Students: Tao Baerlocher, Jonas Krieg
Location: Group work in Casablanca
Date: June, 2008
Type: Research project, student work, will to control (state activities)

The third subject focuses on the activities of the city and state in Casablanca’s periphery thereby constituting a kind of counterpart to the first two. Identifying the “Bidonvilles” as the city’s prime urban menace the state has been trying to replace them by large-scale housing projects (logement social) to provide their inhabitants with sanitary and hygienic living space. Apart from hygienic reasons sociopolitical consideration such as the containment of Islamic Fundamentalism are cited. To accomplish this task the state (under the leadership of the King himself) has launched ambitious programs such as “Ville sans Bidonsvilles 2012”, that promises to eradicate all “Bidonvilles” in Morocco by 2012. The large scale of these operations and their never ending nature has led the state to rely more and more on Private-Public-Partnerships to secure financing. Also the long history of Casablanca’s public housing projects and its recurring failures have led the authorities to involve the affected population more; capitalizing on informal energies instead of strictly denouncing them. Re-housing today takes the form of complex and refined processes oscillating between participatory freedom, paternalism and brute force. These processes and their impact on people’s ways of living constitute the main interest of this study.