My contribution to this panel is a qualitative analysis of the processes of urban restructuring, heritage-commodification and neolibrealization of Moroccan cities. Cities like Marrakesh, Fez, Casablanca and Tangier –where the central state orchestrates such processes via PPP arrangements– have become “contested terrains” where local residents attempt to resist all attempts that compromise their right to the city. I begin with an analysis of the various ways in which policy and media discourses ideologically frame Moroccan cities and their neighborhoods as spaces of consumption, poverty, threat, illegality and so on. I then develop a model of “symbolic topographies” in order to understand, on the one hand, the spatial forms attendant to the political and ideological power in history and, on the other, the process of (re)signification of the spatial units within each city. Hence, each Moroccan city is an assemblage of discrete spaces which, together, make up (inter alia) areas of commodified memory and; state intervention; enclaves of consumption and; fledgling neoliberalism as well as social stigma. Given the authoritarian nature of the state, many urbanites avoid open confrontation and deploy in its stead an “art” of surreptitious, unobtrusive resistance. My ethnographic work reveals that the forms of resistance I identified are far from monolithic. For instance, women’s groups, residents of historic and peripheral neighborhoods, and street vendors, all adopt distinct ways of counter-conduct that each fit their spatial and temporal contexts. Further, some civil society groups internalize the modern governmental reason in their activism. Others espouse the language of “empowerment” as a practical mimesis of the market logic, while many simply appease the state in order to secure short-term benefits. As for those urban subjects who lack the capacity to assert their right to the city, they engage in various forms of collective, albeit fragmented, speech/action consisting of informality, re-villaging and what James C. Scott calls “infrapolitical… gestures of contempt and desecration” as means of oppositional politics (1990, 199). To be sure, informality is no “mere survival,” but rather a tactic to expose the dystopian nature of the neoliberal Moroccan city fraught with failing policies, unresponsive private sector and corrupt local authorities.