Since the first decades of the French Protectorate in Morocco, experts and officials have sought solutions to a variety of urban crises—from housing and unemployment to public health and popular unrest—in large-scale, publicly financed housing and infrastructure projects. In the 1940s and 1950s, Casablanca’s colonial municipal government created a new zoning apparatus and engaged in the rapid construction of housing developments as a means of managing the multiplying informal settlements on the city’s periphery. The architects of these projects aimed to implant an ethics of restraint and intercommunal respect within what they described as an unruly urban landscape, characterized by tense and potentially explosive relations between Europeans, Moroccan Muslims, and Jews. This paper traces how Casablanca’s colonial municipal government attempted to incorporate local notions of danger, uncleanliness, and transgressive behavior into new urban regulations as a way of countering the threat of intercommunal violence and anticolonial unrest. Zoning laws and electrification projects embedded and materialized ethnic and religious differences between the city’s European, Muslim, and Jewish populations within the physical and legal infrastructures of urban life in Morocco. More than just a “laboratory for modernity” (Rabinow 1989), Casablanca’s new housing projects were a site where colonial planners and engineers working with local informants aimed to build Moroccan understandings of pollution and respectability into networks of pipes, wires, and regulations. Following the violent December 1952 urban revolt, colonial experts and bureaucrats worked to cast the uprising as a "technical problem”—a mismatch between the Casablanca’s physical and legal infrastructures and the social and ethnic landscape of the city itself. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly discussion of the political lives of infrastructures in the Middle East and North Africa by asserting the need to take seriously the interplay of expert projects and knowledges with local categories and forms of moral reasoning. As sociotechnical systems, Casablanca’s urban infrastructures were not simply top-down constructions but also encompassed the political and ethical projects of a diverse array of urban actors: Moroccan labor activists, rural migrants, and European settlers as well as the central state. Drawing on archival records, technical documents, and newspaper accounts from Protectorate-era Morocco, I argue that state strategies for managing the threat of violence through zoning regulations and built infrastructures have had lasting impacts on social and material life in urban Morocco.

After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the sultan Mehmed II ordered forced immigrations from Balkan and Anatolian cities to repopulate his devastated new capital. Although he guaranteed the immigrants abandoned Byzantine houses for free, the insufficient infrastructure in Istanbul generated a huge dissent among them. In the end, many residents fled when the government reversed the free-housing policy and levied rent on their dwellings. The angry townspeople objected, “were we brought here to pay rent for these houses of infidels?” This story reveals that, apart from the economic factors, the houses themselves also dissatisfied the new residents. How were these houses in fifteenth-century Constantinople different from the contemporary Muslim or rural domestic architecture, to such an extent that the immigrants perceived them as “infidel” and abandoned them? The survey of Istanbul in 1455 yields significant clues to answer this question regarding the architectural morphology of houses. The survey inventories 908 houses that belonged to the Imperial Treasury, with limited descriptions of the inhabitants and buildings per se. Mostly located in the peripheral neighborhoods of intramural Istanbul, these are apparently the formerly vacant Byzantine houses allotted to the immigrants, which in large part were still desolate at the time of the survey. Although the descriptions of houses are mostly bald and unavailing, such as “a single-storied house” or “a house with many rooms,” we can point out several types of buildings that the immigrants could have regarded as infidel, or at least alien to their culture of housing. Among these are renovated monasteries with multiple rooms, a kind of apartment building that was never accepted by Ottoman families until the nineteenth century. Terraced houses, which can be designated by the word “adjacent(mutassil),” are another category that was alien to the residents, due to their limited privacy and lack of substantial gardens for vegetation. Even in the later centuries Ottoman cities were predominantly occupied by spacious rural-style houses accompanied by productive gardens, surrounded by a wall. Although it is a universal phenomenon that highly urbanized and densified cities start to amass various accumulative urban dwelling units, the rustic psychology and way of living among fifteenth-century Ottoman townspeople led them to reject the “urban” congested Byzantine houses in Istanbul. The waqf property survey in 1546 indicates that after almost ninety years, the city was by and large filled with garden houses that corresponded with the residents’ mentality.

On April 10, 1917, Dr. Alex Granville, director of the Alexandria Sanitary Service, filed sent a letter to the Ministry of the Interior regarding the fact that prostitutes were being treated in a government Lock Hospital in the Moharrem Bey district of Alexandria. Neighborhood residents, he reported, took exception to the treatment of prostitutes in their district and Dr. Granville demanded that the treatment facility be moved to somewhere less objectionable. During the period of the British occupation, prostitution was legalized and well regulated by the Department of Public Health. Due to the influx of British troops during the war, the number of licensed prostitutes soared and special measures were taken to discover and treat both licensed and unlicensed prostitutes and, by late 1915, specific areas had been set off where licensed prostitutes could operate. With almost no exceptions, these red light districts were all located in Egyptian quarters of major cities—Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, Ismailia, etc--away from neighborhoods where European administrators of the government and military were likely to live and to encounter them on a regular basis. A secondary factor of this relocation was that it (theoretically) made it more difficult for foreign troops to solicit the services of prostitutes and, when venereal disease infection rates became high among troops, to cordon off the red light districts entirely for a period of time. What makes the complaint registered by Dr. Granville somewhat unique is that Moharrem Bey was a native quarter, and that the residents requesting the relocation of the hospital were native Egyptians, not Europeans. This paper aims to discuss the implications of relegating legalized brothels and licensed sex workers (and their medical treatment) into native Egyptian quarters during the war. While European attitudes toward these quarters—routinely described as filthy, miasmic, smelly, etc.—are well documented and help explain why they were seen as appropriate sites for sex work, what is less documented is how the inhabitants of these quarters felt about hosting said brothels and sex workers in the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. As we have seen above, they did object, and they used legal means to do so when and where possible. What were the complaints and methods of protest? And what were the tensions with colonial and military administrators, as well as the troops, that resulted from this imposition?

A review of colonial-period narratives on the French urban and architectural experience in the colonies shows clearly that Morocco was a true laboratory for many experiments with new urban designs, architectural and decorative styles, and building materials. A former secretary general of the French Protectorate, considered Morocco as the spearhead of the colonial urban experience (mouvement urbaniste) not only in North Africa but possibly in all the colonies. In 1912, with the signing of the treaty making Morocco a French Protectorate (1912-1956), Resident General Lyautey (1854-1934), accompanied by a team of urban designers, architects, archaeologists, and art historians, discovered a country with a long and deeply rooted urban tradition. The first public buildings to be erected in Rabat, now the administrative capital of the Protectorate, and Casablanca were meant to showcase colonial power and prestige. More importantly, these buildings reproduced many features, in terms of architectural volumes and decoration, from Morocco’s centuries-long Hispano-Moorish tradition. In fact a new style was born: the “Neo-Moorish” (also known as “neo-Moroccan” or “neo-traditional”) or what François Béguin (1983) has called “Arabisances” in what is now a seminal work on the topic. While several studies have been published on the “Arabisances” movement in the art, architecture, and urbanism of colonial-period Morocco and several postcolonial narratives have been deconstructing the many facets of this movement (artistic, ideological, political, etc.), we know very little about this movement outside the main urban administrative centers in colonial period Morocco. For example, in Casablanca, the case of the city –hall (Marius Boyer), the post-office (Adrien Laforgue), the courthouse (Joseph Marrast), the bank (Edmond Brion), and the church of Sacré Coeur (Paul Tournon). This paper aims to shed light on a very specific aspect of the “Arabisances” movement, namely the place of local architecture and crafts in building Muslim-specific workers’ housing (“cités ouvrières”). More specifically, this paper will use field notes and archival documents to examine the work of French architect Edmond Brion (1885-1973), who designed three of the best preserved Muslim-specific workers’ housing projects in Casablanca between 1932-1952 : the Cité Lafarge, the Cité de la Cosuma, and the Cité de la Socica. Preliminary examination of Brion’s archives is providing unprecedented insight into the inner world (sources of inspiration, collaborations, and intrigues) of a major figure of 20th century architecture in Casablanca.