of poverty and debt in La Pincoya (2012), Amina further distinguished between her neighbours and her friends. While she sometimes saw the former as the representatives of an oppressive surveillance culture maintained through gossip, she nevertheless benefitted from what Han calls ‘acts of silent kindness’ (2012, p. 79). Several women on her street could be counted on to look after Amina’s younger sister when she had to travel for work, and they would often bring Amina bowls of

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couscous on Fridays since they knew that it was less practical for her to prepare such a meal for only two people. They did this by insisting their actions were mere afterthoughts, which allowed them to keep up the pretence that Amina did not need their help. Accordingly, these were not acts of charity in need of reciprocation, although Amina occasionally engaged in similar acts towards other female members of her community. This arrangement occasionally allowed Amina to refuse the care extended to her as a way of asserting her own abilities and position in the community, an attitude that could easily be described by what Das calls the ‘strong ethics of endurance’ (2013, p. 218). Ultimately, Amina insisted on her self-reliance and in our conversations often told me she was ‘tough’ and could always ‘take care of herself ’ (Fr. se debrouiller). Her body, however, often failed her, and the chronic character of her illness made her feel helpless at times. ‘Look at me’, she would say and point with dismay at what she lamented as a body marked by illness. ‘This is all because of the medication and the stress. What can I do? I cannot quit my job and I have to take this medicine.’ While Amina accepted those things she perceived to be outside of her control, she compensated by developing a mastery over the material aspects of her home. As a consequence, the un-homely seemed to reside alongside her persistent work of securing a better life, forming the two faces of what Das calls domesticity (2008). Through the bodily performance of daily routines and homemaking practices, Amina worked to shore up her confidence in herself and in the future. For many, including Amina, this resilience was manifested and strongly associated with the skilful and ingenious daily management of scarce resources.

Spaces of embodiment and enskilled routines One Sunday in April when the weather was beginning to warm up, Asma and I were on our way to pick up Amina from her house. We had planned to meet two other young women from the neighbourhood, and spend the afternoon in downtown Casablanca, window shopping and perhaps going to our favourite café. When we arrived, however, we found Amina in the midst of her weekly cleaning. As she was quick to tell anyone who asked her about how she spent her Sundays, Amina would always say: ‘Kif dima. Hammamit, jeffeft, ghesselt, wa teferejt telfaza’ (As usual. I went to the hammam, scrubbed the floors, did laundry and watched TV). Weekdays, Amina would get up at seven, hurriedly get dressed, have a quick breakfast with her sister, and head out to work. At lunch she would return to prepare a small meal and take a short nap before

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returning to the office. Most evenings Amina arrived home past six o’clock and collapsed into sleep, sometimes before managing to finish her dinner. While academic literature has tended to see routines as the emblem of an alienating modernity, or in Ben Highmore’s formulation ‘a straightjacket of dull repetition’ (2004, p. 307), drawing on ethnographic material gleaned with Amina’s help, I argue that routines are actually instrumental in contributing a sense of stability and control to lives otherwise marked by chronic insecurity (cf. Desjarlais 1997). As such, the routines that Amina claimed defined her monotonous life also provided her with a sense of structure and ownership, in a context in which contingency was abundant. Following Michel de Certeau, in this section I look at everyday routines as more than just the tedious ‘background to social activity’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xi), a critically informed political project that has been increasingly taken up in the past decades (see Lefebvre 1991, de Certeau and Giard 1998, Highmore 2010). In doing so I explore how the repetitious nature of what have otherwise been considered chores not only reveals meaningful reinterpretations of lived experience but also offers a commentary on the work needed to secure a good and dignified life. As I discuss in the material that follows, the choice to approach mundane tasks through the prism of skilful practice empowered inhabitants like Amina, while at the same time providing a unique insight into the articulation of class, gender and everyday politics of survival on the margins of Casablanca. The role of the body and the amount of physical labour that went into this set of daily practices were not insignificant. In fact, I argue that it was through the development of a certain degree of mastery in the execution of such daily tasks that the boundary between routine and ritual became blurred, bringing forth a new register of embodied spaces and their attendant practices. Following Amina’s lead from her previous statement, I begin with a discussion of the hammam and then move on to the work of maintaining the home, exploring the link between cleaning of body and of domestic space in the process of securing a sense of well-being amid the ongoing economic and social precarity of the urban margins.

Public baths Whereas during the week the body performed the routines that ensured the running of everyday life, once a week it worked on itself in a ritualized form of routine that allowed for its renewal (cf. Turner 1967). This was most powerfully exemplified by the weekly trips to the local hammam. A Moroccan version of the Turkish public bath, the hammam continues to occupy a central space in the

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lives of ordinary Moroccans, particularly for those like Amina, who did not have a bathroom at home.6 Early on in my fieldwork Amina invited me to join her for her weekly hammam visits, an invitation I took up several times, before the summer heat made these visits more sparse. On these occasions we would wake up at half past six in the morning and assemble the various things that make up the arsenal needed at the hammam. Amina would get her sister dressed and prepare their respective duffle bags containing a change of clothes, bathrobes and towels, slippers and toiletries. Holding this considerable arsenal, which included three large pink plastic pails, two little plastic stools and a soft, rolled up bathroom mat we would head out into the deserted alleyway as the dawn was slowly colouring the sky a bright hue. ‘If we are there by seven we can avoid the crowds. It’s better when it’s empty’, is what Amina said to me on the occasion of our first visit in order to justify our early rise. Arriving at the hammam, only a few streets away, we were, indeed, greeted by a mostly empty changing room. After paying the 15 dirhams (£1) at the entrance and purchasing some savon beldi (traditional black soap made from olives), we undressed down to our underpants, stored our belongings in one of the many open shelves, and entered the steamy cavernous rooms of the hammam. In her work on beauty rites and rituals in Casablanca, Susan Ossman claims that people go to the hammam as a form of leisure, ‘in the same way that the middle and upper classes frequent sports clubs to relax’ (2002, p. 182). Although the analogy contained in this statement seems to imply that going to the hammam is an activity that only certain social categories engage in, she does explain that there are various types of hammams, from the most basic to the more luxurious and spa type. I would add that the experiences one can have in these spaces differ accordingly, and I would further argue that in the case of the hammam shaʿabi (the working-class hammam), such as the one Amina and I frequented, leisure was but one (and a closely entangled) aspect of a complex form of routinized and ritualized work performed with and on the body. Once inside the hammam, Amina would choose a spot next to the tiled wall and lay out her stool and bathmat, after which she would help her sister sit down. From that point onward, we had to engage in a particular sequence of acts and gestures so as to achieve a ‘proper’ hammam experience. If I ever skipped a step or tried to perform them in a different order Amina would be sure to chide or gently mock me. From a small faucet in the wall Amina would fill the buckets with a mix of scalding hot and cold water. Pushing the buckets along the floor she would then use a small plastic cup to scoop up water from the bucket and douse it on herself. The next step entailed applying the savon beldi all over the

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body and allowing it ‘to work’ on the skin. Its specific properties were meant to help in the following step, which was the exfoliating of skin over the entire body with the help of a rough black glove. This second step was the most labourintensive part of the process, and I was encouraged to scrub myself vigorously from head to toe in order to remove all my dead skin cells. Women usually help each other for exfoliating their backs, and in some hammams it was possible to ask one of the female attendants to help with this exercise in exchange for a small fee. However, in hammams like the one in Amina’s quarter, most women worked on themselves, diligently and with intention, using gestures and movements that echoed those they employed in scrubbing their houses. Shrouded in steam, some women exchanged words with their friends or neighbours, but mostly the atmosphere was not the boisterous, socially effervescent one that Ossman hints at in her narrative, and which risks falling in the trap of many Orientalist depictions of the hammam as sensuous sociality (2002, p. 183). There were few points in the cleaning ritual at which the body was not performing some form of work, either on itself or on another. Amina, like other women who came with their children or other family charges to the baths, had to perform not only her own cleaning ritual but that of her sister as well. After the exfoliation, she would use the water in the pails to rinse herself off and proceed with washing her own and her sister’s hair, shaving, lathering themselves with shower cream, and repeating the rinsing several times. In between moments of handling her own body or that of her sister, she would rinse away the dirty water towards the drain in the middle of the room, detangle hairs from her comb or replace scrubbing gloves, soaps and other such things in the area around us. In this way, each woman created a bubble of watery activity around herself in the hammam, while constantly managing the boundaries of this space so that one did not splash water on one’s neighbour, or allow tufts of hair to flow onto someone else’s bathmat. Squatting on the tiny plastic stools fit for a toddler, or sitting with one’s legs spread out on a bathmat, body posture in the hammam also had to be managed to ensure modesty, which meant that comfort was not always a priority. After the final rinse, we would move into the first room of the hammam, where we could put on our bathrobes or towels and slowly exit into the much cooler air of the changing room. As we got dressed and pulled a woolly djellaba over our clothes, Amina would always remark on the smoothness of our ‘new’ skin. As soon as we returned to her house she would bring out the blankets, and at 10.00 am on a Sunday we would be ready to take a long nap as a reward for the thorough cleaning performed on our bodies.

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Work performed so laboriously on the body that one requires rest afterwards can be seen as a form of what the formidable Mary Douglas has identified as the prophylactic practices necessary for ‘ordering’ the world through the separation of matters deemed polluting, as a way of ‘articulating the body’ and reaffirming its being (2002, p. 159). Female bodies, in particular, have been traditionally associated with polluting substances and the fluid and ‘slimy’ aspects of corporeal excreta, and therefore require specialized forms of cleansing rituals (Dürr and Jaffee 2010). But beyond the hygienic aspects of hammam rituals, such weekly visits also functioned as a way of reassuring the community that one was alive and well. Oftentimes, when walking through the streets of Hay Mohammadi with Amina, female neighbours would stop and ask her if she had been ill since they had not seen her at the hammam that week. The hammam trip was also seen as a way of maintaining one’s health, and the common greeting for those who had just exited the baths was a hearty ‘Bi sahatek!’ (To your health), a greeting that was also meant to ward off the evil eye, something one was supposedly more vulnerable to when freshly cleansed. Neither Amina nor any of my other close female interlocutors whom I accompanied on visits to the hammam attached solely hygienic or symbolic/ religious significance to their cleansing rituals. As the considerable literature on bodily ritual and pollution has described for other locales (see Das 1992, Burke 1996, Nguyen and Peschard 2003), such cleaning routines and their skilful execution produced an entirely different performance register, an ‘ordinary’ ritual that contained and blended ideas about hygienic concerns with various other meanings and associations. In fact, when prompted by my questions, Amina was quick to emphasize the pragmatic aspects of the hammam visit, such as the cosmetic benefits of exfoliating once a week and the need to give her sister a thorough bath, given the lack of proper facilities in their own home.

Gendered skill On that particular day in April when I was due to go out into town with Asma and Amina, in order to speed up our departure for downtown, I insisted that Amina let me hang up the laundry. As she agreed, I noticed that she was washing her jeans by hand in a large plastic tub placed next to the washing machine. Confused, I asked if the machine was broken. Glancing sheepishly in the direction of Asma and myself, Amina said: ‘No. I just prefer to wash these by hand.’ Without much reflection, I protested by saying she was ruining her hands and her jeans would be cleaner if she washed them in the machine. Not to mention, it would save her

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time. Offering various reasons for her laundry washing habits, Amina concluded, almost defiantly: ‘I don’t mind. Ana hadga! One day, when I’ll get married, inchallah, I would like nothing more than to stay at home and clean all day.’ Ana hadga can be roughly translated as ‘I am resourceful’, but few people stop at that when defining the term. Bringing to mind Luce Giard’s ‘creative ingenuity’ (1998, p. 159), hadga seems to encompass the myriad different abilities needed and aspired to by any good homemaker. When I pushed for a more precise definition, Asma intervened and impatiently explained that hadga is simply someone who is good at everything, but foremost, a woman who is ready for marriage. Attempts to find any reference to the term in the scholarly literature came up short. Conversely, an internet search yielded an abundance of online discussion groups and blogs overwhelmingly dedicated to swapping recipes and home-keeping tips. One such online blog authored by a woman from Marrakech defined the hadga woman thus: ‘She’s a hardworking, thrifty, creative, resourceful woman whose work stands testament to her character. The triumvirate she rules by is cleanliness, thrift and nourishment.’7 According to the blog author, the set of skills and practices that determine a woman’s quality as hadga could be interpreted as unnecessarily laborious, as my own reaction attested. This was particularly visible in relation to cleaning activities. While embraced in other areas of life, modern electronic equipment was rarely used in the process of house cleaning. With the exception of salons and sleeping rooms, most house floors were tiled in Hay Mohammadi. Bending at the waist, Amina – like many other women – would stoop forward and mop the floor by working a piece of cloth called a jeffaf with her bare hands from one end of the house to the other. In order to clean the carpeted areas in the salon, a special small hand brush was used in a similar body pose to remove the crumbs and lint that had accumulated over time. Despite being described as skilled resourcefulness, hadga was seldom the preferred term for qualifying work done outside the home, or for that matter work done by a man. In order to impress upon me the aberration of a man doing housework, one day Amina pointed out one of her neighbours to me. Standing in the doorway of his house, thin and grey-haired, the man was wearing a wornout apron with a flower pattern. Giggling with mischief, and hinting that he might suffer from a psychological disability, Amina claimed that everyone in the neighbourhood was in the habit of deriding him because of his effeminate behaviour. By suggesting that men who do housework were an aberration, Amina discredited all my attempts to suggest that there was nothing abnormal about men’s participation in domestic work. ‘Heshouma!’ (Shame!), she would

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chide me, when I told her my partner cooked dinner for us frequently. She would then add, in what became an almost ritualized exchange we had on the topic: ‘He should never even get near the kitchen! Poor man.’ Amina admitted that in theory it would be nice if men and women shared domestic work. However, she personally seemed resigned to what she saw as the status quo: ‘That will never happen in Morocco. Men here are just not like that.’ This dramatically gendered vision of domestic labour was evidently less fixed in practice, and I was often present when unmarried men helped with house chores. Hamid, who was in his late twenties and lived a few streets away from Amina, told me that when his mother travelled to visit relatives, ‘of course’ he and his brother cooked their own meals and did the cleaning. When he would get married though, he added, he would prefer that his wife took care of the domestic work. Joanne Hollows urges us ‘to think about how domestic practices do not take place within a pre-given entity such as “the family”’, and invites us to consider the gendering of housework as produced, performed (2008, p. 60), and, I would add, constantly renegotiated as well as potentially deployed to accumulate particular forms of symbolic power and capital. While this can cut across classes, working-class women might tactically deploy the image of ‘family’ and ‘hearth’ as a way of claiming a privileged position ‘against the injuries of class’ (Williams 2000, p. 157). As feminist scholars and anthropologists have argued elsewhere (Martens and Scott 2005), the designation of the domestic realm as women’s realm should not be exclusively viewed as a form of subjugation but might also function as a way of boundary creation through which women get a sense of empowerment and control by excluding men from that space (hooks 1991). Amina’s acceptance of what she presented to me as the status quo is revealing of the manner in which she perceived her own position in her community, and then chose to leverage her skills as a hadga woman for the purpose of amassing a particular form of locally recognized cultural capital. Moreover, through its strict association with women and the domestic realm, hadga became one of the ways in which an ideal, desirable aspect of femininity and home were produced. On many occasions I saw young girls commended for their help in the kitchen or with cleaning by an enthusiastic ‘tebarak Allah ʿalik, nti hadga’ (God bless you, you are hadga), which contributed to the reinforcement and inculcation of this ideal (cf. Ghannam 2013). As any ideal, however, that of being hadga was by no means static or unanimously practised and embraced. Visiting Asma at her home in one of the industrial quarters that skirted Hay Mohammadi to the north, I tested out my understanding of the concept by

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asking if a hadga woman was supposed to leave the kitchen in some disarray, with unwashed dishes piled up in the sink – as happened to be the case with Asma’s kitchen at that moment. In the playful manner that defined our relationship, she wondered if I was concerned about her husband noticing. Then she followed up, her mirth barely contained: ‘Clearly he didn’t marry me for my cleaning skills.’ As we laughed together, Asma went on to enumerate the many ways in which she fell short of the hadga ideal. In fact, Asma and Khalid were one of several married couples I knew in Hay Mohammadi who shared the burden of housework in a seemingly effortless manner that juggled work schedules, social obligations and their own personal disposition to engage in this type of work. Because her husband’s job required that he regularly work night shifts, I often stayed over at Asma’s home, sometimes joined by two of her younger cousins who were in the habit of visiting as a way of evading parental supervision at home. On one such occasion she decided to prepare a tagine stew for our dinner. Leaving the meal to cook slowly in the kitchen, we sat down in the salon to chat. Distracted by our conversation, we were reminded of our meal when the scent of burning reached us from the kitchen. This episode became a running joke that would be brought up whenever her siblings or friends teasingly questioned Asma’s cooking skills. In fact, Asma was a perfectly capable cook, and often prepared food at her mother’s house and during special feasts. However, growing up in a large family as the second youngest of eleven siblings, Asma managed to exempt herself from some of the homemaking tasks her older sisters had to learn and perform from an early age: ‘When I was young, I played outside with the boys all day. I was not interested in learning to cook, and clean, and all those things. My older sisters did all that.’ Indeed, the option of being hadga or exceptionally skilled in homemaking and home-keeping practices seemed to intersect in revealing ways with one’s socio-economic and generational position inside the community. Recently married at the time of my fieldwork, working full time and without any children at that point, Asma did not feel the need or pressure to demonstrate her housekeeping skills to anyone. Furthermore, she had the relative luxury of living in close proximity to her own family and her in-laws, as well as having most of her older siblings settled in Hay Mohammadi. Mealtimes were thus spent in a careful balancing act either at her mother’s house or at her in-laws, while evening social visits would often take us to her older sisters’ homes for tea and cake. For dinner, Asma and Khalid would sometimes go to a local affordable pizza place, or meet their friends from university in downtown Casablanca. Other times, Asma claimed that they would just throw together a simple

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meal of bread and eggs. Although both Amina and Asma were employed full time, they both earned the minimum wage8 and owned no significant savings or property. Asma and her husband’s rent alone was the equivalent of Asma’s salary. However, Asma’s husband and their extended family acted as a support network and could provide her with necessary social and economic capital in case of hardship (cf. Bourdieu 1977). Amina was considerably more vulnerable in the face of contingency and, owing to that, felt that she needed to develop and sustain alternative forms of care and support. Not having the benefit of a similar network, Amina pragmatically decided to become a resourceful, skilled homemaker, which she felt would ensure her well-being both in the present and in the future, when a suitor would hopefully appreciate her skills and set up a household with her. Beyond the production of a particular form of locally recognized capital, such intense preoccupation with the skilful ordering and management of the household simultaneously also addressed the presence of the un-homely, functioning as ‘unarticulated efforts [. . .] to overcome feelings of the uncanny, to render the uncanny less visible or less effective, to pacify its affects’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 186). Thus, in the same way that dirt might be omnipresent ‘matter out of place’ in need of ordering (Douglas 2002 [1966], p. 36), so the uncanny, or the un-homely, needs to be constantly contained and accounted for through skilful everyday routines. This constant accounting for the uncanny, be it due to personal loss, historical trauma or economic precarity, is something that feminist scholars have emphasized with regards to the process of homemaking. Dayaratne and Kellett (2008, p. 66) argue that homemaking is a process that ‘continues and consolidates itself with each event of significance that adds to the sense of home by overcoming the obstacles which might diminish it’. Those who shared Asma’s relative fortune of being part of an extended network of kin and shared-caring arrangements needed to dedicate fewer personal resources to overcoming potential obstacles. For inhabitants like Amina, however, mundane acts like successfully fighting a rent increase, living with the spectre of historical and personal trauma, and finding the resources to care for self and others, all illustrate the effortful and considerable affective work that is entailed in making a home on Casablanca’s margins.

Conclusion When considered closely, the home as both material reality and social institution emerges as a near-perfect ‘total social fact’ (Mauss 2016 [1925]) for the way it

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indexes socio-economic status while collecting under its roof occasionally contradictory affective, moral and legal-political dimensions (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2012). At the same time, homes and the ways in which they organize the arduous, gendered labour of social reproduction are not givens, but emerge in historically situated ways as socio-spatial arrangements in which the experience of dwelling is as much an embodied as a politically constituted set of practices. The embodied performance of seemingly mundane homemaking practices discussed in this chapter can be seen as one fragment from a wider commentary on the unending work entailed in maintaining a dignified life in the economically precarious context of Casablanca’s margins. While preceding chapters have looked at the representational and discursive practices that contributed to the production of the negative image associated with the social spaces of Hay Mohammadi, in this chapter I have sought to provide a more intimate look at how inhabitants themselves wrestle with material limitations and ongoing contingency. By looking beyond immediate concerns with hygiene and aesthetics, the material gleaned with Amina and Asma’s help reveals the complex and multifaceted nature of what is entailed in creating and sustaining a sense of well-being through the configuration and upkeep of domestic spaces on the urban margins. In Hay Mohammadi, both people and places have been maligned for decades by elites and political actors who at times withdrew their care from the inhabitants while at others punished them outright only to release them into the arms of the destabilizing effects of economic liberalization and precarious living conditions. Against this background, well-being becomes a delicate balancing act between pragmatic needs and ‘silent acts of kindness’. Read in the context of the existing literature on domesticity in the region, home and the process of dwelling in Hay Mohammadi, I thus argue, take diverse forms, some more felicitous than others. For women especially, homemaking is an ambivalent process, marked by happy memories as well as histories of violence, defined and experienced as equally empowering and alienating. As Amina’s biographic account revealed, these aspects are strongly inflected with classed experiences of place, and powerfully influenced by both the actual presence of economic insecurity and the more diffuse anxieties about material scarcity – affects that are not equally shared among all inhabitants. As a consequence, feeling at home on the margins of Casablanca is oftentimes achieved through ambivalent caregiving and caretaking practices. In a context in which the neighbourhood has become synonymous with state-inflicted trauma, and current degradation and poverty are seen as its side effects, learning how to inhabit one’s home in the face of constant contingency becomes a cherished skill

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– a skill that often involves not only containing but also reproducing and caring for the elements of un-homeliness in one’s life. These elements can include personal grief alongside historical trauma and the unending burden of securing livelihoods through skilful routines. I suggest that some of these elements of care, such as the cleaning of home and body, are ways in which those in lower-class positions learn to ‘make do’ with degradation and uncertainty. Their practices are as much about reasserting control as they are part of assuming the limitations of life, doing the best one can and waiting for new possibilities to emerge. Deployed on the level of everyday life, the skilful managing of caregiving and homemaking manifested by Amina invested otherwise mundane routines with the power to stabilize a chaotic present, which consequently allowed her to live with dignity. I contend that Amina’s example speaks beyond her own personal circumstances and those of her community, to the challenges faced by marginalized urban dwellers in Morocco and elsewhere who must cohabit with the darker and more desolate parts of their lives and their homes. The ethnographic account I provided here reveals some of the ways in which those who inhabit the urban margins are forced to recast their living conditions and cope with constraints through the subtle reworking of available forms of gendered skill and care. This exploration of care on the margins of the city ultimately forces us to rethink concepts such as home, well-being and morality, while acknowledging the burden of social and domestic reproduction placed on lower-class women.

5

The future on/of the margins Relocations, aspirations and emergent mobilities

Throughout the period of my fieldwork, it became increasingly evident that the transformations affecting both Casablanca’s margins and its wider urban landscape were intimately linked in the lives of my interlocutors with a process of imaging and imagining the future. This future seemed to always be just around the corner, and could often be glimpsed from a position of physical movement. Riding the bus or sitting in the crowded backseat of a shared taxi, Casablancans were confronted with it daily. Adorning the tops and sides of buildings, large advertisements announced the next phase of the most recent ‘dream home’ realestate project (Figure 5.1). Accompanied by a rising number of ‘megaprojects’ designed by starchitects like Christian de Portzamparc (Casablanca’s new Grand Theatre) or Zaha Hadid (Rabat’s new Opera House), these visions were meant to signal the city’s aspiration of establishing itself as a global business and financial hub (Aljem and Strava 2020). Closer to home, glossy renderings of future shopping malls and amusement parks greeted passers-by from construction site fences, while behind these Potemkin displays of ‘not-yet’ places, construction stagnated in a post-2008 world. Portable versions of these images were also inescapable. Amina began collecting the flyers handed to her daily on the street, amassing in this way a small archive of the most recent affordable-housing projects dotting Casablanca’s growing periphery (Figure 5.2). At mealtimes with Asma’s family, while we were seated in front of the TV or listening along to the radio, Arabic and French-language jingles asked their audiences if they were finally ready to escape the noise of the city and live in the luxurious peace and quiet of a new, gated suburban community. Judging by the exclusivity signalled by many of these visions, the price-tags attached to them and the aesthetics employed to portray them, the reservoir of images from which aspirations of future social and geographical mobility could be assembled appeared to be predominantly aimed at upper- and middle-class

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Figure 5.1  Architect’s rendering of the planned upscale quarter of Anfa and the ‘Tours Vegetales’, advertised as Casablanca’s future elite residence in 2014. Source: Yasmine Real-Estate.

consumers, and therefore elusive for the majority of my interlocutors. Set against the backdrop of accelerating slum-relocation projects and the deterioration of low-cost housing quarters dotting Casablanca’s periphery, these images begged the question: Who produced them and in what kind of political and socioeconomic ecology did they exist? What sort of future could the inhabitants of Hay Mohammadi hope for, and what sort of images coloured their hopes and dreams? How did people like Asma and Amina respond to the visions of urban ‘hyper-modernity’ (cf. AlSayyad 2014) enticing them from these omnipresent advertisements? And what would the future look like for those who could not afford the billboard visions? As forced relocations of informal communities in and around Hay Mohammadi continued apace, and as cheaply built mass housing mushroomed along the city’s periphery bringing with it longer and more logistically complex commutes, mobility, in all its polysemic richness, emerged as a crucial dimension of everyday life for those on the lower-end of the socio-economic spectrum. At the level of official discourse, Casablanca’s (and Morocco’s) recent projects of mobility have been formulated in progressive terms that champion better ‘social integration’ and aim to support economic advancement of communities that have been historically disenfranchised, as is the case of Hay Mohammadi

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Figure 5.2  Examples of flyers Amina collected in 2013–14, advertising new housing developments on Casablanca’s periphery. They all include basic information such as price per unit (250,000 dirhams, roughly £23,000) and contact information for the real-estate developer.

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Figure 5.2  (Continued).

(CASATRAM 2013). Situated under this banner, though not explicitly connected, programmes ranging from a national slum-eradication campaign, to low-cost ‘new-town’ construction, and the modernization of public transport, offer a grounded view of how such discourses are materialized in the lives of lower-class inhabitants. As I neared the end of my fieldwork, the last dwellings of Karyan Central’s bidonville were on the point of being bulldozed, marking almost six decades since the first colonial attempts at slum-eradication. I thus open with a close account of one family’s experience of forced relocation from the karyan to the outer edges of Casablanca, shedding light on how such projects – while ostensibly well intended – managed to produce new forms of social exclusion. In the second part, I explore the experience of those who might aspire to voluntary relocation as a way of achieving social mobility, for whom challenges emerged in the form of tense negotiations between local moral ideas and financial constraints that structured both the image and location of their dreams. Lastly, I document the reactions to the city’s first tramway network. Inaugurated around the same time as the karyan’s erasure, new and ‘clean’ means of physical mobility were championed as an effort to remodernize transportation and prefigure the future. The tramway’s incipient success, however, also brought the city’s social fragmentation into starker relief, as I’ll show, occasioning renewed discussions

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about belonging and the right to a modern, urban experience for those on the lower-end of the city’s socio-economic spectrum. Drawing on Tim Cresswell’s approach to mobility as an ‘entanglement of physical movement, representations, and practices’ (2009, p. 18), in this closing chapter I consider how voluntary as well as forced home relocations and their connection with the inauguration of the new tramway network can shed light on important aspects of what the future might entail for Casablanca’s expanding margins. In doing so I contrast ‘mobility’ – which can be equated to the prescriptive model envisioned by the Moroccan state and distributed through a network of traditional as well as new media – with ‘mobilities’. I believe the latter offers a way of recognizing the multiplicity of such experiences, be they of daily travel, home relocations or aspirations for the future, as they are influenced, constrained and, ultimately, co-productive of significant spatial and socioeconomic distinctions.

‘Cities without Slums’: From marginalization to the periphery In mid-2014, towards the end of my fieldwork, I was on my way to visit Hind and her family in the bidonville-resettlement neighbourhood of Lahraouiyine. We had met many times throughout the previous year, and common friends mentioned her name every time the topic of dismantling the Karyan Central quarter came up. After many brief conversations, Hind invited me to meet her family, offering to give me a detailed account of growing up in the karyan, and talk about their recent relocation to Lahraouiyine, ten kilometres outside Casablanca’s municipal boundaries. In order to reach the resettlement site, I had to take a shared grand taxi from the stand at the Kissaria, the covered clothes market in the centre of Hay Mohammadi, adjacent to the debris of the slowly disappearing bidonville. After enquiring which section of what seemed like a sea of large white vehicles were the cabs heading to my destination, my wait was not long. Very soon the six passengers necessary to make a ride had squeezed inside – two in the seat next to the driver plus four in the back – and the old Mercedes Benz lurched out of the parking lot. Speeding in order to make as many trips as possible that day, the driver swerved in and out of lanes in a manner that I had grown to recognize as practised rather than reckless. After leaving the last homes of Hay Mohammadi behind us, to my right I could spot a thin slice of ocean before dipping down into the main artery that separates

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Casablanca’s margins from its more recent periphery. As we drove in a southeast direction from the city, we were flanked on one side by a wall of buildings resembling the stacked architecture of Hay Mohammadi’s 8 × 8 homes, while to the other side the open space of what was once agricultural land stretched dustygreen into the distance. New housing developments were clustered together at intervals, looking vulnerable, exposed and unfinished. Turning left after a while, we drove past the city’s new abattoirs and Marché de Gros (wholesale produce market), whose presence could be smelled from afar. We passed the former village of Lahraouiyine, now only a handful of homes in an advanced state of material decay. My destination was Lahraouiyine Al-Jdid (New), the recent extension of this quickly disappearing forefather. The glistening ribbon of brand-new tarmac bypassing the village stretched in front of the taxi like a welcoming carpet. Towering at the entrance to the yet unfinished neighbourhood, a billboard from the state Housing Agency Al Omrane1 declared in French: ‘The right to housing, the right to happiness’ (Le droit au logement, le droit au bonheur). The Lahraouiyine housing project is one of several relocation sites developed under the aegis of the ‘Cities without Slums’ programme (Villes sans bidonvilles – hereafter VSB) launched by the Moroccan state in 2003, in the aftermath of the deadly suicide bombings that took place that same year. Although there had been several previous attempts by the state to address the situations of bidonvilles across Morocco, the Casablanca bombings appeared to catalyse a new approach towards informal housing and the urban poor (see Chapter 1). This shift, while still inscribed in and shaped by the history of colonial and post-colonial approaches to urban governance, entailed the incorporation of internationally promoted ideas of participatory planning. Presented by the state as, first and foremost, an initiative for social integration,2 both local and foreign experts consider the VSB program a successful model, to the extent that in 2010 it won UN-Habitat’s Award for ‘best practices’ in the field of ‘settlements upgrading’.3 The way in which the Moroccan population perceived the VSB programme, however, was mired in confusion and misconceptions, often circulated through popular rumours. Significantly, those outside of the targeted communities understood the programme to be a handout to the poor. Several of my upperand middle-class interlocutors in Casablanca were convinced that the state was distributing new homes for free to what they considered to be lazy, unworthy populations. This view was supported by a common trope, circulated in the form of rumours, which held that slum inhabitants were actually richer than they claimed. During a casual conversation about my research with an acquaintance

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living in a middle-class neighbourhood adjacent to Hay Mohammadi, the following outburst took place: ‘You know, some of those people have millions (of dirhams) stashed under their mattress. They hide it, and wait for the state to provide!’ Having been confronted with this myth several times before, I responded that I was familiar with this story but found it implausible. Not wanting to concede the point, my interlocutor retorted: ‘Mumkin (perhaps), but you know, I see the girls from that bidonville next door every day and they all wear Zara [clothes]!’4 As Luise White has poignantly observed, rumours can ‘be a source of local history that reveals the passionate contradictions and anxieties of specific places with specific histories’ (2000, p. 83). In Morocco, these rumours indexed local and class-inflected anxieties closely linked to ideas about social distinction and belonging, which have become dramatically spatialized through decades of urban (mis)planning and improvised dwelling practices, as previous chapters documented (cf. Zhang 2010). Such suspicions were amplified by the lack of clarity inherent in the way the VSB programme was run. Due to the technical language used to describe the programme as well as the intricate arrangements it attempted to implement (for example, lotteries for assigning resettlement plots), few people actually had a clear understanding of its steps and mechanisms, including slum dwellers. Interviewing a handful of local and regional administrators and planners involved in the VSB programme since 2008 gave me a slightly more accurate though by no means complete view of the process. In part this was owing to the fact that until 2003 several bidonvilles-clearance mechanisms and procedures had been in place.5 The variety of approaches reflected the recognition that not all bidonvilles were the same and thus required tailored interventions. According to a planner in the Ain Sebaa-Hay Mohammadi arrondisement, when the VSB programme was awarded the UN-Habitat prize, it practically led to the standardization of approaches across Morocco. In practical terms, this has entailed the creation of a public–private assemblage of contractors and local administrators, who handle everything, from an initial census in order to assess relocation eligibility to the assigning of relocation plots.6 The regional authorities make land available from the state’s public reserve, the creation of which has contributed to the dispossession of other vulnerable communities (Berriane 2017). The resettlement scheme is premised on the fact that each new relocation plot will house two households from the slum in what is called an R+3. This entails a standard 64 square metre construction, with a ground floor (rez-de-chaussée in French, hence R) and three upper floors. The programme pairs two households with a real-estate developer, who is charged with the

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construction of the new building and takes ownership of the first two floors. The state subsidizes 40 per cent of the construction costs, reducing each household’s contribution to the equivalent of £3,000 in 2014. Upper- and middle-class interlocutors were often incredulous when confronted with this information, with a few maintaining that the cost was low enough to be considered a handout. But many karyan dwellers struggled to find these resources. In the absence of personal funds, the programme connects families with micro-credit lenders or local banks through a special government-guaranteed funding mechanism (FOGARIM).7 Research into the success rates of the VSB programme has shown that for many of the relocated dwellers this has led to unsustainable debts and further impoverishment through the imposition of new financial burdens (cf. Le Tellier 2009, pp. 106–10, Bogaert 2013, Beier and Strava 2020). To illustrate the ways in which these structural conditions actually play out in the lives of affected communities, I draw at length from Hind’s and her family’s ‘housing biography’. Her account, while not open to generalization, reveals how the specificities of slum dwellers’ lives become erased through the relocation process and masked by a technocratic language which hides the repeated movement, loss and unmaking of homes experienced by those targeted for resettlement (cf. Baxter and Brickel 2014). In Hind’s case there had been several homes her family had been forced to unmake and move out of. At the time of my fieldwork, Hind had been teaching Arabic literacy classes for children and adults at a community centre in Hay Mohammadi for close to four years. In her late twenties, Hind’s enthusiasm and energy were barely contained when she spoke about her work. Whenever I ran into her, she would stand out in what I came to recognize as her signature outfits. Always matching her headscarf with the rest of what she was wearing, she would walk in like a pastel-coloured breeze in her long skirts, all bright smiles and large brown eyes. Her demeanour was no different on the day of my visit. As she welcomed me with tea and sweets, Hind began to narrate the story of her life in the karyan in a matter-of-fact tone, even cheerful at times. Without making light of the situations described, she seemed to treat her experience as ordinary rather than exceptional or pitiable. Her story is one of many that speak against commonly held stereotypes used to describe and vilify karyan dwellers in Morocco: We moved to the karyan in 1994. Before that we lived in the medina qadima (old town), in a big old house. But there was some trouble, a fight with the extended family over our inheritance, so we had to leave. My mother took us – my brother, three sisters, and myself – and moved to Hay Mohammadi, you know, Karyan

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Central, in a beraka.8 When we moved there from the medina we didn’t know anybody. We rented the beraka from a man and brought all our things. We had never been to Hay Mohammadi before. We were welad al medina (children of the downtown) and we thought everyone was dangerous, and we would have to be very careful. In the medina we had had everything we wanted. It was a shock moving to the karyan. When we brought our things, furniture, and carpets, and kitchen things, and people in the karyan saw them, they started calling us gaour (foreigner), because they had never seen such things! Back then you couldn’t get everything you can now in Hay Mohammadi, so they were behind in a way.

While Fatiha, another interlocutor who had been resettled in Lahraouiyine from the karyan, had told me she had lived there ‘since the day she opened her eyes onto the world’, Hind’s story points to the variety of circumstances through which people come to take up residence in a Moroccan bidonville. It also touches on the social stigma associated with being a bidonville inhabitant, and the ill fame that was associated with the area. When narrating their habituation to life in the karyan, Hind’s account contradicts common stereotypes by highlighting the apparent incongruities and ambivalence in people’s moral behaviour, but also the role that an everyday routine played in anchoring their displaced family, and normalizing their situation: We adapted. My siblings and I went to school and then straight back home. School and home, that was it. We made sure never to stray from the path. Us girls, we walked with our eyes to the ground, not making any eye contact with any of the people. We didn’t know any of them, but they all knew us by name very soon. And they looked after us. If some man tried to speak to us on our way to school another man would tell him to leave us alone, that we were Hafida’s daughters and they shouldn’t disrespect us. We were surprised at first, but that is how it was. If my mother would send me with the bread to the oven,9 a boy I had never met before would take it from me and say ‘let me do it, khety (sister)’, and go himself. They tried to protect us (kayhafed elina) because they saw we were honest people. Sometimes we passed people who were drunk (nass skeran), you know, who just sat in the street and drank all day. But when we walked by they would hide the bottle from us [making a gesture with her hand]. No one ever caused us trouble.

When I asked about the potential physical dangers or risks of living in the karyan, Hind claimed that life was rather normal, no more dangerous than in any other low-income neighbourhood. There was one dramatic event, though, that stood out in her memory as well as that of others I had talked to:

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One night there was a big fire. This was in 1996, I think. We were asleep and the neighbours came to wake us, told us to get out quickly. I still remember how the tin roof was glowing red above our heads and it was very hot everywhere. We ran outside in our pyjamas and left all our things behind. The whole night you could hear all over the karyan the butagas exploding.10 Boom! Boom! One after another. By the morning almost everything had burned down. We lost all our things – the nice things people had envied us for, and had to start à zéro (from scratch). Someone said a disabled man who was distilling alcohol in his beraka had caused [the fire].

Hind could also remember other, smaller fires taking place after that. She also recalled a fire caused by a woman’s butagas, and another one in 2005 that was sparked by faulty electricity wires.11 But there were also instances where fire appeared as what Kerry Chance (2015) calls in the case of South Africa, a way of ‘securing techno-institutional claims’: Some people claimed the fires were not an accident. Sometimes we would be warned ahead of time. Someone would go down the alley a day or two before and tell people ‘if you have things that are dear to you, put them away’, and then we would know something was going to happen. The police found out at one point, and they would try and capture those who spread the rumour before a fire would happen. But people also said ‘if we don’t set fire no one will ever pay attention to us’. And you know after the first big fire the government built the Hassan II projects and relocated some of the families.

While the ‘Hassan II’ housing projects were, indeed, built in 1998 to rehouse a section of the karyan, the plans for this relocation had first been elaborated in the late 1960s. Stalled by corruption and speculation, 2121 new apartments out of a projected 10,000 were finally completed in 1999, out of which only half were destined for the karyan inhabitants.12 As a consequence, Hind and her neighbours lived for years in a constant state of anxiety and cautious expectation for what they were led to believe would be their impending relocation, and perhaps better living standards. Hind could, therefore, not remember the exact date when they were informed of their final relocation: Perhaps it was 2004? We always heard rumours that the government was going to move us. When they started this project [the VSB program] the caïd13 and some other people started coming to the karyan and writing people down. They made a list of who lived where and how many in each family (ʿayla).

When asked if it was during one of these census-taking operations that they were informed of the project and what it would entail, Hind claimed that the

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representatives who took down this information did not communicate with them about further steps. Rumours, thus, also came to dominate how Hind and her neighbours grasped the slum-relocation programme. The representatives I had spoken with justified this lack of communication in several ways. While some explicitly disregarded the need to inform ‘ignorant populations’, several claimed that public knowledge of specific relocation plans would invite corruption and speculation (cf. Doshi 2013). This, of course, ran counter to the officially espoused spirit of ‘participatory relocation’, which was further evidenced in the operationalization of the programme’s accompagnateur social or social worker. Upon pressing local administrators to say more about this role, they were invariably vague in describing the specific work entailed by the position, many of which had been contracted out to various technical consulting firms. My own naïveté caused me to picture a benevolent figure, visiting the slum regularly, providing clarifications and counsel to the families they were supposed to ‘accompany’ throughout the potentially distressing relocation process. In reality, the accompagnateur’s job was enacted twice in the lifetime of a relocation project: in the very beginning, when their task was to take down the identification details of the karyan dwellers, and at the very end, when the inhabitants had been assigned new plots at the relocation site. For their final task, the accompagnateurs visit the family in order to take a photo of their shack, and are legally required to witness the physical process of its dismantling. Hind concurred: When they finally came and took a photo of our home we had to tear it down that same day. Then your developer has to pay rent for you somewhere else, while he builds the new home. So, we went and lived in a new place while we waited for him to complete the house. But you know, these people, they don’t just have to build your home and my home. They win contracts from maybe twenty people from the karyan. It took a long time for him to finish. He still has many unfinished homes. After the six months expired we had to move again and pay for the rent ourselves.

Although the VSB programme’s legal provisions prescribe fines for cases in which the developer fails to complete the project in a timely manner, all parties agreed that six months was not sufficient time to finalize a building project and that any legal recourse would only amount to further futile expenses. Eventually, Hind and her family moved into the new home, although much work remained to be done. They arranged to be connected to the water and electricity network and decided to complete the remaining work on their own. As per the R+3 specifications,

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Hind, together with her mother, unmarried brother and the younger sister’s new family took up residence in the second-floor apartment, while her older sister’s family lived on the third floor. The second-floor apartment’s 48 square metres14 were visibly insufficient for accommodating five adults and a young child, but because at the time of the census only one of Hind’s sisters had been married, the rest of them were counted as a single household. As a consequence, Hind and her mother slept in the salon by night, while the younger sister, Fatiha, her husband and their young daughter occupied the room next door. Hind’s unmarried brother lived in the remaining room, which also doubled as a storage room for the family. The minute space allocated for the kitchen in the building plans forced the family to perform much of the cooking in the hallway as well as in the building’s staircase, where a burner connected to a gas canister was stored and used for the preparation of larger meals. When I made a remark about how the household was forced to spill out into the staircase area, Hind chimed in, playfully pointing out it was a good thing her sister lived upstairs. They could therefore treat the space as part of a larger family house, similar to the multigenerational living arrangements of their old home back in the medina. While some of the resettled families reacted to such constraints in more vocal ways (Beier and Strava 2020, pp. 15–17), Hind’s attitude towards the changes brought about by the relocation, though sometimes imbued with a tinge of nostalgia, was framed in pragmatic terms: Some of the people from the karyan didn’t like it here. They said they were haddaryin (urban) and they thought Lahraouiyine was too isolated and rural for them. So, they rented out their homes and moved back into the city. We stayed though. We are adaptable. It’s true that it’s very quiet here, not like in the karyan. There you would leave your door open for the breeze and your neighbours would walk in all the time. By the time they knocked and asked if you were home, they were already in the middle of your room asking: how are you doing and what were you up to? Here it’s different. No one comes, because no one knows each other.

As Hind’s words intimate, this loss of sociality, of comings and goings, carried an ambivalent weight. Subjected to forced relocation by the state, those in Hind’s position often juxtaposed the social liveliness of a former, relatively fixed but ultimately precarious home, with the stillness and diminished sociality caused by this radical move. Hind’s own reaction was determined: ‘You can long for the past, or always prepare for the future and live in your head, but I live fully in the present. It’s the best thing (ahsan haja), because you never know what

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opportunities or challenges might arise.’ Constantly faced with insecurity and aware of their own vulnerability in the face of change they perceived to have little control over, karyan dwellers like Hind and her family developed coping mechanisms which entailed a vivid awareness of the present. The implications for those in similar conditions were that mobility via relocation compelled them to develop an ability to look at contingency as productive, a coping strategy that has been explored elsewhere as a significant shift, and a potentially detrimental one in the everyday politics of resistance, as it discourages mobilization and organized struggle for truly inclusive and participatory approaches.15

Ideal homes: Investing in dreams and securing local moral futures For some inhabitants, however, living in the future allowed them not only to cope with the present but also to give substance to their aspirations. For those who could afford it, investing both financial and physical resources as well as imagination into a future dwelling was one way of securing one’s place in the world, in a context that was perceived by many in Hay Mohammadi, and Casablanca more generally, to be highly contingent and defined by an ‘everyonefor-themselves’ (kul wahed fi rashoum) attitude. During my time in the field, several friends and interlocutors from Hay Mohammadi became involved in the process of purchasing affordable-housing flats, or discussed the options of buying a plot for a self-built home, and eventually moving away from the area. As I fortuitously and repeatedly found myself in the middle of conversations about future homes and affordable real-estate prices, a precise image of what social mobility – and its inevitable entanglement with geographical mobility – meant for my interlocutors in Hay Mohammadi began to take concrete shape. In fact, my closest interlocutors hardly ever discussed the future as an abstract, temporal dimension emanating from the present. Their visions of the ‘not yet’ were strongly anchored in and mediated by the material culture and physical place of an ideal but graspable home. This manner of ‘securing the future in the present’ was done through the piecemeal purchase of furnishings or the accumulation of real-estate information in hard-copy form, as well as the selfconscious selection and appropriation of ‘visions of the future’. In the summer of 2013 Amina told me that she had been painstakingly saving money to buy an apartment and move out of Hay Mohammadi. She asked me to keep this a secret, fearing people in the community might think she was

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sitting ‘on a big pile of money’. Through her participation in a rotating credit association (qra’) Amina had managed to save a small sum that she could use for the various fees involved in securing a bank loan for the purchase. However, the rent control she had so arduously secured (see Chapter 4) still allowed her to save only a fraction of the amount needed to make a down payment on a new flat. Hence, Amina had resumed talking to her estranged sibling and was hoping that, during a family visit for Ramadan that year, she could ask for a loan to help with the costs. In the meantime, Amina secured and assembled her future home in a piecemeal manner, inspired by the images she saw in real-estate ads as well as on the internet. On one of our Sunday outings in the city in June 2013, Amina suggested a quick visit to the downtown department store Alpha 55.16 Taking the escalator to the upper floors, we arrived in the home décor area, where Amina began to browse through the various items on display. Fi dari jdid (in my new home), inchallah, I would like to decorate the salon in purple [fabrics]. You know, I often daydream about how I would arrange everything in my new home. What type of curtains, which decorations. I sometimes look online at Kitea [displays].17 I get ideas about how my salon could look like. Then there is that TV show, have you seen it? Where they go to someone’s house and they re-paint and re-do all the furnishings. I really enjoy watching that!

Amina did not only invest ideas and time into her future home, but would also often play with the arrangement of objects in her current home. This entailed changing the cushion covers in the salon to reflect the seasons – thicker, velvety fabrics for winter, and lighter, easier to wash cotton for summer. The month of Ramadan also spurred interior rearrangements such as moving the TV into the foyer so that Amina could watch her favourite Turkish soap opera while preparing the meal for breaking the fast. On several occasions, she mentioned that she saw these exercises in redecoration as a way of testing ideas for her future, dream home. However, most of the improvements she envisioned, such as a new refrigerator or an entryway mirror, were saved for implementation in the new apartment. Any smaller purchase was also justified as an investment in the future dwelling. Most of these items were acquired during visits to the street markets in other lower-class areas neighbouring Hay Mohammadi. One day, as we were browsing through the crowded abundance provided by sidewalk vendors in one of the city’s oldest market districts, Derb Soltane, Amina stopped to ask for the price of a large tea-serving tray. Displayed on the pavement alongside other kitchenware, the tray’s box claimed it was made in ‘Manshester, England’

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(sic). The seller demanded 200 dirhams (roughly £15), and Amina bargained with him down to 150. Placing her purchase in a bag, and ruefully smiling at me, Amina said: ‘It’s for the new home. It’s not frivolous.’ Amina’s manner of selectively choosing and integrating elements of the home visions the media presented her with into a personal idea of her future home is by no means unique. Her curated investment in certain household objects as a way of assembling her ideal home was underpinned by her practice of ‘window shopping’ as a way to accumulate knowledge and a particular form of cultural capital (cf. Miller 1995, Clarke 1998). By staying in touch with contemporary trends in home furnishing, but ultimately being able to adapt them to her own budget and tastes, Amina’s ways of engaging with the visions circulated in the media ultimately allowed her to feel empowered. Reiterating the idea of the hadga woman discussed previously, in the process of assembling her future home Amina saw herself as a savvy consumer, using her limited resources to achieve the kind of material effect she associated with a middle-class, ‘modern’ household. Nevertheless, this did not mean that she fully embraced the secularinflected visions from which she drew inspiration (Figure 5.2). On a different occasion, after returning from a visit to relatives in the north of Morocco, Amina showed me a blanket she had bought. That same day I had given her a set of curtains as a gift, and we both marvelled at how our purchases matched perfectly without our having coordinated in advance. Amina unrolled the blanket for me to see, and we both appreciated its deep crimson amplified by the soft fleece texture. ‘I will save it for le lit (Fr. the bed) in the new home’, Amina specified. Having spent the night over at her place many times, I knew that at the time and throughout her life, Amina, like many lower-class Moroccans, had been sleeping on the low and narrow sofa cushions that lined her small salon. A bed seemed like an improvement in terms of comfort, so I asked her if she was going to buy one. Hesitating, she said: ‘Well, I would. I might buy a click-clack (futon) instead, because, you know, I can’t really buy a bed.’ Sensing that the meaning of her words was not immediately apparent, she continued: ‘If my relatives were to ever visit me in the new home they would think it’s heshuma (shameful), an unmarried woman with a bed! They would think I’m having an affair with a man, doing bad things. So maybe I’ll buy a click-clack; I can use it as a bed by night and a sofa by day.’ Amina’s statement was a frank reminder of the ways in which homemaking concentrates and weaves together ideas about morality, class and local livelihoods (cf. Vom Bruck 1997, Booth 1999). Evidently, financial means were not the only factor influencing a home move or even furnishing choices for many lower-class people. A combination

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of ideas about morally appropriate behaviour as manifested through furnishing choices, coupled with a lack of physical space, meant that most families of modest means used the salon for sleeping. When extra rooms existed, they were often much smaller than the salon. Furnished in a similar manner, with long, hard cushions lining the walls, they ensured an efficient use of limited space, often accommodating up to five people during the night, but allowing for little of what a Western understanding of private, personal space might entail. Indeed, for many working-class families a bed was synonymous with the act of setting up a family, and I seldom encountered households in Hay Mohammadi where children, young or old, had their own bed. Similarly, the purchase of an apartment away from Hay Mohammadi was also heavily entangled with ideas about matrimony, which Amina’s case as an ostensibly unmarried , but financially independent woman, unsettled in many ways. Amina eventually decided to visit some of the new housing projects built at the end of the new tramway line in the neighbourhood of Annasi. One of her derb neighbours had moved to the area to escape the stifling presence of his in-laws, and he was going to show Amina his family’s apartment as well as the neighbourhood. A taxi driver by profession, Adil, came to pick us up one Saturday morning in the small red Fiat that he drove for work. Fifteen minutes later we were driving past recently built apartment blocks surrounded by dusty paths waiting to be converted to sidewalks. The whole area had something of a frontier air about it. Beyond the buildings, flocks of sheep could be seen grazing. A mosque was under construction, and a cluster of small shops occupied the ground floor of the building nearest the tramway’s terminus. Upon arrival, we first visited the showroom of the real-estate agency, where Amina was given some basic information about the cost of a 48 square metre apartment and the availability in the coming months. Unfortunately, Amina would have to wait for the next phase of development, the representative told her, since all the current housing had been sold out. ‘There’s a great demand. We can hardly keep up!’ said the sales representative, a woman similar in age to Amina, dressed in a navy-blue suit. We then visited Adil’s home, where his wife and three young children greeted us in their sunny salon on the fourth floor of an apartment building similar to the one we had just visited. Showing us around their two-bedroom home, Adil and his wife pointed out some of the things they were dissatisfied with, which were mainly related to the poor workmanship and the minuscule bathroom space. Overall, however, Adil’s wife interjected as we stood in the children’s bedroom, this was a proper place to live in. Her younger sister was recently married and shared a room with her husband and

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his younger siblings. ‘That’s just heshuma (shameful)! A young couple, sleeping next to others!’, she exclaimed and paused to ensure that I had grasped her allusion. As a considerable volume of literature in the anthropology of the home has observed, gender and moral norms are often negotiated and articulated through the inhabiting of new homes (Booth 1999, Cieraad 2006). Unsurprisingly then, the location of a new home in Casablanca, and by extension a place of social belonging, was heavily associated with and influenced by judgements of taste and morality (cf. Salamandra 2004, Zhang 2010). Although seldom expressed in such explicit terms (see other Adil in Chapter 2), the voluntary relocation away from Hay Mohammadi was also considered by many as an opportunity to improve one’s social milieu. Density and the professional occupation of neighbours were two significant factors employed in assessing the desirability of a new locale. Standing in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon after our visit to Annasi, Amina and Asma were heatedly discussing alternative neighbourhoods where Amina might buy an apartment. Asma insisted that Amina look into a new housing development in the Ain Sebaa area: ‘Because you know what kind of people live there? There is a doctor on the floor below you and a lawyer in the apartment next to you. Good, quality people, not just anyone. You will have maximum eight families in the building. A proper, sahih (healthy) atmosphere.’ Through such conversations and negotiations of what ‘proper’, good lives should look like and where they should be anchored in both the physical as well as the social topography of Casablanca, ideas about social mobility became linked to relocation away from the dense, overcrowded spaces of Hay Mohammadi, without necessarily contesting the moral norms of the community. In Amina’s case, these values were embedded in the local social worlds of working-class communities who forced by material limitations aspired to maintain dignified, morally good lives, and in the process reproduce a certain local order. Hence, Amina’s worries about the moral propriety of buying a particular piece of furnishing were not (solely) due to pious idea(l)s but also hinged on a desire to be recognized as acting within, and thus belonging to, her ‘local moral community’ (Kleinman 1999). However, while acknowledging the structuring power of such local moral worlds on individual actors’ behaviours, I am also cautious about suggesting that Amina’s actions were solely motivated by and explained through an adherence to conservative moral norms. Instead, I read Amina’s actions as illustrative of the kind of negotiations of various, at times conflicting, ‘moral registers’ (cf. Schielke 2012) required of those in lower-class positions. These negotiations functioned as an anchor against the contingency of everyday life

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and provided those like Amina with the mooring that, as Cresswell argues, is necessary for sustaining mobility (2010, p. 18).

Mobilities, reparations and aspirational ‘non-places’ While many of the promises that canvassed Casablanca’s urban landscape were considered elusive at best – even by some of its more affluent inhabitants – alongside hyperbolic visions of the future, completed projects also existed (cf. Abrams and Weszkalnys 2013). Although few, they seemed to vouch for those projects still in the planning phase. One example was the Morocco Mall (the largest in Africa) which opened to great acclaim with a performance by the American singer Jennifer Lopez in 2011, while another was the tramway inaugurated in December 2012 (Figure 5.3). Futuristic-looking, glossy red tramcars now slither silently through the city’s once loud and polluted boulevards, linking some of its most destitute neighbourhoods in the east to the lush, exclusive areas hugging the city’s beaches to the west. The first 32-kilometre branch of the line18 was hailed as the lifeline that would bring modern transportation and social integration to an increasingly congested,

Figure 5.3 The new tramway, passing through a lower-class neighbourhood in Casablanca, 2014. Photo by the author.

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crime-ridden and socially fragmented city. If the global development of transportation networks has been closely associated with the ‘compression of space-time’ as a hallmark of the modern age (Virilio 1986), the inauguration of Casablanca’s first tramway line seemed to bring along a slowing of pace. In its first year, the tramway moved at a crawl for fear of the high rate of casualties that a normal operating speed would entail.19 As a new, clean and safe, if not very fast, means of transport, the tramway became much more than just a new way of travelling in the city. Although it has become commonplace in the literature to speak of infrastructures as made visible by breakdown (Star and Ruhleder 1996, cf. Larkin 2013), the tramway could be considered successful on several fronts, ranging from social to environmental, making visible, instead, the ruptures in the city’s social and spatial fabric, as I detail in this section. Spaces of transit have famously been associated by theorists of modernity with images and ideas of sterile and transitory forms of relationing, anonymous and alienated masses, and uprooting from historical and social contexts. Contrary to these views most famously found in the writings of Marc Augé (1995), as the foremost example of the ‘non-places’ central to Casablanca’s current revitalization of modernity, the new tramway quickly became linked to and folded into local histories and struggles emanating from specific places. For example, in my conversations with local inhabitants, the choice of building the first branch of the line through Hay Mohammadi was read as a form of reparation for past crimes (see Chapter 1), and a gesture to finally bring the community back into the urban fold. But the stark contrast with existing forms of transport and local infrastructure also highlighted the deeply classed nature of local mobilities, and provided those of my interlocutors on the lower-end of the socio-economic spectrum with a concrete language for commenting on the very present class differences marking Casablanca’s spaces. In the publicly available documents outlining the decision to invest in the development of a tramway network for Casablanca, the words ‘intégration sociale’ appear multiple times (CASATRAM 2013). Although the primary motivations cited remained concerned with easing traffic congestion and upgrading existing infrastructure, the planners had not neglected the evident need of grappling with the city’s growing socio-spatial fragmentation (see Chapter 1). This preoccupation with using the development and implementation of a ‘modern’ transport network to create a more ‘socially integrated’ city was repeated by the public relations representative of the tramway’s managing company during a formal interview I had arranged in early 2014. From the outset, I was told, the planners had wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to connect the ‘disadvantaged

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areas of the city’ to the more affluent parts on the Ain Diab beachfront – where the Morocco Mall as well as other upscale hotels and shopping establishments are located – as well as ‘to hospitals, public administration and schools’.20 In fact, during the later phases of the planning, I was told, the extension that brought the tramway to the main university campus in Casablanca’s southwest had been added to the original plans as another way of providing a ‘social service’ to the city’s many university students. But as several young interlocutors from Hay Mohammadi told me, the trip took much longer by tramway and service frequency was quite low (a tramway every twenty minutes), which ultimately meant that many remained faithful to the much quicker way of using a shared taxi to get to their courses. Because of these limitations, during the first twelve months of its operation, the tramway seemed to be treated by the city’s inhabitants with a combination of awe and annoyance. Although heavily subsidized through public and private funding, the price of a one-way ticket (6 dirhams, roughly 50 pence) remained out of reach for many of the inhabitants it was meant to serve. Overwhelmingly, my interlocutors from Hay Mohammadi who rode on the tramway seemed to do so on weekends, in order to go to the beach promenade in Ain Diab. As a consequence, during this early stage, the tramway appeared akin to an attraction, in the way one might regard a new ride at a carnival, rather than an everyday means of transport. Although this situation changed visibly in the following years, the tramway has retained traces of this aura for inhabitants on the city’s margins. From my previous experience of living and working in Morocco, I was accustomed to travelling by bus or by shared taxi. However, arriving in Casablanca for fieldwork a month after the opening of the tramway line, I decided to test its convenience for travelling to and from Hay Mohammadi. Comparing the corporeal experience of travelling through Casablanca in these different ways threw the tramway’s mission of urban ‘social integration’ into a different light. After having used the local bus from Hay Mohammadi to get into downtown Casablanca several times and experiencing almost as many attempts by pickpockets on my mostly empty backpack, I was seriously admonished by my closest interlocutors. Sitting with Asma after one such incident in her mother’s home near the Kissaria in Hay Mohammadi (see Chapters 2 and 4), she asked me not to take the bus anymore, and, instead, use either the shared taxis or the tramway, because the bus was simply not safe. Recounting stories about her university days, when she regularly used the bus line serviced by the stop in front of their building, she insisted that buses were no longer a safe or clean way to travel. Not only that, but for pious women, or any women at all,

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Asma insisted, travelling on an overcrowded bus meant exposing oneself to a variety of forms of harassment. In a shared taxi, she explained, people tended to respect women more, by offering them the front seat or seating women together. Ending on a light note Asma said: ‘Nevertheless, given how crowded these shared rides are, you can understand why they are also called the “love taxis” (taxi al-hub)!’ Women were not alone in their apprehension about the myriad threats and corporeal vulnerabilities of using public transport in Casablanca. Several of my male interlocutors also stressed the need to stay vigilant if I chose to travel by bus, offering personal examples of instances when they had been aggressed on public transport. As a consequence, when the tramway’s managing company announced that policemen would ride in and patrol the tramway cars on a daily basis during the first six months after its inauguration,21 it was not surprising to see the unanimous public support with which this decision was received. During a dinner conversation with Asma and her husband, they pointed out how this decision set the Casablanca tramway apart from its counterpart in Rabat, Morocco’s capital, where a similar tramway network had been introduced in 2011. Indeed, many Casablancans found the difference in security measures between the two cities telling. While the tramway in Rabat serviced open platforms where travellers could simply walk across in order to change travel directions, and tickets had to be validated only once they were inside the tramway, the spaces of the Casablanca tramway were by comparison intensely regulated and policed, even before the introduction of plain-clothes officers. For example, in order to gain access to the tramway platforms one had to pass through turnstiles installed at each platform, which also served as the point of ticket validation. Walking across the rails in order to switch trains was not only discouraged but also physically prohibited by security agents who were equipped with whistles and a strong sense of duty. Entrances and exits were strictly labelled, directing the flow of passengers on and off the platform, and a second pair of tramway agents announced the arrival and departure of each tramway train with loud blows of the whistle as a way of socializing pedestrians into traffic vigilance. The tramway’s managing company ostensibly presented these measures as a way of minimizing disruptions as well as casualties, and a necessary step in educating Casablancans about the proper ways of employing this ‘modern’ means of transport. Conversely, nobody had deemed such measures necessary in Rabat. Asma and her husband believed this was because the authorities considered Rabatis to be more cosmopolitan and ‘civilized’, while, in her words, the authorities regarded Casablancans as ‘uneducated ʿaroubiyin’ (peasants).

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The physical barriers were amplified by the confusing indications used to signal where tickets could be purchased and how the tickets should be validated, which did not cater to the less literate. Such policing tactics overwhelmingly singled out passengers who came from lower-class backgrounds and older generations, thus reinforcing the very stereotypes that were thought to legitimate this policing. On several occasions I witnessed tearful exchanges as mothers with prams were trapped in the turnstiles and the machines invalidated their tickets due to a handling error, or elderly women were prohibited from crossing to the opposite platform and, instead, forced to walk the length of a block in order to use the designated ‘entrance’ turnstiles at the opposite end of the platform. Meanwhile, those who came from upper- and middle-class backgrounds were visibly more adept at seamlessly navigating and adapting to the tramway’s confusing rules, becoming well versed in the particular corporeal literacy that it demanded of its users. This ability to be fluent in such corporeal forms of urban literacy and to participate in a local, political economy of gesture functioned as a way of both evincing and reproducing the social status of those engaging in specific forms of mobilities, tramway navigation being just one example (cf. Elyachar 2012, p. 90). By ‘gesture’, I am referring to a wide range of bodily movements, as well as an awareness of what to do with one’s body in the physical and social space of public transportation (cf. Bourdieu on hexis, 1977). For example, confronted with their corporeal and gestural illiteracy in the realm of the tramway, many of my interlocutors from Hay Mohammadi felt frustrated and confessed that when they needed to get somewhere they preferred the much faster and familiar means of the shared grand taxi or the bus. These shaʿabi means of transport were equally suffused with and sustained by their own particular economy of gestures. Beyond the mere mastery of how one pays for one’s ride, and the intricate choreography of pressed bodies on shared rides, an entire repertoire of sign language was used to signal to passing taxi drivers a desired destination.22 Early on in my fieldwork, Asma had tried to teach me this language as we stood by one of the main roads in Hay Mohammadi hoping to hail down a grand taxi. ‘This way the driver knows where you want to go and doesn’t need to slow down and ask’, Asma explained as I made a note of the different hand gestures she performed to signal various destinations in the vicinity of Hay Mohammadi. Being skilled in this rich and locally specific economy of gestures amounted to a certain degree of cultural capital in the environment of Casablanca’s periphery, which the tramway’s system of indication did not value.

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By contrast, the tramway’s use was overwhelmingly inscribed in a logic of leisure and consumption and to a much lesser degree regarded as efficient transportation, a fact that was made evident by how a majority of my interlocutors approached it as a ‘moving space’. Abdeljalil, the president of the neighbourhood jamʿiyya, told me that he had been planning on taking his young daughter to the Morocco Mall to see the aquarium. They would make sure to stop by McDonald’s for ice cream, even though, he insisted, he was generally opposed to frequenting such chain-restaurants. Many of the youth in Hay Mohammadi also told me they mostly used the tramway for weekend outings, because it was ‘a nice, classy way of going into town’. On these occasions they would put on their best clothing and save their pocket money for going to a café, or to enjoy snacks available on the promenade. Amina and I had also created a routine of going to the beach Corniche in Ain Diab every other Sunday. Similar to hundreds of Casablancans from places like Hay Mohammadi, we embarked on the tramway early in the day in order to be able to find a seat, and travelled to the end of the line in Ain Diab. As we stepped out of the soundproofed capsule that had smoothly delivered us there, we were greeted by the shimmering blue ocean framed by swaying palm trees and the overflowing bougainvillea of the neighbourhood villas. The tramway’s terminus sat at a perpendicular angle to the wide, car-jammed boulevard running along the length of the Corniche, but the planners had failed to install a signalled crosswalk for pedestrians. As a consequence, those who arrived by tramway had to wait for a halt in the flow of traffic in order to attempt crossing the road. Mothers with prams had to make a dash for the other side while cars swerved around them, angry horns filling the air. Echoing opinions I had heard in Hay Mohammadi, Amina saw this planning failure as typical of the type of shoddy workmanship she had grown accustomed to from the city’s authorities. Another, perhaps unintended, consequence, Amina suggested, was that it underscored the different positions inhabited by those who arrived in packed tramway cars at the beach on Sundays, and those who impatiently blared their horns at them from their private automobiles. In noting these failures of planning and their perhaps unintended effects, people like Amina appeared to find an opening for articulating the very real but often elusive realities linked to class differences that marked Casablancan urban space. Unsurprisingly, class, in this case, increasingly became indexed not in the mere access to new modes of mobility, but also in the ability to frequent particular spaces without quite literally rubbing shoulders with social ‘others’. Indeed, upper- and middle-class interlocutors, who were in the habit of driving

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to the beach on weekends claimed that since the tramway’s opening the Corniche had been flooded with people who ‘clogged up the traffic’ and made the area more ‘populaire’ (classless, common). The mobility and proximity of social ‘others’ was perceived as disturbing to the taken-for-granted social order (cf. McCallum 2019), and suggested the presence of a tacit struggle over not only material but also symbolic resources, such as the prestige of frequenting a previously exclusive area like the Corniche. Reactions that deplored the area’s ‘popularization’ essentially fed upon the same social anxieties that lent power to urban myths like that of the ‘millionaire karyan dweller’. Significantly, such anxieties hinted at the fragility of the ‘middle-class dream’ that canvassed the city’s billboards, while at the same time underscoring the dramatic yet unaddressed spatialization of class that has occurred in the past decades throughout the city.

Conclusion Homes and imaginaries about homemaking as a form of place-making are central to the future as much as they are to the present. They function as what Cresswell (2010) and Ingold (2004) point to as the necessary moorings of a growingly mobile, and I would add, contingent sense of being in the world. As the home biography of Hind detailed, however, for urban dwellers in precarious positions homemaking often includes the repeated unmaking of home. Be it due to family disputes or state interventions aimed at sanitizing and reordering the urban margins, relocation accounts can reveal important knowledge about the social reproduction of urban spaces and the communities that call them home. They also illuminate the important stakes that are in play when authorities move to fragment and push these communities even farther outside the city. With less destitute dwellers relocating voluntarily in search of affordable housing to similar peripheral areas, new social geographies are emerging on the sprawling margins of Casablanca. As they attempt to secure a dignified life, inhabitants like Amina and Asma develop personal registers of interacting with the visions of upward mobility that canvas everyday spaces, and implicitly index messages about the self-conscious fashioning of social status. However, as the ethnography presented here and in preceding chapters illustrates, the inhabitants of Hay Mohammadi were highly skilful at appropriating and adapting such visions as a way of both engaging with their ongoing marginalization and opening new spaces for securing the future, be

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they real or imagined. As such, participation through a plurality of types of ‘mobility’ enabled inhabitants from Casablanca’s lower-class areas to aspire to improved future lives that corresponded to local moral norms and ideals. Even for those who lacked the resources to attain these ‘elusive promises’, the ability to engage in similar forms of consumption and to appropriate their accompanying imaginaries became a significant means through which to sustain hope and secure the future through the present. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that, by fostering this sense of societal aspiration, national media and real-estate industries participated in the production of new forms of debt extraction from the lower classes. The full effects of this cannot yet be evaluated, but might point towards the emergence of new forms of destitution and structural violence (cf. Stout 2015). This financialization of citizenship and societal belonging – through the promotion of home-ownership and the inclusion of the urban poor into structures of debt creation (Bogaert 2013) – occurred alongside seemingly progressive projects like the inauguration of the new tramway line. The creation of new transportation infrastructure, however, complicated official narratives about inclusion by highlighting the growing chasm between the ‘popular masses’ of the city’s growing periphery and those who were made anxious by their sudden proximity. I argue that these anxieties point towards the vulnerability of the ‘mobility’ model put forth by hegemonic (visual) discourses. Taken in the context of the city’s wider transport infrastructure, the tramway line was seen by the managing company and various urban planners I spoke with as a purely technical solution to the pressing need of ‘modernizing’ public travel in Casablanca. This approach was echoed by the Cities without Slums (VSB) programme, which regarded the presence of bidonvilles as a technical problem in need of a technical solution. Both programmes relied on a certain logic that a particular, yet seductively simplistic, idea of ‘mobility’ would become a motor for social integration if not advancement. In this sense, paying attention to the reactions provoked by the tramway’s emergent impact, as well as the general misconceptions describing the VSB programme as a ‘handout’, can serve to illuminate the obduracy of existing social divides and the capacity of infrastructure to effect ‘unwieldy’ or unanticipated outcomes (Larkin 2008). While the tramway’s mission had been to facilitate a more socially inclusive urban landscape, the first signs of its success were met with apprehension by those who had worked hard to insulate themselves from contact with the maligned lower classes. In the current historical moment, such dynamics and their attendant local expressions are by no means exceptional – a

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fact that is worrisome on its own, as radical inequality has become normalized globally. In the context of Morocco, and the aftermath of regional and global crises, the divisive reactions occasioned by these two state-led projects of ‘mobility’ suggest a tense and complicated future in which struggles over ‘the right to the city’ will only continue to build up.

Conclusion

In the early summer of 2014, as the Tcharmil raids continued sporadically, Amina asked me to weigh in on a local rumour she had heard – that the city authorities were finalizing plans for the redevelopment of the karyan. Several of the larger dwellings facing the wide Ali Yaata Avenue had been torn down, and the inhabitants of adjacent quarters speculated that the bulldozers would soon come to level the remaining debris. Amina wanted to know if I had any information about what the authorities planned to build on the site: ‘You’ve spoken with those people at the urban planning office. They probably tell you more than they tell us. So, what do they say?’ For almost three years after the launch of the Cities without Slums programme and the relocation of the first karyan inhabitants, the official statement from the municipal urban planning agency had claimed that a sports park surrounded by artisanal workshops and stores, together with a vocational training centre, would replace the informal quarter. This plan had been publicized through newspaper articles in local media and had travelled by word of mouth around Hay Mohammadi. But by 2014 these ideas seemed to have been shelved, and, during an interview with the architect that had won the redevelopment brief, I was told that his proposal had been indefinitely put on hold. I did not have a clear answer to Amina’s question until, towards the end of my fieldwork, after several false starts, the urban planner heading the division in charge of Hay Mohammadi’s redevelopment agreed to meet with me. Casablanca’s Master Plan (Schema Directeur) was in the process of being updated for the first time since 1989, which signalled a potentially positive turning point to actors across the spectrum – from Casamémoire to local inhabitants clamouring for better public facilities and social amenities. At the time of our meeting, the ‘updated’ subsection of the plan regulating the neighbourhood’s future development still needed to be approved by the Interior Ministry. The planner with whom I spoke was enthusiastic about the new plan, but stressed the hierarchical nature of the decision-making process: ‘Our proposed amendments to the plan can still be vetoed by officials in the Ministry, and once

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the plan is returned to us no further changes can be made.’ The one aspect the planner was confident would remain in the document was the ‘valorization’ of neighbourhood space. Unclear about what the vague nature of the term was meant to encapsulate, I asked her to elaborate. With cheerful professionalism she explained: ‘The new plan makes provisions for increasing the limits on building height; at the moment the majority [of residential buildings] are no taller than four [stories] so we hope to raise it to seven.’ According to the planner, the new provisions would ideally also allow for demolitions of the homes built on the base of Écochard’s grid, making way for new, taller structures. Besides increasing the neighbourhood’s already high density, the plan did not appear to consider the much-needed upgrading of existing medical, cultural and educational facilities, public spaces or derelict infrastructure, which apparently fell under the remit of different regulatory bodies. Significantly, the inhabitants had been offered little chance of responding to this much-awaited planning document. Consultation in this case had entailed that the proposed amendments to the plan and its technical provision be pinned on the notice board of Hay Mohammadi’s main administrative office during a two-week window, according to the planner, ‘for all to see’. Ironically, Amina’s question seemed to not only anticipate the planner’s response but also already contained in it the inhabitants’ resigned scepticism, having become accustomed to the appearance of consultation but seldom its implementation. In spite of the frequently advocated democratic principles and participatory planning frameworks supposedly central to social development programmes like Cities without Slums and rehabilitation activities sponsored by Human Rights organizations, in everyday practice representatives of the state remained inclined to perpetuate a top-down approach underpinned by a concern with economic profit and social control, demonstrating limited transparency and little vision for meaningful change. As the provision of the plan suggested, the state’s approach towards precarious urban areas like Hay Mohammadi remained anchored in a logic of development that relied almost exclusively on capturing real-estate value as a motor for economic growth and did little to implement the kind of participatory, deep structural reforms needed to revitalize the historically marginalized and impoverished community it had recognized through the ERC report (Chapter 1). Cast in this light, the various commemorative and heritage efforts focused on the neighbourhood, together with the social development agendas enacted through local NGOs, emerged as slightly more than performative gestures with regard to the lives and struggles of Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants.

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In November 2019, on my last visit to Hay Mohammadi before completing this book, I was looking for signs that behind such window dressing real opportunities for change remained available. The now-completed second tramway line crossed through the neighbourhood’s heart, skirting the fenced-off but now fully empty grounds of North Africa’s once largest and oldest informal settlement. The bustling and thriving informal market that spilled around the karyan animating its streets every afternoon and evening was also in the process of being cleared away, as municipal authorities resumed with renewed verve an ‘on-again off-again’ campaign of eradicating informal commerce from the city’s streets. The jamʿiyya had seen a reduction in its funding stream and many of the staff had left in search of more secure employment. Youth programmes had been significantly reduced as a consequence, though brief self-funded stints by Francophone artists and volunteers continue to provide a welcome source of activities. In Derb Moulay Cherif, my long-term interlocutors and friends were visibly preoccupied by an alarming number of old homes collapsing in the night (with fatal consequences for their inhabitants, Darouiche 2021), lending new urgency to discussions about the precariousness of life in the spaces that fostered foundational and course-altering moments for the history of modern Morocco. The ongoing contrast and misalignment between redevelopment and rehabilitation discourses and the narrow vision exhibited by financially driven urban policies captures in a powerful way the logics that continue to define the relationship between the Moroccan state and its urban margins. This relationship reflects not only local realities but also the contours of structures that shape Moroccan society more broadly, pointing to the tension and gaping rift that continue to grow between the needs and aspirations of lower-class communities and the exclusionary and untransparent politics of the state. Then, as the global Covid-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt in the spring of 2020, Hay Mohammadi experienced once more the staying power of vilifying logics and policing infrastructures. As strict lockdowns were increasingly implemented across Morocco, Hay Mohammadi was targeted with heightened policing and control, as roadblocks were erected around sections of the neighbourhood and military tanks and personnel were dispatched to control the movement of people to and from the neighbourhood (Sefrioui 2020). Justified in terms that echoed colonial-era logics which saw lower-class populations as a source of contamination and contagion, lockdown measures were less concerned with the burden of disease that such an enclosure would carry for the inhabitants of this densely populated quarter. While the pandemic and its associated responses exacerbated existing discourses and actions towards

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the urban margins, it did not dramatically redraw the limits surrounding the lives of precarious communities. As another moment of crisis in a longer genealogy of such events, it has, however, highlighted the acute need to rethink and remobilize around inclusive urban practices and the need for regenerative governance for and by vulnerable communities and the places they call home.

The centrality of the urban margins in contemporary Morocco The premise behind this book has been the historically and politically contingent coproduction of space and society. My objective has been to study and elucidate the ways in which the space of a mythicized yet maligned urban community has come into being and acted as both instrument and antagonist of various regimes. But it is only by starting from an experience-near and place-based point of departure that the nexus of state–space–society becomes distinguishable and amenable to much-needed unpacking and articulation. To this end, I have set out to explore how broader social and political transformations can be discerned through a fine-grained look at everyday spaces and practices sustained by and through actors working at different scales, but always in relation to the urban margins. At once romanticized and vilified, or ghettoized only to be instrumentally co-opted in suitable moments, I have argued that Casablanca’s urban margins have been useful for sustaining and reproducing social and political logics that have remained largely unquestioned until now. Erected into both a singular emblem of a celebrated past and a synecdoche for the problems plaguing lower-class neighbourhoods across the country, Hay Mohammadi offers a privileged perspective on the convergence of historical, political and social forces that have led to a reductive and depoliticized account of urban peripheries and their inhabitants. As an important place in the history and mythology that at once sustain the idea, aspiration and contemporary reality of Moroccan modernity, neighbourhoods like Hay Mohammadi continue to be instrumental to the state’s and society’s image of itself. From colonial laboratory, to post-colonial target of militarization and state terror, to testing grounds for the implementation of new projects of social management and control, and the recent implantation of neoliberal logics and actors, the urban margins are not an unintended consequence of statist developmentalist processes but part and parcel of their very realization (cf. Roy 2005, 2011; Harvey 2004, 2006). When looked at in this

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light, the depoliticization and naturalization of historical, social and everyday realities linked to Hay Mohammadi emerge as powerful strategic effects. My ethnographic examination of historical processes alongside their recuperation by commemoration and preservation activities revealed the entanglement of cultural actors and political forces responsible for the reproduction of a reductive and contradictory image of the neighbourhood. This image has not only remained unquestioned to date but has also led to the emergence of an accepted official account that has eluded more complex engagements with how contemporary socio-spatial inequality has been central to hegemonic processes of political and economic reproduction. In particular, the disconnect between selective preoccupations with architectural heritage and urban design on the one hand, and the performative recognition of state violence on the other, have also had a twofold effect. On the one hand, by reifying these two eras into separate and disconnected chapters of history they mask the violence that is inherent in all (colonial) projects of modernity, and leave unacknowledged the modern nature that is at the heart of state-led forms of violence. On the other hand, by designating these forces as temporally divorced from the present, they occlude links between the neighbourhood’s past and its active role in present-day socioeconomic degradation. In this sense, continued appeals to Casablanca’s and Hay Mohammadi’s past as the birthplace of Moroccan modernity stand out as a powerful image and discourse – albeit one that has so far been understood in starkly dehistoricized ways, and construed as the domain of an elite few with the ability to appreciate and revive (a rather exclusionary vision of) the city’s cosmopolitanism. Presented as the embodiment of humanist and technocratic benevolence towards the city’s lower classes and stripped of its colonial and capitalist roots, heritage-centred accounts of Hay Mohammadi’s modernity and its perceived subsequent undoing remain, for the moment, not only insufficiently problematized but also eternally promising because of the deeply affective dimensions attached to modernity’s aesthetic and spatial affordances. Limited in their ability to manoeuvre within the boundaries set by a state that continues to arbitrarily police the limits of what is open to critical discussion and debate, organizations like Casamémoire and the jamʿiyya have played a significant part in propagating these representations. Consequently, as the language of rights-based agendas has gained currency and become established as part of the transformations shaping Morocco’s internal political landscape in the early-twenty-first century, efforts to address Hay Mohammadi’s memory and trauma also reveal the selective preoccupation with specific categories of remembering and past experience, and the discarding

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of ‘less useful’ histories (Allan 2013). As official commemoration activities have become closely entangled with and occasionally subsumed by architectural heritage agendas and the apolitical language they mobilize, historical memory has become reified and codified into an emergent hegemonic version of an otherwise complex and ambivalently constituted reality. My documentation of how this history is further captured through cognate ‘representations of space’ (Lefebvre 1991) – in the forms of commemorative maps, archival and heritage images of urban planning, and a board game – suggests that neighbourhood space is increasingly portrayed through a small number of tropes that have limited purchase in the everyday lives of ordinary inhabitants. As reflected by the memory practices gleaned through the affective mapping exercise, Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants anchored their attachment to place and its history in mundane spaces and activities that have helped sustain both dignified survival and a sense of proud belonging. This opposition between the official, elite, reified record and the mundane, pragmatic and resilient is both an edifying and an insufficient finding. While the performance of commemorative and heritage practices in Hay Mohammadi has been responsible for producing new hegemonic tropes, it has also acted as a crucial resource for the community: whether in the form of securing international funding for local NGOs or as part of generating visibility and attracting positive attention from outside the community. Although the reification of colonialera planning documents and the commemorative map provided a limited and incomplete view of the neighbourhood, they nevertheless facilitated struggles over authority and the right to tell and retell local history (as discussed in Chapter 2). In other words, what I have critiqued as the disconnect between official commemorative and heritage regimes and the history and memory that informs local everyday struggles also emerges as a valuable space and resource open to appropriation by inhabitants as part of the savvy pragmatism required to sustain life in precarious places. Similarly, the proliferation of third-sector initiatives and their focus on rendering certain groups as not only in need of but also particularly amenable to disciplining and social control has allowed certain inhabitants on the urban margins to tap into and capitalize on the scarce educational and training opportunities such initiatives provide. But while such pragmatism may manage to stave off the problems associated with socio-economic survival for now, I also want to caution against its unproblematic celebration. To this end it is crucial to point out the ways in which the institutionalization of NGO structures and the language of rights-based issues have led to a narrowing of channels and vocabularies available to those

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who seek to question and transform current logics and forms of governance. As social development agendas aimed at pacifying potentially volatile lower-class male bodies become established and start to grow in popularity – benefitting from entrenched logics of securitization and neoliberal ideas of productivity – their effects can be seen in the reshaping of the language and avenues considered legitimate for voicing disaffection and dissent. In this sense, episodes like the Tcharmil raids (described in Chapter 3) become important flashpoints in the wider landscape of struggles over social inclusion and political belonging. Such episodes, anchored as they are in concerns over spatial practices, racialized fears of underdeveloped internal ‘others’ and the expression of classed affects and aesthetics associated with inhabiting particular social geographies, point towards a future in which political belonging may become increasingly subject to assaults from dehistoricized ideas about deservingness and a growing (global) popularity of conservative moral logics. These same logics are responsible for romanticizing and depoliticizing the unwaged, gendered work that is required to secure a sense of home amid an unrelenting storm of economic insecurity that marks precarious lives on the urban margins of Casablanca. My ethnographic work in Hay Mohammadi revealed, unsurprisingly, how the architecture and material culture of the home act as important spaces through which both aspirations about the future are rehearsed and current tactics of survival become mediated. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, the gendered labour required from women in precarious positions, who find themselves compelled to mobilize patriarchal notions and skilful routines in an effort to care for self and others, should push us to rethink normative understandings of economic class and the gendered and moral ideas attached to it. Indeed, the various positions and life experiences of my interlocutors as inhabitants of Hay Mohammadi did not neatly fit strictly economic conceptions of class. Past ethnographers and scholars have either doubted the applicability of such sociological notions to the Moroccan context (Tozy 2011) or left largely unexamined the local manifestations of classed orders. As the Introduction also underscored, ordinary Moroccans and those who govern them use a variety of categories to differentiate between the multiple – and often overlapping – positions that historical circumstances, geographical position, political forces and socio-economic conditions continue to shape into the social structure of Moroccan society. My own ethnographic experience and analysis leads me to argue that class – frequently glossed as tabaqa by my interlocutors – as an expression of social structures (and the structures of feeling associated

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with it) is not only a very pertinent aspect for understanding historical and contemporary Moroccan state–society dynamics but also one that needs to be documented in much greater detail. As urban peripheries continue to expand and sprawl into former agricultural lands on the outskirts of Morocco’s cities, and as inhabitants of ‘older margins’ become effectively remarginalized as part of city-upgrading schemes, ethnographic attention to these movements and the social geographies they (re)produce not only remains essential but is also uniquely positioned to provide the kind of depth and critical nuance that such phenomena demand.

For a renewed anthropology of post-colonial urbanity My thinking and analysis in this book have been firmly situated in a tradition of anthropological research and writing about cities whose ethos is represented by an attention to the experience and reality of everyday life, and a place-based critique of the forces that drive socio-spatial inequality. Given its disciplinary history and theoretical focus, anthropology came to the study of urban spaces and their dynamics rather late and was somewhat ill-suited to encompass the scales at which these dynamics occur, especially in the context of the Middle East and North Africa region (cf. Eickleman 1974, Abu-Lughod 1987, Low 2000). Over recent decades, however, a growing and redoubtable body of work has firmly demonstrated that anthropology can not only devise apt epistemological and methodological tools to tackle the challenges posed by the expanded scales and forces driving urban transformations but also act as a necessary, empirically driven corollary to existing historical, theoretical and technical analyses (Ghannam 2002, Kanna 2011, Bjorkman 2015, Newman 2015, Laszkowski 2016). The ethnographic approach that lies at the heart of exemplary urban anthropologies in the twenty-first century has also demonstrated that in order to steer clear of reifying either structural forces or the agents through and on which they work, we need to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016), and retrain our attention on the frictions, ambiguities and affectively incomplete experiences that define the nexus between structure and agency. In the face of almost certain global crises to come (environmental, epidemiological, financial) and the expansion of spatial logics driven by power and capital, anthropology remains uniquely positioned to contribute to both our understanding of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid 2012) and a much-needed grounded critique of the orthodoxies that have brought us here (cf. Simone 2004).

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In this sense, particularly when it comes to cities in North Africa and the Middle East, post-colonial transformations and their genealogical relationship extending in time from colonial logics to recent neoliberal institutions remain insufficiently examined (cf. Beinin 2015, Hanieh 2011, 2013). As both continue to exert a powerful pull on the imagination of administrators, NGOs and ordinary people alike, an ethnographic attention to how these imaginaries and their appeal are fostered and circulated will be paramount to understanding the way they are shaping not only urban lives but also national and transnational agendas – whether they are focused on urban upgrading through the eradication of slums, or on the pacification of lower-class bodies through social development programmes rooted in the logics of the Cold War or the more recent War on Terror. To this end, a reflexive attention to our own imaginaries as researchers and scholars remains highly necessary. The literature on cities in the Middle East and North Africa has so far focused on a selection of limited locales, overwhelmingly represented by capital cities like Cairo, Istanbul and Beirut, and a handful of themes, as recent reviews of the field have poignantly observed (El Kazaz and Mazur 2017). While on the one hand this centralization of urban ethnographic work points to the powerful forces concentrated in these locales, it would also behove us as critical scholars to examine more closely the historical, institutional, disciplinary and political rationales behind this funnelling of attention and research funding into a handful of urban centres (cf. Deeb and Winegar 2012). We should be wary of falling into the trap of reproducing what Lila Abu-Lughod (1989) once aptly labelled as the ‘theoretical zones of prestige’ that defined anthropology’s engagement with the region for much of the twentieth century. As transnational actors and forces ‘(re)discover’ North African cities of various sizes as profitable grounds for the implantation of extractive logics, a post-colonial anthropology of urbanization, broadly conceived, should provide a range of grounded insights and approaches that are able to historicize and elucidate the ways in which globally diffuse forces are translated into concrete, though not always self-evident, social and spatial logics. It is, of course, not only in North Africa – but also from West to East Africa, and Southeast Asia and beyond – that cities and the urban corridors their contemporary sprawl has fostered continue to act as prime locations for experiments in governance and the creation of narrowly defined forms of value. As Morocco enters a new stage of accelerated urban redevelopment, embodied in expensive and exclusive megaprojects meant to redraw internal social geographies and reposition the country as a regional financial and business hub (Aljem and Strava 2020), struggles over access to urban space and the livelihoods

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it can support will only intensify. It is thus my hope, in the first instance, that by documenting not only the history behind the making of uneven social geographies but also their placement at the heart of wider scales and networks, a crucial step can be taken in pulling apart and remaking the legacy of spatial inequality bequeathed by colonial regimes. Second, this should not lead to a reification of these processes and eras or the elision of the role played by postindependence actors, but, instead, encourage a practice of staying attuned to both the ruptures and continuities between colonial, nationalist and neoliberal logics and agendas. When these genealogical relations are kept in view, as I have tried to do for Hay Mohammadi, they allow for other scales and relational dynamics to become visible and open to analysis and critique. Two aspects that promise to offer privileged starting points for this kind of analysis emerged most powerfully from my ethnographic explorations: the materiality of urban space and the affects produced by different registers of practices found within it. Buildings, streets, transport systems and sparse leisure spaces are more than benign manifestations of technocratic systems for organizing urban life. Their surfaces and volumes are deeply invested with ideological connotations from across a spectrum of ideas and logics coloured by classed, gendered and political experiences. From the reviled bricolage of Hay Mohammadi’s karyan to the aspirational character encoded in the glossy contours and surfaces of Casablanca’s new tramway, and from the supposedly kitsch textures of staged lower-class homes to the universally promising geometry of colonial housing designs, the city’s accretive materiality emerges as not only intrinsic but also vital to the struggles over Morocco’s urban past, present and future. It is in the affective affordances and connotations of such built environments and the planning regimes and developmentalist agendas that mobilize them, as well as in their deeply or partly appropriated and detoured-from-below nature, that the relevance of such materialities begins to crystallize. Although in many places statist projects of urban governance and planning – from the colonial era to the present – have tried to pass themselves off as technocratic (and thus value-free) efforts at enacting universal ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’, strongly affective notions have always underpinned such agendas. The ‘affective turn’ that has marked anthropological engagements with a range of topics in recent years, and spilled into cognate fields and disciplines (Ahmed 2004, Thrift 2008, Navaro-Yashin 2012, Malmström 2019), has made it possible to recognize and diagnose more clearly the political salience of such aspirational yet continually deferred and unequally realized plans (Penny and Harvey 2012,

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Abrams and Weszkalnys 2013, Appel, Anand and Gupta 2018). In the context of globally fetishized, post-colonial cities like Casablanca, urban materialities and the lives grafted onto them are rife with the stories, myths, memories, hopes and fears that also animate and mobilize heritage agendas and urban renewal policies, for better or worse. Ethnographic studies of such conditions of postcolonial urbanity are beginning to and should continue to probe into the ways in which both ordinary inhabitants and powerful actors tap into these affective reservoirs with different intentions and to divergent effects. Globally, the rich and palimpsestic materiality of uneven urban environments is ideally positioned to illuminate the dialectical relationship between structures and agency, that is, between the textures and experiences of everyday life and the forces and logics that aim to police and channel them into historically contingent notions of value and productivity. When understood as the convergence of affective, political, social and economic forces, the materiality of urban spaces has the potential to offer novel perspectives on how normative notions of state and society are actually brought to life and rendered visible, though not always coherent, through everyday practice.

Everyday politics in everyday spaces: Finding hope for the struggles to come Throughout my time carrying out fieldwork in Casablanca, as well as since, I have been struck by the nuanced and manifold ways in which ordinary Moroccans, whose actions would not easily fit into conventional definitions of political action, constantly demonstrated the salience of Lefebvre’s (1991) and de Certeau’s (1984) ideas about the political potential latent in the experience and practice of everyday life (cf. Hall 2012). On the one hand, moments like the Arab Spring protests of 2011 or the Hirak movement, which mobilized Morocco’s Northern Rif region in 2017, have captured and communicated in no uncertain terms the frustrations, deep resentment and widespread sense of disenfranchisement felt by ordinary people across the region as well as in Morocco. On the other hand, these movements do not exist in a void or emerge fully formed overnight. Their grievances were accumulated day in, day out through the myriad experiences of uneven access to basic livelihoods, the untransparent practices of a state apparatus that more and more people denounce and distrust, and the indignities which they both endure and articulate using the local term of hogra (Hannoum 2019). In a context of limited access to both channels of power and means of

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discursive representation, poor and lower-class Moroccans have thus been compelled to develop contingent political vocabularies and forms of action. Set against the background of decades during which economic and political decisions have carved deep lines within the look and fabric of urban lower-class areas, and taken together with the ongoing delegitimization of social justice vocabularies and agendas, it seems apt that a revival of politics from below should emerge from the surfaces and experiences afforded by the materiality of socially fragmented urban spaces. Which is to say that dissent and frustration always find a way to be expressed, but they might not take shape in the ways that we have been accustomed to recognize them or even in the places where they have conventionally been thought to reside. During the researching and writing of this ethnography, this became evident in several ways. As evoked by the affective mapping exercise featured in Chapter 2, derelict urban gardens, the street fame of local food vendors, former landmarks of terror regimes and colonial-era housing estates offer just a few examples of how the fabric and life of the city’s margins provide a crucial conduit and perhaps even a strategic language for enabling conversations that might otherwise become foreclosed. Similarly, it is at the level of everyday struggles to secure livelihoods, maintain dignified and morally valued domestic lives, wrest back the authority to retell local social histories, (deeply or superficially) appropriate colonial architectures or neoliberal logics and articulate a sense of exclusion through the materials and surfaces of urban upgrading projects that I was able to document emergent forms of critique and trace the reconfigured demands for the right to the city. At the same time, I remain acutely aware of and have tried to heed the cautionary warnings issued by previous scholars, such as Asef Bayat (2010), who have rightfully argued against romanticizing the actions of those in precarious conditions or taking for granted notions like marginality. As my account of Hay Mohammadi has hopefully shown, these socio-geographical categories and the communities they seek to describe are, indeed, not fixed – in spite of their ongoing depoliticization and dehistoricizing – but deployed fluidly and pragmatically by various actors across the different scales that determine the shape and experience of urban life in Morocco’s largest city. These valences, however, emerge only when their production and use-value is traced processually across temporal scales, urban spaces, domains of intervention, and the actors in whose hands they are leveraged as part of a revived understanding of difference and its power for enacting a democratizing urban politics. This should not prevent us, however, from recognizing the overwhelming role that lower-class communities play in the wider work of social reproduction within and without

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their own neighbourhoods. What becomes evident from the ethnographic accounts I have brought together is that lower-class inhabitants are not only responsible for the work of social reproduction inside their own communities, but that through their interactions with other actors they also prove essential in reproducing a variety of structures and effects central to contemporary agendas. From acting as the target of cultural and social development regimes, to being co-opted for the reproduction of hegemonic accounts, to serving as a foil for middle- and upper-class voices, even as they often are in their direct domestic employ (cf. Montgomery 2019), those on the lower-end of Morocco’s social structure contribute the lion’s share of the labour required for the vast task of contemporary social reproduction. Prevailing logics, such as those espoused by neoliberalization agendas, have made it possible until now to downplay the political and economic value of this labour or romanticize its material and aesthetic forms as the repository of local cultural and moral values. However, as I hope to have shown through the ethnographic material gathered here, it is in the palimpsestic places and through the accumulated practices of this labour that the modern city actually comes into being: as mundane, constantly renegotiated, everyday collective oeuvre (Lefebvre 1991) which grows around and responds to but does not always follow prescriptive plans. This urban modernity in all its unstable, polyvalent and cognate meanings – and the haunting yet future-oriented nostalgia for it in which current preservation and redevelopment efforts are steeped – carries its own redeeming and politically revitalizing qualities. Methodologically, the rich and living archive of aesthetic, textual, gestural and political material that both Modernist and modernization agendas continue to produce demands a sustained engagement from us as critical scholars of the contemporary world. While up to now, this archive and the built heritage of modernity’s heyday have mostly been understood as embodying the language of developmentalist, universalizing and colonial paternalistic power, we stand to gain so much from a broader excavation of the affects and political dynamics that made its production and endurance possible. In order to do this, we can begin by recognizing the fundamental role of urban peripheries like Hay Mohammadi within the projects that modernity has birthed. Such margins are more than deeply charged sites for the examination of the affective power that state agendas and international actors continue to yield in Morocco and elsewhere. When carefully historicized and fleshed out with the help of local voices, the aftermaths and afterlives of modernity’s accumulated debris are apt to offer a substantial and open reservoir for amplifying and contextualizing not only the struggles of the present but also those that are surely yet to come.

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Notes Introduction 1 In 2017 youth unemployment in Morocco climbed to 28.5 per cent, averaging 18 per cent over the past decade. See International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT Database (2017). 2 The slum’s contested relocation was finally completed in 2017, after the last few families were forced out. 3 I draw on Debra Spitulnik’s (2002) poignant argument on the importance of attending to the linguistic forms and specificities employed in describing local understandings of what ‘being modern’ or ‘modernity’ entails. 4 One significant regional contribution in this respect, albeit focused on marginality as a form of social exclusion from gender and moral norms, is the collected issue by Colonna and Daoud (1993). 5 See Lewis (1890). 6 Lila Abu-Lughod (1989) first wrote about the metonyms traditionally associated with research on the MENA – gender/women, Islam and political organization – as a way of calling attention to their limitations (cf. Deeb and Winegar 2012). 7 The Fellowship’s mission shares significant affinities with the main principles of anthropology, with the stated exception that ‘the year’s experience should not be primarily one of academic study’, or ‘the practice or furtherance of a professional career’. For more details on the Fellowship’s history see: http:​/​/ura​​f​.har​​vard.​​edu​/m​​ ichae​​l​-c​-r​​ockef​​eller​​-memo​​rial-​​​fello​​wship​. 8 There are three main Berber dialects in Morocco: Tarifit, Tamazight and Tashelhit, each corresponding to a geographical region, starting with the Rif in the north and stretching into the south across the Atlas Mountains, respectively. 9 Protests erupted in Morocco on 20 February 2011, galvanized by similar street movements sparked in Tunisia on 14 January 2011 by the death of Mohamed Bouazizi. The Moroccan king publicly engaged the protesters’ demands and set off a process of constitutional reform leading to strengthened parliamentary powers, but ultimately doing little to alter the monarchy’s hold on political authority. See Paul Silverstein (2011) and Chloe Muldering (2014). 10 Anthropologist Katherine E. Hoffman (2013, p. 101) recounts how the lack of official research permission during her doctoral fieldwork in Morocco in 1995 caused many in her research locale to be ‘suspicious of her motives’. While

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15

Notes at the time of my fieldwork other researchers I was acquainted with in Morocco recounted stories of police surveillance and suspicion, I myself never knowingly experienced similar scrutiny from the authorities. For a discussion of the history of this ideal and the contentious as well as necessary changes it has gone through, see Janet Carsten (2012). See Jordi Aguadé (2003) and Dominique Caubet (2007). See Charis Boutieri’s (2012, 2016) work on the topic of bilingualism in formal education and training. According to the Moroccan National Bureau of Statistics (HCP), in 2014 approximately 84,000 foreign nationals lived in Morocco, 40 per cent of them of European origin. While some are the spouses of Moroccan nationals, a significant proportion fit the label of expatriates: people who live in the Kingdom either temporarily for work, or as retirees. Owing to this they are less likely to speak Arabic and more likely to frequent Francophone spaces and communities. My positionality was by no means fixed and homogenously constituted or ‘performed’, either for the inhabitants or for the more elite actors I encountered. But as debates in anthropology around the ‘self/other’ or ‘halfie/wholie’ question have demonstrated, this positionality refracts as well reflects back to us the things we might learn in the field (Abu-Lughod 1991).

Chapter 1 1 Named after the prominent Moroccan communist leader born in 1920 in Tangiers, a significant figure in the anti-colonial struggle. 2 Geographer of North Africa, Rafaelle Cattedra (2006), consolidates this hypothesis in a study of the bidonville as paradigmatic for twentieth-century urbanism. 3 See Abdallah Laroui (1979) for a detailed discussion and history of French colonialism in Morocco. 4 Lyautey in Wright (1991). For a similar policy in a different colonial context, see Bernard Cohn (1983, pp. 165–209). 5 French architectural historians Jean-Luis Cohen and Monique Eleb (2002, p. 319) argue that at the time of the French Protectorate these categories were understood to be artificially assigned for administrative purposes and had limited applicability in the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants. Gottreich’s work on nineteenthcentury Marrakech shows how historically such zoning was practised in complex and fluid ways by Moroccans (2007, p. 73). 6 An exception to this is, for example, the Lafarge cement company worker housing, designed before 1939 by Edmond Brion. See Cohen and Eleb (2002, p. 321).

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7 (Own translation) ‘We are going to address the most urgent [issue] and most pressing is slum clearance, then we will see. We will build housing that is as simple as possible, the least costly possible and as quickly as possible.’ In Conseil du gouvernement, section marocaine. Résidence générale du Maroc, meeting on 30 June, 1 and 2 July, Rabat, 1953. 8 Until that point, the strategies used by the Protectorate’s urban planning division to deal with an increasing amount of informal housing oscillated between reordering the self-built homes on site (restructuration) and providing temporary rehousing (relogement) (Écochard 1955, p. 47). 9 The vernacular movement in architecture garnered international attention in 1964 with Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, which glorified the genius of builders who knew how to translate the ‘traditional’ circumstances of their communities into built form. Also see Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1957), and John F. C. Turner (1977). 10 For an in-depth look at Moroccan political history, see Abdellah Laroui’s (1979) comprehensive study of political structures since precolonial times. 11 Mehdi Ben Barka continues to be a mythical figure for leftist movements in Morocco and the region. After calling on Moroccans in 1963 to oppose a war with Algeria over a border dispute, he was exiled to France where his disappearance and likely assassination took place in 1965 (Farsoun and Paul 1976). 12 General Mohammad Oufkir, acting as Hassan II’s right hand in matters of state security, led the state’s efforts. Rollinde (2003, p. 123) reports that the repression was instantaneous, claiming that Oufkir himself shot on the rioting crowd from his helicopter, while military tanks rolled over the protesters. 13 See Jules Clement’s historical study of urban riots in Morocco (1992) and Koenraad Bogaert’s political science study of governance responses to them (2013). 14 Built in 1972 after a second failed coup against Hassan II, the Moroccan state vehemently and repeatedly denied the existence of the Tazmamart prison and the human rights abuses that took place there until 1991. Considered emblematic of the era, it has been featured in several autobiographical accounts of torture. See Ali Bourequat’s In the Moroccan King’s Secret Gardens (1998) and Ahmed Marzouki’s Tazmamart: Cell No. 10 (2000). 15 The group was named after the 1965 student movement that had been violently repressed by Hassan II’s regime. 16 Nass Al Ghiwane are a musical group closely associated with the political contestation of the 1970s. Born in Hay Mohammadi, the group became synonymous with subversive lyrics and a trance style that fused local Gnawa music with Western influences, like Pink Floyd. 17 Reported by James M. Markham in The New York Times on 4 July 1981. 18 The Moroccan state reported 8,000 arrests and 66 dead, while the opposition counted 1,000 dead, of whom 637 by gunshot (Daoud 1981).

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19 In 2020 Casablanca was administratively composed of sixteen districts, or arrondissements grouped under eight prefectures. 20 The Interior Ministry is considered to be the institutional locus of the monarchy’s power. As a so-called sovereign ministry, the king directly appoints its head regardless of results in the legislative election. 21 This administrative reform was considered so successful that it was then replicated in other major Moroccan cities, leading to a total of seventeen Wilayas across the country. 22 Similar to the institution of the Wilaya, the Urban Planning Agency model was replicated in several other large cities. Beginning in March 1998 all Urban Planning Agencies were put under the control of the new Ministry for Habitat, with the exception of the Casablanca Urban Planning Agency which in 2020 was still directly subordinate to the Interior Ministry (cf. Rachik 2002). 23 For a detailed discussion of the Commission’s history and mandate, see Slyomovics (2005b, 2008). 24 The full report comprising six volumes is available online in Arabic, with summaries available in French, English and Spanish. http:​/​/www​​.ier.​​ma​/ru​​briqu​​e​ .php​​3​?id_​​rub​ri​​que​=3​​16 25 The grant, awarded in 2011, was meant to fund a larger project, of which the documentary was but one aspect. The other components were the publication of a book on the history of the neighbourhood, the organization of a neighbourhood festival called Yawm al Hay (Days of the Neighbourhood), as well as an oral history project. 26 This preoccupation was tested in Tunisia as early as 1910 and then applied in Morocco a few years later. See Jules Harmand (1910, p. 160). For a discussion on the dialectical relationship between (invented) tradition and twentieth-century modernity see Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). 27 In the Islamic legal tradition, the authenticity of a statement is judged by the chain (isnad) from which it is descended from the past. 28 In 1987, Casablanca-born architect and photographer Jean-Michel Zurfluh was the first to make the case for protecting the medinas of Casablanca, referring to both the old Moroccan core as well as the French-built quarters. 29 The construction dated from 1916 to 1917, and was designed by the French architect Hubert Bride. See Cohen and Eleb (2002, p. 89). 30 Several families who benefitted from rent control and non-revocable leases were inhabiting the building, when part of the roof collapsed. The administration issued an emergency eviction notice, and rumours soon claimed that a high-rise office building would replace the Hotel. Despite ongoing efforts, the Lincoln Hotel’s fate remains undecided at the time of the manuscript’s revision. 31 Boyer was a French-born architect who practised in Casablanca between 1919 and 1947. His work was prolific, and includes the building of the current Wilaya

Notes

32 33

34

35

36

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(prefecture) and several bank and newspaper headquarters. See Cohen and Eleb (2002, p. 464). Personal conversation with Laure Augereau, project coordinator (2009–14) at Casamémoire. The only site officially classified as historical heritage in Casablanca to date is the prehistoric quarry of Sidi Abderrahmane. In 1951, traces of the Atlanthropus Mauritanicus dating back 400,000 years, were discovered at this site. See Raynal et al. (2010). The association is part of a Mediterranean network of institutions collaborating under the framework of the EU-sponsored programme Euromed Heritage 4. The aims of this programme are to ‘identify, document and promote 19th and 20th century architectural heritage in North Africa, in order to encourage its integration into current social and economic structures” (own translation from French). See: http://mutual​-heritage​.crevilles​-dev​.org. In cooperation with the Prefecture (Wilaya) and various local institutions and foundations, for the first few years the sites included the old medina, the former French administrative quarter in the downtown area, the Habous district (named after the Islamic religious foundation that owned the land), and several colonial buildings formerly owned by merchants and financiers along Casablanca’s boulevard Mohammad V. In the contemporary era, festivals of various kinds across Morocco have become a signature of Mohammad VI’s rule, strongly contested and critiqued by conservative and left-leaning voices alike. See Kapchan (2008) and Spadola (2013).

Chapter 2 1 A claim duly contested and robustly critiqued by a burgeoning scholarship in critical cartography (Harley 2009, Kitchin and Dodge 2007, Crampton 2011, Wood 2010). 2 Examples of community-based reparations have included guarantees of nonrepetition, provision or expansion of social services such as healthcare and education, and symbolic measures such as formal apologies through public commemorations. For a comparative look at the history of reparations, see Slyomovics (2008). 3 The ERC followed recommendations compiled in a written report by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ 2009 Report). Available from https​:/​/ww​​w​.ict​​j​.org​​/publ​​icati​​on​/ra​​bat​-r​​eport​​-conc​​ept​-a​​nd​-ch​​allen​​ges​-c​​ollec​​​tive-​​ repar​​ation​​s. 4 In English: ‘Traces of spaces, history, memory and heritage(s) of Hay Mohammadi’.

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5 Several memorial plaques were also planned for installation across the neighbourhood. After significant delays, fewer, budget versions of the initial design were placed at tramway platforms servicing Hay Mohammadi stops. 6 The number forty is used in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic tradition to represent symbolic meanings (Schimmel 1994). According to Taki, the number carried no special connotation for the commemorative map. 7 Own translation from French. 8 Attempts to secure conversations with these senior figures during my fieldwork, while encouraged and welcomed by Casamémoire’s staff members, were indefinitely postponed. 9 Snakes and Ladders is an ancient Indian board game considered a worldwide classic. The game is made up of a grid of numbered squares, where snakes and ladders respectively hinder or help the players’ progress from square one to the finishing line. 10 Despite the official reconciliation process, many people remained reluctant to speak of or address in an active manner the historical events covered by the commission. My interlocutors considered this to be a function of the ‘sanction-free’ approach of the ERC’s report, leaving the perpetrators of human rights violations unprosecuted. As Slyomovics shows, this has led to a situation where former detainees may encounter their torturers in everyday life (2009). 11 Although 252 nongovernmental organizations were registered under its umbrella at the time, there were seldom any activities for neighbourhood youth at the Dar Shabab – a reason why many of them attended the jamʿiyya and other community centres that managed to support themselves through local and foreign funds. Also see Yasmine Berriane (2010). 12 The term was used almost interchangeably to designate both the victims of the anticolonial struggle – after whom the Echouhada Avenue had been named – and the victims of Hassan II’s regime. 13 Cinema Saada is one of two cinema halls built in Hay Mohammadi in the 1950s, the other being Cinema Cherif, in the Derb Moulay Cherif quarter. Featured on the commemorative map, both cinemas are in an advanced state of degradation and have been closed for more than a decade. Cinema Saada is considered a landmark of the rich counterculture that thrived in the neighbourhood during the ‘Years of Lead’.

Chapter 3 1 Informal street vending, although generally illegal, is common in Morocco. While the police occasionally organized raids to disperse and fine those who engaged in

Notes

2 3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10

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such economic activities, the raids were generally seen as ineffective. Hence, they became a normal aspect of everyday life for both inhabitants and vendors. For a look at how the blurring of distinctions between ‘insecurity’ and a ‘sense of insecurity’ gains the power of mobilizing punitive reactions, see Wacquant (2008). The Interior Ministry is considered to be the institutional locus of the monarchy’s power. As a so-called sovereign ministry, the king directly appoints its head regardless of results in the legislative election. An interesting comparison can be made with the image of the Algerian hittistes, young unemployed men said to ‘hold up the walls’ (Souaih 2012). According to the Ministry of Education, 407,648 students dropped out of school nationally in 2014–15 (CSEFRS 2019), while during the same period youth unemployment climbed to 24.5 per cent, averaging 18 per cent over the past decade. See International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT Database (2017). In 1965, school strikes and student sit-ins sparked by a controversial new education regulation ended in citywide riots that brought together labourers, bidonville dwellers and students. The protests were violently repressed by the regime with the help of the army. See Chapter 1 and Rollinde (2003). Dennerlein has suggested that an alternative view of this mechanism is as a ‘showcase reform initiative directed primarily to an exterior audience’ (2012, p. 29). In 2017, on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s accession to the throne, the royal speech specifically chastised public sector employees and commanded them to emulate private sector entrepreneurship, to ‘work hard, just like staff in the private sector – or even harder’. See https​:/​/ww​​w​ .mor​​occow​​orldn​​ews​.c​​om​/20​​17​/07​​/2248​​48​/fu​​ll​-te​​xt​-ki​​ng​-mo​​hamme​​d​-vi-​​​speec​​h​-thr​​ one​-d​​ay/. There are clear similarities here with the territoires touchés designation, although officially no such recognition of an overlap exists. The charity’s full title is the ‘Mohammad V Foundation for Solidarity’, and it was created in 1999 by the then soon-to-be King Mohammad VI, as one of the poverty-fighting programmes which he has continued to support. Self-styled as the ‘King of the Needy’, King Mohammad VI has made poverty alleviation his main priority since taking the throne after his father’s death. The INDH and the Cities without Slums programme, which is discussed in Chapter 5, are the two flagship programmes of this royal initiative. One of the active members in the jamʿiyya speculated that the problem was that there were too many women’s associations and groups in the neighbourhood, which meant the area was saturated with these types of programmes. These programmes are largely linked to EU policies of stemming the tide of economic migration to Europe. See Latek (2019).

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13 This focus on discipline and structured routines has also been described and discussed as a common pedagogical approach in the context of North American inner-city reform schools. See Lucas (1999) and Manno et al. (1999). 14 Following Howard Becker (1984), I see ‘artification’ as a symptom of the depoliticization of cultural forms of resistance. A salient example that resonates with the material discussed here is what happens when graffiti art is installed in art galleries, thus removing it from its original context of resistance and contestation. 15 The overall aesthetics of this style are also comparable to the British youth subculture of ‘chavs’. For a recent account of the role played by the media in the vilification of working-class culture in Britain, see Owen Jones (2011). 16 Several dozen public Facebook groups and ‘fan pages’ dedicated to collecting such individual poses are currently still active, although receiving less traffic in the post2015 period. One of the most popular of these is Tchârmil, counting upwards of 45,000 followers. See https​:/​/ww​​w​.fac​​ebook​​.co​m/​​Tchâr​mil-4​76074​61583​8935/​? fref​=ts. 17 From the official Facebook page of the group ‘March against lack of safety (in Casablanca)’ which counted 21,000 members at its peak: ‘We should not wait until they [the Tcharmil] attack you and then we arrest them. Too bad for those who wear a suspicious haircut or dress [style]. There is a price to pay. In any case if this brings some peace to the citizen it is not bad.’ [French original: ‘on va pas attendre qu’ils vous agressent et après on les arrette. tant pis pour pour [sic] ceux qui portent une coiffure ou une tenue suspecte. Y’a un prix à payer. En tout cas si ça apporte la sérénité au citoyen c’est pas mal.’ (spelling and punctuation errors in the original)]. Archived on 13 April 2014 from the web page of the online group ‘Marche contre l’insecurite a Casa’ [March against lack of safety (in Casablanca)]. 18 ‘One must stop finding excuses [for these acts] (the economy, politics, education, poverty). Citizenship is not only about rights, but also responsibilities.’ [‘Il faut arreté (sic) de trouver des excuses (l’économie, la politique, l’éducation, la pauvreté). La citoyenneté ne se résume pas à des droits, mais aussi à des devoirs’]. Retrieved 22 April 2014 from https​:/​/ww​​w​.fac​​ebook​​.com/​​pages​​/Marc​​he​-Co​​​ntre-​​Linsé​curit​é. 19 The name of this initiative was given in French: ‘Anticharmil ou l’incitation à la lecture’. 20 ‘Human rights. We all agree with [that] but not for this type of criminals. If you ask me we should build a new Tazmamart for them. Otherwise the problem will always be there.’ [‘Les droits de l’homme .nous tous d’acord avec mais pas pour ce genre de malfaiteurs.a mon avis on devrait construire un nouvaux TAZMAMART pour eux .autrement le probleme sera tjrs la’ (spelling and punctuation errors present in the original)]. Archived on 13 April 2014 from https​:/​/ww​​w​.fac​​ebook​​.com/​​pages​​/Marc​​ he​-Co​​​ntre-​​Linsé​curit​é. 21 For a review of the resurgence of such debates, see Small, Harding and Lamont (2010).

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Chapter 4 1 The type of housing architecture designated by the term riad is composed of two or more stories built around an Andalusian-style patio with a fountain in the middle. This type of housing was associated with the merchant elites of imperial cities such as Marrakech and Fes. 2 See Robert Montagne (1951) and André Adam (1968). 3 Francophone scholarly literature has maintained a strong engagement with the historiography of urban spaces in the Maghreb region, albeit from a sociological and political science perspective, which lacks the insights afforded by ethnographic work (cf. Pinson 1992, 1994). 4 A notable exception is Fadma Ait-Mous’s chapter on the economic strategies of a working-class housewife in Casablanca, featured in the collected volume Casablanca: Figures et scènes métropolitaines edited by Michel Peraldi and Mohamed Tozy (2011). 5 An illustration of this is the work of Pierre Bourdieu. To this day, Bourdieu’s famous study of the Kabyle house remains one of the most influential and oft-cited structuralist engagements with the domestic architecture from North Africa (1979). 6 A considerable number of my working-class informants, even when owning a shower, continued to go to the hammam, because it was thought to allow for a proper, thorough body cleaning, for which a shower was not sufficient. 7 See http:​/​/www​​.moro​​ccobo​​ard​.c​​om​/vi​​ewpoi​​nt​-5/​​361​-n​​ora​-f​​i tzge​​rald/​​5663-​​moroc​​co​ -wo​​men​-g​​oing-​​ex​tra​​-mile​​-in​-r​​amada​​n. 8 In 2013–14, the monthly minimum wage in Morocco was 2,333.76 dirhams, the equivalent of 230 euros.

Chapter 5 1 Under the supervision of the Ministry of Housing, Urban and Regional Planning, Al Omrane is the primary public operator of housing, ‘new town’ development and ‘slum-clearance’ programmes in Morocco. The Al Omrane Group was born in 2004 from the merger of ANHI (National Shelter Upgrading Agency), Attacharouk Company and SNEC (National Company for Equipment and Construction). Al Omrane later absorbed the ERACs (Regional Entities for Development and Construction), the latter transformed into subsidiary companies. 2 Articulated in the Royal Speech of 12 December 2006, and in documents submitted in 2010 to UN-Habitat’s ‘Scroll of Honour’ (Al Omrane 2010). 3 An extensive evaluation report published the following year cautioned against accumulated delays and setbacks, but generally praised the programme. See UN-Habitat (2011).

172

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4 Referring to the Spanish clothing brand, whose retail price is higher in Morocco than abroad. Associated with a certain prestige and socio-economic status, the brand seems to connote the image of a modern, well-off consumer. 5 Francoise Navez-Bouchanine’s foundational work on slum-upgrading in Morocco since the 1980s remains an exhaustive catalogue of these various approaches. See especially 1990, 2007, 2012. 6 As defined by the programme, eligibility is determined by a resident’s registered address on his/her state ID. In her work on slum relocations, Lamia Zaki (2011) explores the implications of the state’s recognition of slum residence as a formal address, calling into question the validity of categories such as formal and informal in the context of urban housing regulations. In practice, a more nuanced vocabulary of technical designations was actually employed by urban planners and administrators, which distinguished between illegal and irregular housing. See Ababsa, Dupret, and Denis (2012). 7 For more on this funding scheme, see Bogaert (2011, p. 723) and World Bank (2006b, p. 16). 8 A shanty-home is commonly referred to in Darija as a ‘barrack’, or beraka, which is speculated to be derived from the French term ‘baraque’. 9 In many poor- and lower-class urban(izing) areas in Morocco, communal ovens continue to play a large role in the production of a household’s daily bread. Charging a small fee for baking homemade bread during specific hours, the ovens supplement their income by producing and selling their own bread and pastries. For a closer look at the role of bread in social and political relations in Morocco, see Katharina Graf (2018). 10 Moroccan households, whether rural or urban, use 15-kilogram butane gas canisters for cooking and hot-water needs. Butagas is used as shorthand for the canisters. 11 The majority of bidonvilles in Morocco are branched to the electricity network by makeshift installations, which are tolerated by the authorities. In many cases the authorities charge a fee for the illicit usage. For a discussion of how ‘getting on the grid’ has impacted the formalization of informality in Morocco, see Lamia Zaki (2008). 12 The evolution of the Hassan II housing project was followed by the Moroccan press and reported most prominently in the newspaper Maroc Hebdo. See the online Archives of Maroc Hebdo: http:​/​/www​​.maro​​c​-heb​​do​.pr​​ess​.m​​a​/Sit​​e​-Mar​​oc​-he​​bdo​/a​​ rchiv​​e​/Arc​​hives​​_596/​​p​df​_5​​96​/mh​​i​_596​​.pdf. 13 According to the Moroccan Dahir n° 1-08-67 of 27 rejeb 1429 (31 July 2008) with regards to the enforcement officers’ corps, the caïd is the representative of local authority, the guarantor of compliance with Urbanism regulations, charged with maintaining public order. For a more in depth look at the evolution of the caïd’s role, see Alain Classe (1992).

Notes

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14 Although on paper each plot was required to be 64 square metres, upper-floor dwellings were significantly smaller owing to the staircase area and the thickness of the walls. 15 For instance, in the case of the urban poor in Iran and Egypt (Bayat 1997), and Brazil (Holston 1990, 2008). Echoes of this approach can also be seen in Farha Ghannam’s work on resettled people in Cairo (2002). 16 In her analysis of visual culture in 1980s Casablanca, Susan Ossman refers to Alpha 55 as an ‘impure mix of people, cultural forms, and objects’ (1994, pp. 43–5). At the time of my research the store was firmly situated within the city’s ecology of upscale, Western-style malls. Future studies on the transformation of Casablanca’s stratified shopping scene might reveal meaningful insights into the transformation of these consumer spaces. 17 Kitea is a local chain-store specializing in furniture sets and displays that mirror the IKEA model. As the first store of its kind in Morocco, it is associated with a ‘modern’, middle-class home décor aesthetic. 18 A second branch was completed in 2018, with plans for further extensions to the network, including inter-modality with new rapid bus transit (BRT) and the highspeed rail line (LGV) inaugurated in 2018. 19 There were still a significant number of minor and fatal casualties during the first twelve months of operation. The official figures placed the total at twelve, slightly below the international average. Taib, Shada. Personal Interview. January 2014. 20 Taib, Shada. Personal Interview. January 2014. 21 According to the tramway spokesperson, this was part of an officially signed agreement with the local police department in Casablanca, which was later extended to a whole year. Nevertheless, during subsequent visits in 2016–18, policemen were still patrolling the tramway. See http:​/​/ibe​​rgag.​​com​/t​​ramwa​​y​-de-​​ casab​​lanca​​-200-​​polic​​iers-​​pour-​​assur​​er​-la​​-secu​​rite​-​​du​-tr​​anspo​​rt/. 22 There is a long tradition in the anthropology and human geography of Africa of documenting these practices in relation to social and political transformation. For some examples from West and East Africa respectively, see Gewald, Luning, and Van Walraven (2009) and Ference (2019).

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Index Page numbers with “n” refer to endnotes. Abu-Lughod, Janet  6, 33, 43 Abu-Lughod, Lila  157, 163 n.6 acts of silent kindness  111, 121 Adam, André  11 aesthetics of future residence  123–4, 170 n.16 of Moroccan homes  104, 106 of Tcharmil  92–7 affect(ive) cartographies  68–77 economies  96–7 neoliberal class  97–8 Ahmed, Sara  96 Ali Yaata Avenue  29 Al Omrane  128, 171 n.1 ANAPEC. See National Agency for Promotion of Employment and Skills (ANAPEC) Anciens Abattoirs  29, 46, 101 Anfa  33, 124 anthropology of post-colonial urbanity  156–9 anticharmil  96 appropriation  45–8, 93, 97 Arab Spring protests  13, 100, 159 architectural Modernism  7 architectural preservation  44 Architecture without Architects (Rudofsky)  165 n.9 ʿaroubiyin  9, 143 arrests  79, 80, 91, 94–5, 98, 165 n.18 Arrif, Abdelmajid  43 ‘artification’  90–1, 170 n.15 Arts de Rue  90, 91 associations  87–9 atelier ambulant (mobile unit)  103 Augé, Marc  141 Bahmad, Jamal  4 Bakkar, Abdeljalil  18

Bayat, Asef  97, 100, 160 Becker, Howard  170 n.15 Ben Barka, Mehdi  165 n.11 Berber dialects  13, 163 n.8 Bessoneau building  44 Bghina hakna  90 Bhabha, Homi  110 bidonvilles  147 in Morocco  172 n.11 VSB programme  127–35, 147, 149 Bogaert, Koenraad  165 n.13 Bourdieu, Pierre  96, 171 n.5 Boyer, Marius  44, 166 n.31 bread riot (1981)  39–40, 84 Bride, Hubert  166 n.29 Brion, Edmond  164 n.6 British colonial enterprise  7 Buck-Morss, Susan  82 cafés memoire. See memory cafes capitalist society  82 care(giving)  121–2 cartographies affective  68–77 Cartesian  52–4 of Hay Mohammadi  56–62, 68–77 Casablanca  4 development  4, 26 future elite residence of  123–6 Lincoln Hotel  44 margins  3, 32, 77 Master Plan  149–50 as ‘open-air museum’  42 Prost’s urban development plan  33–4 riots in  36, 37, 39–40 territorial units of  40, 166 n.19 tramway network  140–6, 158 2003 suicide attacks  87 Urban Planning Agency  40, 166 n.22 Casablanca bread riots (1981)  39–40

Index Casablanca Finance City  4 Casamémoire  14, 44–5, 48, 60 Cattedra, Raffaele  40, 164 n.2 CDT. See Democratic Labour Confederation (CDT) de Certeau, Michel  53, 113, 159 Chance, Kerry  132 children’s rights  88, 90 Cinema Saada  66, 168 n.13 Cities without Slums (VSB) programme  127–35, 147, 149 class  12 anxieties  94 lower-middle  17, 36 neoliberal class affects  97–8 politics  19–21 working-class  104, 118, 138, 139 classed spaces  9–12 CNDH. See Moroccan National Human Rights Council (CNDH) cognitive mapping  69 Cohen, Jean-Louis  45, 164 n.5 collective presence  97, 99 colonialism and housing innovations  3, 32–6 and modernity  7 Morocco’s urban development  31 heritage-preservation practices  43 commemorative map  56–62, 68, 85, 154 community reparations  55–6 conceived space  4 Cooper, Frederic  8 Corner, James  67 Covid-19 pandemic  151 creative ingenuity  117 Cresswell, Tim  127, 140, 146 Darija (Moroccan Arabic)  19, 20 Dar Lamane  73–4 Dar Shabab  64 Das, Veena  111, 112 Days of the Neighbourhood  166 n.25 Deleuze, Giles  76 Democratic Labour Confederation (CDT)  39 Dennerlein, Bettina  169 n.7 Derb Moulay Cherif detention centre  38, 62, 74, 151 development  84

199

Casablanca’s  4 housing  123–6 projects  8 social  26, 81, 85, 91, 99 transport  140–6 domestic labour  116–20 double-stigmatization  82 Douglas, Mary  116 dropping out  169 n.5 dual cities  6, 43 Écochard, Michel, housing grid  34–6, 48, 54–5, 106 El Bouih, Fatna  17, 38, 42, 56, 74–7, 95 Elden, Stuart  95 Eleb, Monique  45, 164 n.5 enclavization  93 Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC)  41, 55–6, 85, 167 n.3 Euromed Heritage 4  167 n.34 European Union (EU)  88–90 everyday (politics; routines)  112–13, 159–61 February 20th Movement  13 flexible emending  49 FOGARIM  130 food subsidies  39 forced relocations  126 Foucault, Michel  31, 87 French Agency for Development  89 French colonial modernity  7 French Cultural Institute  101 French language  19–20 Freud, Sigmund  110 funding activities  56, 89, 90 future housing projects. See new housing developments gameboard  53, 62–8, 78 gender  105, 113, 139 gendered skill  116–20, 122 Ghannam, Farha  173 n.15 ghettoization  3, 39 Giard, Luce  117 Gondry, Michel, film factory  101, 103 governance  6, 25 Grasseni, Cristina  23, 76

200 Group d’Architectes Modernes Marocains (GAMMA)  7 Guattari, Felix  76 Hache, Émilie  87, 97 Hached, Ferhat  36 hadga woman  117–19, 137 Hadid, Zaha  123 hammam  113–16, 171 n.6 Han, Clara  111 Hassan II [King]  3, 37, 41, 44, 55, 132, 165 n.14, 172 n.12 Hay Mohammadi  14 Écochard’s housing grid  34–6 fieldwork context  13–24 human rights abuses and state violence  3 lockdown measures in  151 maps of  56–62, 68–77 memory and trauma  153 memory sites in  56–9 myth and reality  3–5 as ‘open-air prison’  42 spaces and inhabitants  29–31 state violence  85 Hay Mohammadi, Une histoire en jeu  64 heritage  43, 45, 49, 85, 167 n.34 Highmore, Ben  113 Hirak movement  159 Hoffman, Katherine E.  163 n.10 homemaking  102, 103, 105, 116–20, 146 homes furnishing  136–8 gendered labour  116–20 ideal  135–40 Moroccan  101–2, 104 as social and cultural facts  103–5 un-homeliness  106–12 housing  34–6, 39–41, 73, 104, 105, 123–6, 128, 138, 139 housing architecture  171 n.1 Écochard’s grid design  34–6, 48, 54–5, 106 Kabyle house  171 n.5 social  47 ‘I am the hood, seven and a half stories’  42 iconographic maps  56–62, 68–77

Index Image of the City (Lynch)  68 incarcerations  38 INDH. See National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) industrialization  34 informality  8 Ingold, Tim  146 insecurity  79–80, 108, 168 n.1 instrumental commemorations  42–8 Interior Ministry  166 n.20, 169 n.3 international development agendas  86 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  41, 86 ‘Islamic city’  43–4 isnad  43 jamʿiyya  14, 55, 57, 60–7, 77, 81, 87, 169 n.11 Abdeljalil Bakkar  18, 82, 88, 145 INDH’s financial support  89 reduction in funding  151 ‘street arts’ programme  80, 81, 89–91 youth clubs  79, 81 Journées du Patrimoine  45 Karyan Central  32 Kilimini  96 labour unions  87 La Caixa  89 Lahraouiyine housing project  128 language  19–21 Lefebvre, Henri  44, 159 The Production of Space  4, 55 Le Renard, Amelie  20 lieux de mémoire. See memory sites Lincoln Hotel  44 loitering  82, 84 Lopez, Jennifer  140 lower-class youth. See also youth, in Hay Mohammedi development interventions  81, 86 responsibilization of  85–9 ludic mapping  67 Lyautey, Hubert  33 Lynch, Kevin  23, 68 map-making  23 map(ping)

Index Cartesian  52–4 cognitive  69 colonial-era  51, 52 commemorative  56–62, 68, 85, 154 Dar Lamane  73–4 El Bouih’s future-oriented  74–7 geometrical rendition  70–1 grid  51, 52 of Hay Mohammadi  68–77 ludic  67 memories of violence  55–62 online  51 power of  77 street  51 marginality  25, 163 n.4 and precarious lives  9–12 socio-spatial  31 margins  3, 32, 77 mcharmlin  93–5, 97 media archaeology of place  23 mediated approaches  21–4 mediated space  4 Mémoire et Dignité  57 memories of violence  55–62 memory cafes  57, 59 memory sites  56–9, 78 Menoret, Pascal  93 Michael C. Rockefeller Fellowship  13, 163 n.7 militarization  152 of urban planning  4 mobilities  16, 40, 41, 123, 124, 126–7, 140–8 geographical  123, 135 social, 126 135, 139 modernity/modernism  6–9, 152, 163 n.3 architectural  7 revitalization of  141 scopic regime of  22 urban  158–9, 161 Modern Standard Arabic  19 Mohammad V  36 Mohammad V Foundation  89, 169 n.10 Mohammad VI  8, 13, 41, 80, 88, 167 n.36, 169 nn.8, 10 Montagne, Robert  34 moral discourses  82–5 Moroccan Architects’ Association  44 Moroccan homes  101–2, 104

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colonial interventions  103 mobile unit  103 publications  104 as social and cultural facts  103–5 un-homeliness  106–12 Moroccan Labour Union (UMT)  39 Moroccan Muslims  33 Moroccan National Bureau of Statistics (HCP)  164 n.14 Moroccan National Human Rights Council (CNDH)  55 Moroccan riots  36 1965 student riot  37 1981 bread riot  39–40, 84 Morocco Mall  140, 142 Nash, June  10 Nass Al Ghiwane  165 n.16 ‘nass mezzianin’  90 National Agency for Promotion of Employment and Skills (ANAPEC)  89 National Centre for the Study of Human Rights  95 National Initiative for Human Development (INDH)  88–9 National Union of Moroccan Students  37 National Union of Popular Forces  37 Navaro-Yashin, Yael  110, 111 Navez-Bouchanine, Francoise  172 n.5 neoliberal class affects  97–8 neoliberalism  86, 87 neoliberalization  5, 10 neoliberal metropolis, Bahmad’s formulation of  4 neoliberal reforms  2, 82 new housing developments Cities without Slums (VSB) programme  127–35 future elite residence  123–6 hyper-modernity  123–6 ideal homes  135–40 Lahraouiyine project  128 participatory planning  128, 150 R+3 129, 133 relocations  126–35 social exclusion  126

202 new proletariat  34, 103 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)  81, 86–8, 168 n.11 ‘non-places’  141 Nora, Pierre  59 Orientalist idea  26, 43 Ossman, Susan  114, 115, 173 n.16 Oufkir, Mohammad  165 n.12 pacified youthfulness  91 Pandolfo, Stefania  70 paradoxical construction of heritage facts  43 participatory planning  128, 150 participatory relocation  133 perceived space  4 The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Slyomovics)  61 photo-elicitation  23 policing discourses  82–5, 99, 144, 151 policy(ies)  6, 8, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 43, 86, 88, 99, 151, 159 political violence  37–42 de Portzamparc, Christian  123 post-colonial urbanity  156–9 precarity/precarious loitering  84 marginality and  10–11 preventative arrests  98 priority sites  88 production of space  4 The Production of Space (Lefebvre)  4, 55 Prost, Henri  33 public baths  113–16 rebellious youth  92–8 reconciliation process  85 religion  18 religious charities  87 relocation  163 n.2, 172 n.6 forced  126 participatory  133 slum-eradication  127–35 voluntary  126, 138 reparations (community)  41, 56, 85, 167 n.2 repression  165 n.12

Index responsibilization of lower-class youth  2, 85–9, 99 rituals, hammam  113–16 Rollinde, Marguerite  165 n.12 Rose, Tricia  81 routines  112–13 Rudofsky, Bernard, Architecture without Architects  165 n.9 Schema Directeur de l’Amenagement du Territoire (SDAU)  40 Scott, James  54 security  37–8, 84, 143 selfie-economies  92 sense of insecurity  79, 169 n.2 sense of place  21 sensory apprentices  22 sensuous scholarship  24 shaʿabi  11, 82 silent acts of kindness  111, 121 Situationists  23, 69, 76 skilled landscapes  76 slum-eradication  126 ‘Cities without Slums’ programme  127–35 slum relocations. See relocation slum-upgrading  172 n.5 Slyomovics, Susan  168 n.10 The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco  61 Smithson, Alison  36 Snakes and Ladders  63, 168 n.9 social alienation  81 social development (agendas/ programmes)  81, 85, 155 social exclusion  126 social housing  47 social integration  128, 141, 142 social justice  86 social marginalization  11 social mobility  126–7 social structures  11 social workers  133 space(s) classed  9–12 conceived  4 perceived  4 production of  4 representations of  154

Index of transit  141 Spitulnik, Debra  163 n.3 state violence  3, 37–42, 55–62, 68, 85, 95 Stoller, Paul  24 ‘Street Arts in the Mediterranean’  90 ‘street arts’ programme  80, 81, 89–91. See also youth, in Hay Mohammedi streets hanging out in  82–3 loitering  82, 84 lower-class communities and youth in  82–4 moral and policing discourses  82–5 time-pass  84 strong ethics of endurance  112 student riot (1965)  37 subproletariat  11 Taki, Najib  17, 56–60, 63, 168 n.6 Tcharmil aesthetic  92–7, 149 theoretical zones of prestige  157 total immersion  18 Traces d’espaces, histoire, mémoire et patrimoines de Hay Mohammadi  56 tramway network  140–6, 158 Tsing, Anna  10 Turkle, Sherry  22 un-homeliness (unheimlich)  106–12 Union Marocaine du Travail (UMT)  15 Union nationale des étudiants du Maroc (UNEP)  37 Union nationale des forces populaires (UNFP)  37 urban anthropology  6 urban apartheid  6, 33 urbanism  156–9 urban margins centrality of  152–6 colonial interventions and birth of  32–6 instrumental commemorations  42–8

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political violence and postIndependence struggles  37–42 Prost plan  33 Urban Planning Agency  40, 166 n.22 voluntary relocation  126, 138 VSB program. See Cities without Slums (VSB) programme Wacquant, Loïc  86, 94, 98 Wali (governor)  40 well-being  121 West, Harry  67–8 Westerners  20 White, Luise  94, 129 Wilaya  40, 166 n.21 working-class communities  104, 118, 138, 139 World Bank  82, 88 Yawm al Hay ((Days of the Neighbourhood)  166 n.25 Years of Lead  37, 59, 95 youth, in Hay Mohammedi banda haircuts  79, 93 dress styles  92–3 lower-class, responsibilization of  85–9, 99 mcharmlin  93–5, 97 pacified youthfulness  91 police raids and arrests  79, 80, 91, 94–5, 168 n.1 rebellious  92–8 selfie photography  92 street arts  80, 81, 89–91 street corner sociality  83 Tcharmil aesthetic  92–7 youth clubs  81, 83 youth unemployment  3, 82, 163 n.1, 169 n.5 Zaki, Lamia  172 n.6 zanqa  82 Zurfluh, Jean-Michel  166 n.28

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