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Urban politics of the Bouregreg project: the integration of Rabat-Salé and Morocco's monarchial state
Abstract
The paper essentially seeks to query in what way contemporary grand urban projects in urban centers of the Arab world fit into political interests of globalizing monarchies. It focuses on a detailed case study of the Bouregreg Project in Rabat-Salé, Morocco which is the monarchial state’s attempt to make a world-class “modern but historical” capital befitting the Islamic Kingdom. By viewing the Bouregreg Project as an urban enterprise of the powerful monarchial state designed to increase political authority in the urban domain, the paper aims to offer perspectives on the intersection of monarchical power and neoliberal capitalism that is asserted to be playing out in Rabat-Sale over the course of the Bouregreg project. For this purpose, this paper specifically focuses on the royal-endorsed agenda of “agglomeration” of Rabat-Salé which the Bouregreg project stands for. Given the intertwined histories of the two cities in the last century, which begot the current circumstances of serious political, economic and social discrepancies between Rabat and Salé, this paper critically examines the top-down urban agenda of agglomeration from the perspective of mobilization of Salé. Drawing from documental research and interviews with municipal-level central authorities and governing urban bodies in Rabat and Salé, the purpose of this paper is two fold: first, to demonstrate how the hegemonic agenda of agglomeration is legitimized via political discourse as well as institutional apparatus, and second to illustrate how this agenda is historically and politically linked to the authority of the Moroccan monarchy, walking a tightrope between modernity and tradition in the 21st century. While much scholarship in the burgeoning literature on the urban boom in the Middle East takes a macro-level perspective of neoliberal urbanism, this paper aims to use the detailed case study of neoliberal urban renewal in the Bouregreg project as a wider investigation of the political ramifications of the so-called Arab mega-projects for authoritarian regimes in the region.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Urban Studies