Entrepreneurial Assemblages from off the Map: (Trans) National Designs for Tangier

Abstract

Poststructuralist perspectives need to be reconciled with political economic readings of urban globalization. One approach complements the other: the enactment of distantiated circuits and the territorialization of flows occur within existing geographies of uneven development while contingently reproducing or reshaping such spatial conditions of possibility. We argue that broadening the realm of critical urbanism is particularly relevant for researching peripheral entrepreneurialisms and their inherent (im) mobilities, conspicuous ambition paired with unavoidable constraints. This paper focuses on Tanger City Center, a landmark redevelopment controversial for its exclusionary designs and troubled inception. Adopting mobile methods with relational perspectives, we retrace the translocal negotiation of this symptomatic assemblage. However, we show that its territorialization cannot be understood apart from the state-sponsored remaking of Tangier into an expansive yet also unequal and fragmented city-region. Furthermore, underneath globalist discourse, the assemblage evinces circumscribed (trans)national agency at the planning stage, while subsequent frictions and disruptions punctuate the construction rhythm. Alongside its theoretical thrust, the paper contributes to: (a) the advancement of explicitly urban interpretations of globalization of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Morocco's emerging neoliberal geographies under King Mohammed VI; and (b) the diversification of narratives of globalization-led urban change by theorizing entrepreneurial predicaments from off the map of global city imaginations.