One of the major issues that European architects in Morocco were confronted with from the 1930s on was in fact rural migration to the industrial cities. In Morocco the Service de l’Urbanisme of Michel Écochard which co-operated with ethnologists, geographers and sociologists, was asked for a response to the improvised construction by the rural population, of hut settlements – so-called Bidonvilles – at the outskirts of cities like Casablanca and Rabat. These new areas – somewhere halfway between rural and urban life – were not at all anticipated by the protectorate administration and soon became perceived as sites of "unsanitary" conditions and revolt. Finding solutions to accommodate this ‘greatest number’ of rural migrants became the matter of the day.
The strategies of the Service de L’Urbanisme varied from the re-ordering of the bidonville (restructuration) to temporary rehousing (relogement) and finally to the creation of new housing estates (habitations à loyer moderé), based on the standard Écochard grid. All of these strategies were continuously located in the field of tension defined by the emancipatory goals to improve the everyday life of the colonized and the search for appropriate governing tools that complied with these intentions. Hence ambiguous attitudes emerged towards the existing territory and its inhabitants.
The Écochard plan applied notions of ‘culturally-specific’ dwelling that took existing dwelling practices as a point of departure and resulted in different dwelling typologies for different categories of inhabitants. These categories where indeed built upon already existing definitions of cultural and racial difference. In his large resettlement and building plan for Casablanca, Michel Écochard divided the city into different residential zones for European, Moroccan, and Jewish residents, as well as for industry and commerce. Moreover, the concept of “culturally-specific” dwelling typologies was based on existing European assumptions of cultural and racial difference. Under colonial rule, these categorizations were reinforced and turned into a means of exercising governmental power. The housing estates for Muslims were built far from the “European” colonial city, by creating a so-called Zone Sanitaire. It was bordered by circular roads and a motorway. This spatial division was also a legacy of the colonial apartheid regime, in which Moroccans were forbidden to enter the protectorate city unless they were employed as domestic servants in European households (cf. Cohen and Eleb 2002, Abu-Lughod 1980, Celik 1997). Special neighborhoods were also developed for the Moroccan-Jewish population of Casablanca. Built near the seaside, the El Hank district is one of the largest in Casablanca. The buildings specially constructed for Moroccan Jews at the same time were also placed in a sort of intermediate zone within view of the French population, located on the Corniche between the exclusive residential area of Anfa and the old Medina, both very near the colonial city center of Casablanca. This spatial organization of the 1950s residential and urban planning projects was very hierarchical. It divided the Moroccan population into religious groups (Jews, Muslims), while the Europeans remained a universal category.
The concepts of ‘building for the greatest number’ that had been gained under colonial conditions found their way into suburban planning in France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany (Fourcaut 2004) from the mid-1950s on. In France these methods were used to overcome a delapidated housing stock in need of modernization and large populations in the Bidonvilles that were found in most large cities. Throughout France, and in several other European countries, the approaches for Building for the Greatest Number were applied at large scale –affecting not only numerous peoples dwelling environment but also large parts of the territory. In 1961, the team of Candilis-Josic-Woods won the competition for the satellite town Toulouse Le Mirail. In 1963, construction started on the town, which had to house 100,000 people (Avermaete, 2005). These buildings hit the headlines: not only because of the ‘greatest number’, but also because, in 1998, it was in one of these banlieues that the first riots broke out after the police had shot youngsters. (MvO)
Sources:
Abdallah, Mogniss (2000): J’y suis, j’y reste!: les luttes de l’immigration en France depuis les années soixante. Paris: Reflex.
Avermaete, Tom (2005): Another Modern - the Post-war architecture and urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods. Rotterdam.
Abu-Lughod, Janet (1980): Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, N.J.
Celik, Zeynep (1997): Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley.
Cohen, Jean-Louis / Eleb, Monique (2002): Casablanca. Colonial Myth and Architectural Ventures. New York: The Monacelli Press.
Eleb, Monique (2000): An Alternative Functionalist Universalism: Ecochard, Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique. in: Ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Réjean Legault. Anxious Modernisms Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Cambridge, Mass.
Fourcaut, Annie (2004) :1950 - Les premiers grands ensembles en region parisienne: Ne pas refaire la banlieue? In: French Historical Studies - Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2004, pp. 195-218.
Marion von Osten, «In Colonial Modern Worlds», in: Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali u. Marion von Osten (Hg.), Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future, London 2010, S. 16-32.
