Concrete Futures: Technologies of Urban Crisis in Colonial and Postcolonial Morocco

Concrete Futures presents a history of colonial construction technologies and their postcolonial afterlives in Morocco. During the French Protectorate (1912-1956), cities such as Casablanca underwent a series of profound transformations. On the one hand, famine, unrest, epidemics, scarcity, rural migration, industrialization, an influx of European settlers, the reorganization of the land tenure system, and a host of other factors prompted experts, colonial officials, and local observers to articulate the problems facing urban Morocco in terms of an emerging “crisis.” On the other, new technologies of housing construction, designed to address particular understandings of this “crisis,” remade urban environments across the Protectorate. These technologies—from types of reinforced concrete construction to protocols for demolition and new strategies of housing finance—not only changed the way Moroccan cities were built, but also rearranged relations of authority between different communities of experts, officials, workers, and residents. During the final years of the Protectorate, the colonial administration deployed these crisis technologies in response to a range of perceived threats—from epidemics to anti-colonial revolt—emanating from Casablanca’s urban slums. Decolonization in Morocco provided opportunities for urban experts to work crisis technologies into the modernizing programs of the postcolonial state. Officials adapted cinder-block constructions and microfinancial methods to the imperatives of disaster response in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake in the southern city of Agadir in 1960. In late 1960s and early 1970s, postcolonial architects and administrators blended these technologies with new international definitions of the “environment” in the search for a sustainable, culturally appropriate architecture. Crisis technologies, however, did not always perform in the ways that engineers, planners, and architects intended. Moroccan elites, workers, and artisans also participated in colonial modernization projects. At times, their participation disrupted the harmonious visions of planners and troubled the grand projects of engineers. At others, Moroccan forms of skill and labor were inscribed within crisis technologies and made to serve the aims of colonial governance. This dissertation argues that crisis technologies embedded colonial conceptions of crisis—with all of their contradictions—into the material form of Moroccan cities and the institutional structures inherited after independence in 1956. By considering how officials, experts, workers, and residents strategically shifted between different approaches to materiality in their efforts to remake the built world, this project uncovers the forms of political contestation and technological labor at the heart of colonial modernization schemes. Following colonial construction technologies and their postcolonial deployments, this account links together core concerns in urban environmental history, Science and Technology Studies, histories of architecture and urban planning, and studies of development and modernization. This dissertation also traces the long legacies of modernist failures in Morocco—failures to produce the well-ordered, multi-racial landscape that colonial planners imagined. These failures continue to resonate today. Contemporary forms of urban renewal draw on Protectorate-era strategies and arguments to displace residents, and present-day popular protests foreground demands for access to housing and infrastructure.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163036/1/wildj_1.pd