In Casablanca, Michel Ecochard, director of the Morocco Department of Urban Planning (1946-1952), developed a specific urban planning concept.
Knowledge of the social and physical characteristics of the field was a prerequisite to the plan: ‘the art of urban planning’ laid in ‘fitting into reality’. Ecochard used sociological and building surveys to investigate ‘human groups’ in “all of their daily realities, as well as cartographic and statistical analyses, used to identify ‘the city’s fundamental tendencies.” To construct ‘Housing for the Greatest Number’ of the colonized factory workers, Michel Ecochard established a Housing Grid as the main planning instrument for new urban neighborhoods that replaced the numerous bidonvilles from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s. In order to construct ‘housing for the greatest number’ for the colonized factory workers – mostly migrants from rural areas, the Ecochard Grid was dimensioned according to a courtyard dwelling typology, believed to be the appropriate Habitat adapté for the future inhabitants, the former bidonvilles dwellers. His so-called ‘Housing Grid for Muslims’ measured 8 by 8 meters and consisted of two rooms and a large outdoor space, related to the Arabic Patio. Part of the ensuing 64 m2 was organized as a so-called neighborhood unit, resulting in an intricate ground-level structure of patio-dwellings, alleys, and public squares.
The Ecochard Grid is a very special example of transcultural modernism that was specifically developed in the European colonies. On one hand, Ecochard tried to study the Arabic house and its function, but he also adapted the grid structure and the neighborhood unit concepts by Stein and Perry for his Casablanca low-rise scheme. Moreover, the discourses and practices of the industrialization of building as well as the houses for Existenz Minimum are articulated in these structures. Implemented until 1984, the Ecochard Grid has been the most prevalent planning structure used in Casablanca’s suburbs until today. It has been implemented in other cities in North Africa and the Middle East. (MvO)
Scources:
Avermaete, Tom. Another Modern: The Post-war Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods. Rotterdam: NAi, 2005.
Cohen, Jean-Louis and Monique Eleb. Casablanca: Colonial Myth and Architectural Ventures. New York: Monacelli Press, 2002.
Eleb, Monique. “An Alternative Functionalist Universalism: Ecochard, Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique.” In Anxious Modernisms Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, 55-74. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 200
