The impact of Hubert Lyautey’s philosophy of cultural separation and preservation on the Moroccan urban landscape during the protectorate period has been explored by Janet Abu-Lughod (Urban Apartheid in Rabat, 1980) and Paul Rabinow (French Modern, 1995). This paper, primarily historical in nature, examines Lyautey’s legacy in Morocco after independence through an examination of the reconstruction of Agadir after its destruction in the earthquake of 1960, and by comparing the modernist “New Agadir” [sic, in English] project to more recent urban development projects in Casablanca and Rabat-Sale. The reconstruction of Agadir provided a clean slate for urban planners who worked for the Ministry of Public Works and the Commission for the Reconstruction of Agadir, and they rebuilt Agadir without the “urban apartheid” that had characterized Lyautey’s urbanism. Lyautey had envisioned a segregated residential pattern in which modern French quarters and administrative centers could be built, but “traditional” lifestyles would be preserved for Moroccans, to avoid the ills of the typical colonial city—especially in Algeria—where “the indigenous city is polluted, sabotaged; all of its charm is gone, and the elite of the population has left.” The post-earthquake planners of 1960 rejected the Lyautey legacy: Agadir was to become a wholly “modern” new city. This paper argues that while the New Agadir project rejected Lyautey’s historic preservationism and cultural separationism, it reaffirmed the connection between urban development and state authoritarianism that had been fundamental to Lyautey’s projects. Furthermore, it argues that the great colonial debate of the Lyautey era, the assimilation-association question, has shaped debates about Agadir after 1960 concerning what it means for a city to be both modern and Moroccan. The new Agadir has been described as an “orphan” city, deprived of its past (Charef, 1994); the monarchy’s more recent urban projects, while no less ambitious, have reaffirmed Lyautey’s belief in the linkage between the preservation of tradition and the construction of a modern Morocco. The paper is based on sources in the French and American government archives, the memoirs of earthquake survivors, French and Moroccan press, and the writings and plans of French and Moroccan urban planners.