Paper short abstract:

Laâyoune/El Aaiún is a peculiar urban formation. As the largest city in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, it has been shaped largely through a series of unresolved political projects engendered by expectations of decolonization.

Paper long abstract:

Put differently, the city serves as the spatial expression of repeated efforts to fix, mobilize, displace, and abandon political subjects in the name of decolonization. This paper will examine how the city’s nomenclature indexes a series of efforts to colonize and decolonize the Sahara through urbanization, from Morocco’s Liberation Army in the 1950s to Spanish colonial rule in the 1960s to the decades-old Moroccan-Sahrawi conflict. These incomplete political projects of decolonization have left their mark on the nomenclature and built environment of Laâyoune/El Aaiún in a manner expressive of an intertwined relationship between urbanization and coercion, political commitment and ambivalence. This paper will explore how vernacular place-names throughout the city index conflicting but overlapping imaginaries that construct the Sahara as both a frontier of unlimited opportunity and a territory that requires spatial confinement in order to govern.