Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of urban plans in projecting and conjuring up images of a desirable future in Casablanca, Morocco. By looking at the role played by the urban margins in this process, I use a multi-media, ethno-historical approach to explore how the future is secured through the present.

Paper long abstract:

Built on the gaping holes of a colonial era quarry, Hay Mohammadi, formerly Carriere Centrale, has become a mythical neighborhood in the history of Morocco. Known for North Africa's oldest and largest slum still in existence today, Hay Mohammadi served as a laboratory for experimentation with social housing at the height of the modernist movement. Sixty years later these visionary projects stand as monuments to ruin and decay, victims of a toxic blend of political and economic circumstances. A once promising utopia, the neighbourhood has become synonymous with crime and marginality in Casablanca.

A new urban plan devised by Moroccan authorities in 2014 aims to change the face of such neighbourhoods, and Casablanca more broadly, by encouraging and endorsing a vision of the future rooted in the visual tropes of hypermoderniy. Although few believe in the fruition of these bold plans, elements of these visions infuse everyday life on the margins of Casablanca, unsettling normative understandings of progress and transforming ideas and ideals of what it means to be or become modern.

Based on fifteen months of fieldwork that combine a variety of sensorial and multi-media methodologies, this paper will employ an ethno-historical approach to explore the entanglement of forces involved in projecting an ideal future for Casablanca's urban dwellers. The main questions guiding this paper are: How does the state produce the future through plans and architectural renderings? And how is this future contested, appropriated, and secured in the present by inhabitants on the margins of Casablanca?