The city's many uses: cultural tourism, the sacred monarchy and the preservation of Fez's Medina

Abstract

How does something become heritage? By what processes does heritage, a nostalgic, intangible vision of the past, come to be inscribed on a particular site, transposed from an ethereal notion into a bounded and mappable place? To what desires or longings, economic exigencies or political purposes are these processes answering? Fez, Morocco's invention as a UNESCO ‘Cultural Heritage Site’ beginning in 1912 and culminating in 1981 affords us with one extended historical moment in which to examine these questions. The resulting study indicates that colonial and post‐colonial politics, tourism and a general conception of Morocco's national past collude to produce and sustain a site construed outside of time, but one that is paradoxically bound to constructions of the nation's presents.