Beyond the colonial paradigm: Local dynamics and the shift from social separation to spatial segregation in Casablanca’s urbanism

Abstract

Sharing with other colonial regimes the paradigm of a gap between the colonized society and colonizing one, urban policies undertaken by the French colonial administration in the Moroccan context carried a particular interest for a necessity of modernizing the local society through the urban space via a “civilizing mission”. The extensive operations of creation of new cities in Morocco generated new strategies of urban planning and management, which transformed not only the urban landscapes of cities and territories of these countries, but also went along with a deep mutation in the social structure within the cities. Willing to avoid previous mistakes in Algeria and to protect local culture from a “civilizational shock”, colonial cities built under the French protectorate by Hubert Lyautey, general resident of colonial administration, sought a the first place a separation between local population and European one. However, the subsequent approaches that followed evolved gradually towards a new order of spatial and socio-economical segregation that departed from the initial colonial policies; as the initial ethnical separation shifted to a socio-economical segregation, carried in the process, by complex socio-spatial dynamics in which the local society took part at and influenced the colonial administration and its spatial projections. By looking beyond the colonized/colonizing paradigm, this article aims, through the case of the city of Casablanca, to reassess the power of the local social dynamics. Stressing that while colonial policies initiated the shift to a modern city, social segregations that occurred after, carried by its own dynamics, need to be examined as a powerful process in reshaping our current cities.