Date post: | 13-Apr-2017 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | stephanie-pettit |
View: | 235 times |
Download: | 0 times |
Narratives of Otherness in Contemporary Urban Development Policy The Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme in Morocco
Stephanie Pettit
University Honors, Spring 2015
Capstone Advisor: Dr. Randolph Persaud
School of International Service
Abstract
Pettit
This paper draws on Edward Said’s concept of representing the Other and Franz
Fanon’s spatial logic of colonialism to argue that the contemporary policy narratives
informing the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme in Morocco demonstrate a re-Othering of
the population of the spatially peripheral bidonville. The VSBP, an ambitious shantytown
upgrading and eradication project, was instituted in 2004 in an effort of the Moroccan
state to address more intensely the problem of informal, inadequate housing in and on the
periphery of Moroccan cities after the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca perpetrated
by men raised in the Sidi Moumen bidonville.
While early French administrators such as General Louis Hubert Lyautey and Henri
Prost did not move to eradicate or integrate the growing bidonvilles of Casablanca and
Rabat, rather ignoring or preserving them, later planners such as Michel Ecochard
emphasized the resettlement of bidonville residents into “modern”-style housing projects,
logical quarters good for housing large amounts of presumed workers at a low cost.
Reflective of the logic of this Ecochard trame, the VSBP signals a neoliberal shift towards
rapid eradication and relocation of bidonville residents. Examining the narratives that
inform and justify policy prescriptions of the VSBP, this paper cites recurring themes and
stories told about the Other (the native or the bidonvillois) that imply a continuation of
negative attitudes and actions towards marginalized groups. It also demonstrates a return
to the logic of Othering bidonville residents as outliers if not dangers to modern Moroccan
urbanism and way of life, people who must be socialized and coaxed into the legal urban
fabric and therefore the civilized way of life.
Introduction
2
Pettit
In mid May of 2003, twelve men exploded themselves in targeted suicide bombings
across the Moroccan industrial city of Casablanca. The targets included a Spanish-owned
restaurant, a five-star hotel, a Jewish cemetery and community center, an Italian
restaurant, and the Belgian consulate, most of them symbols of Western influence and
perceived socioeconomic privilege. Lauded mostly by Western states and organizations
for its “model Muslim” status in the region in terms of calm and order, Morocco was
rocked by this event, which stood in stark and horrific contrast to its supposed peaceful
prestige. The attacks were deemed to be faith based, attributed to al-Qaeda in the
Maghreb, and were denounced widely by leaders of Middle East and North African and
Western leaders alike, especially faith leaders. It was quickly revealed that the suicide
bombers were born and raised in the Sidi Moumen bidonville, or shantytown (literally “tin
city”), on the outskirts of Casablanca. In this paper, I argue that this event triggered the
appropriation of a global policy on slums to the level of Moroccan state governance,
accompanied by narratives that drew on characterizing the actors and spaces of this event
as outliers of the modern state.
The bidonville, an informal settlements that began to form within and on the
periphery of Moroccan cities during the French protectorate in the early 20th century, had
long been a site of poverty, corruption, lack of services, and violence, a consistent social
and legal issue concerning the state for decades. The Sidi Moumen bidonville in particular
was one of the poorest shantytowns in Casablanca at the time of the bombings, and also
one of the oldest. It had managed to withstand rounds of slum clearance by the state for
decades, including neoliberal structural adjustment of the 1980s in which the state moved
to eradicate slums while providing no alternatives, cutting back social services, and failing
3
Pettit
to manage inflation that led to food riots. In addition to being an enduring site of the
uncapability of French and Moroccan urbanism to effectively manage urban space, Sidi
Moumen immediately became known as a “Terror Slum”, a bloody smudge on the
Moroccan state’s increasingly commended international image (Mass Housing
Competition Report 2014).
Over a decade later, Sidi Moumen still exists, but some noticeable alterations have
been made. Sidi Moumen is now the site of major government housing tracts and has its
own tramline stop, which connects it to the administrative and financial districts of the
city (Mass Housing Competition Report 2014). The issue of housing has been partially
addressed, but access to employment and mobility rely on the tramline’s connection to
preexisting economic centers. The bridge between 2003 and now is the Villes Sans
Bidonvilles Programme, or Cities Without Slums Program, an ambitious, nationwide
shantytown upgrading and clearance project implemented by the Government of Morocco
(GOM) in 2004. The program is part of a larger trend in international development, that of
slum upgrading and relocation. The original blueprint for the program was developed in
partnership between UN Habitat and the Cities Alliance in 1999, a global design for
addressing the enduring problem of slums and the multitude of issues to development
they posed.
It is crucial to view the Moroccan program, however, in light of the bombings in
Casablanca and in the wider scope of international politics in order to understand its
timeliness and how it is justified in it execution. The discourse surrounding the bombings
by the state and the resulting policy prescriptions for taking new approaches to slums
relied on this event in order to make a case for its existence. The location of “terror” in the
4
Pettit
slums effectively elevated previous notions of the violence present within slums but not
extending beyond them into the “formal” industrialized city.
The discourse on poverty often draws parallels with the irrationality and cultural
difference that is often ascribed to violent extremism (Fanon 1965). Under neoliberal
global governance, poverty shifts from being a collective issue towards becoming an
individualized characteristic that denies the historicity of oppressive systems that produce
and reproduce class structures. Poverty acts as an affront to the rest of the modern,
developed and middle- and upper-class formal city because of its unwillingness to
conform. These two elements, the threat of violence from the Other and the polarized
representation of poverty under neoliberalism, are not unfamiliar to the historical growth
of the bidonville in Morocco. Instead, I argue that they inform contemporary Moroccan and
international development policy narratives about the bidonville.
Slums, the Last Holdout to “Modernity”
The pervasiveness of slums globally has been inscribed and revisited constantly
within international development practice and theory. While the term “slum” is rooted in
colonial urban planning (as well as the French bidonville), it remains the dominant term
used to describe these informal settlements. Criteria vary but most definitions include
high rates of poverty, lack of service provision, and illiteracy, lack of formal employment,
and low levels of education (Huchzermeyer 3). The Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
use of the term is its most formal inclusion into development language, established by the
United Nations at the beginning of the 21st century and have informed country and local
level governments’ approaches to dealing with slums. Because of the multiplicity of social,
economic and political issues concentrated within the spatial density of slums, they are
5
Pettit
treated as the “antithesis of conditions aspired to under modernism” and were considered
an insurmountable challenge to the modernist colonial project in the 20th century as well
(Huchzermeyer 2).
“Cities Without Slums” originated in development lexicon as the slogan of Cities
Alliance, a partnership between the World Bank and the UN Habitat center, in 1999. It has
since been appropriated by the UN as the slogan of Goal Seven Target 11, which focused
on addressing slums, and has trickled down to country-level policies as well. While
methods of addressing slums have shifted away from pure eradication, which was
predominant tactic of the 1970s and 80s, towards participatory rehousing and upgrading,
the general norm of slums as visible difference from the modern city which should be
removed remains obvious in the constant reinscription of insistence upon eradication
present in development literature. Some scholars argue that present attempts to fully
dispel slums from cities globally serves the purpose of fostering attractive development,
making the city more competitive with other cities (Huchzermeyer 4), while others
emphasize the financialization of the poor as a way for the state and multinational urban
development companies to capitalize on “untapped markets” (Gruffydd Jones 2012,
Bogaert 2013). Whether performed through integration into financial markets through
microcredit, physically relocating slums in mass amounts, or creating access of slum
dwellers to economically booming regions within the city, the end goal of the policy “Cities
Without Slums” is clear: to have cities without slums via homogenization of the urban
space.
Slums as value-based difference
6
Pettit
Aside from construing slums as a socioeconomic issue like development policy
tends to do, slum adjustment policies more subtly mark slums as fostering value-based
difference from the rest of the “formal” city. As previously mentioned, slums present a
challenge to many values of modernity under which the formal contemporary city was
constructed (Huchzermeyer, forthcoming; Bogaert 2013; Bogaert 2010), values such as
land ownership, accumulation of credit/having “good credit”, established order and
specializing neighborhoods. As surplus capital accumulates in cities, space claimed by
shantytown dwellers contests the priorities of where the money is channeled. Luxury
developments pop up alongside shantytowns across the world (Bogaert 2013, Chandhoke
1993), and a particular incompatibility of the two remains incredibly visual, in their claims
to space, to the city’s resources, and to economy.
While unlawfully residing on public land and engaging in the informal economy are
not by themselves negative things, shantytown dwellers are still more heavily policed and
addressed by government because of their outlier status. Shantytowns, in theory, oppose
the idealization of steady work to maintain “legal” housing by being both spaces of
informal or mixed involvement with the city’s economy and being constructed on public
land (Chandhoke 1993). This last claim is particularly pertinent to contemporary
development work to formally integrate into rather than eradicate slum dwellers from the
urban fabric, relying on capitalist values of ownership and official employment to mold
former slum dwellers into properly “socialized” citizens. The notion of social difference,
manifested through housing constructs, reflects a colonial opinion that building and
planning were infused with meanings about the people who inhabited them or were
allowed to inhabit them, which is discussed in the following section.
7
Pettit
Postcolonial theory: Colonial history and reinscribing the Other
Certain strands of postcolonial theory emphasize the legacy of colonialism not only
shaping the world but also continuing to reproduce colonial apparatuses and ideologies
even after formal, direct colonialism of the West over the non-West has ended. Annibal
Quijano and other scholars center this historicity of colonialism and Western domination
within their work, insisting on viewing present phenomena controlled not only by
Western actors but also former non-West colonies through this lens as well. The insistence
tracing on a lineage of Western domination and reinforcement of political, economic, and
social norms over time is distinctly postcolonial and postmodern. It rejects the ahistorical
claims made by the European modernisms that served as vehicles for imperialism, instead
contextualizing the repackaging of colonial enterprise in modern day social stratification,
globalization, and governance.
Quijano’s theory of coloniality acts as a segue between colonialism and the
contemporary era of globalization, emphasizing the proliferation of certain ideologies and
practices reminiscent of colonialism. His main point is that “superiority” was produced by
colonizers from the West, imposed onto non-West peoples, and over time the power
became desirable to the dominated (Quijano 169). Quijano argues that the central
component of coloniality was the racial-social classification established by the colonizers
to justify their domination. Overarching Eurocentrism, which elevated the ideology,
cultures, languages, economics, and social structures of European society over that of the
colonized further stratified these classifications.
Under colonialism there was no questioning of the objective logic of the colonizer.
The body of power that Europeans constructed and maintained was considered a
8
Pettit
“paradigm of rational knowledge”, a “totality” that remains effective 1to this day (Quijano
177). This paradigm included dominion over “science”, especially when it came to society,
that boiled down difference to nature and the need for the rational European to extend the
knowledge and practice they had acquired to those who were not naturally inclined to
modernism and progress as the European was. Simple difference was draped in
intractability, turning discomfort into hostilities. Poignantly, Quijano points out that
colonial power was at first kept at a distance from the “native”, but that over time colonial
power subsumed native elites into its project by making power available and “desirable”.
This critique trickles into later Marxist thinkers like Chaube, who delineates between the
bourgeois of the West and the bourgeois (“elite”) of the former colonies, arguing that the
latter is complicit in the project of hegemonic modernity that relies on neoliberal
institutions and programs to maintain power in their own non-West countries (Chaube
2001).
Ultimately, Quijano proposes decoloniality as the antithetical resistance to
coloniality. Social totality, he says, can only be countered by a refocusing of the lens of
history onto heterogeneity of existence and experience, calling first for an epistemological
decolonization away from simplistic Eurocentric understandings of the world to include
diversity and alternative takes on world history and governance. Viewing a particular
space and population that does not “conform” to the project of modernity through a lens
which challenges the largely unquestioned motives of contemporary development
approaches is certainly one way of executing this call for an expansion of the analytical
framework articulated this paper.
9
Pettit
The “Other” is a foundational concept of postcolonialism that has been repeated in
subaltern studies, feminist, queer and disability studies alike. Edward Said’s Other is
constructed as dialectical opposite by the West, which must exist in order for the West to
define itself. But Orientalism dictates a certain dynamic of power as well, where the West
controls its vision of and maintains while the Middle East is subordinated. Said focuses on
the genealogy of Orientalist discourse which stemmed from Europe and came to signify
both ideological and structural power over the course of several centuries. He relies
primarily on a textual reading of disputations by Western travelers, writers, and public
figures on the Middle East and North Africa to establish his concept of the Other.
A clear teleology is presented within Orientalism, where the “West” is set in motion
far ahead towards modernity while the Orient is backwards looking, in need of assistance
in effectively “catching up” with the progress of the West. When Said approaches formal
colonialism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he notes a shift in the discourse
towards facilitating such progress for the Orient by the West, a moral prerogative of
Western civilization to extend its knowledge and innovation to the “masses” who do
necessarily not possess the capacity to achieve these things on their own.
Orientalism is grounded in the politics of representation, which Said decidedly says
cannot be unbiased, in this case because the representation is performed on the premise
of presupposing European/modern superiority. In this sense, Orientalism functions by the
repetition of certain signifiers of the Other over time as a tool for self-definition and
reflection more so than a mere characterization of another group of people. Indeed, as
Said notes, earlier Orientalist writers such as Flaubert put forward their travels in the
“Orient” as voyages into the “mystic”, “dream-like” land meant to aid them in
10
Pettit
understanding their own Western sensibilities, moralities, and difference. Western
superiority was constructed gradually through these Orientalists, translated into
institutional knowledge and enacted through formal colonialism in the 19th and 20th
centuries. A locus of knowledge was ultimately concentrated and maintained within
Western institutions such as universities and backed by authoritative power in Western
governments which, justified by their own logic, were able to establish colonial enterprise
based on a premise of bringing the Other up to the “present day”, to the modernity that the
West had achieved.
Othering is also a spatial operation, though the geo-politics of the contemporary
world order relies on a Eurocentric interpretation of the world map. Orientalist discourse
localizes Otherness in the contemporary Middle East, familiar to the point where it
becomes relatively simple to justify violence or interventionism in the region with quick
references to “Islamic terrorism”, “that part of the world”, “lack of democracy”,
“fanaticism”, and other one-liners enforced by repetition and pervasiveness. The logic of
colonialism relied on geographical location and attributes afforded to regional inhabitants
based off of physical distance from the West. As Frantz Fanon argues, one tenant of
establishing legitimacy for empire was the enforcement of a violent, structural delineation
between colonizer and colonized. The colonial city was a microcosm of a global picture of
the value system of colonialism; a manifestation of and in some cases an experiment in
expressing the new order through planning. This approach to discourse analysis will be
particularly useful as a framework for the purposeful Othering of Moroccans by the French
protectorate through multiple approaches to managing cities and applying modernism, as
11
Pettit
well as for teasing out remnants of such an Othering discourse in contemporary state and
development discourse as policy focuses on the bidonville over the medina.
As Fanon argues, the city was a visible representation of the dichotomous and
hierarchal logic of the colonizer, which operated in terms of binaries of good/evil,
civilized/savage, clean/dirty, light/dark, etc, to describe the “native” quarters versus the
newer European quarters, informing varying approaches to colonial urban planning all the
while. Fanon bases his critiques on the racial dimension of colonialism, constructed and
maintained by the colonizer through discourse but also coercive force, violence, threat and
policing. Separation of the populace based on these hierarchies is important, but equally
important are the tense and hostile interactions that build between the European and the
Other.
Fanon focuses on the potential for resistance, for decolonization, and how the
spatial layout of colonialism would have to shift dramatically, indeed be overturned
entirely in order to create an equal shift in social, political and economic structures of the
oppressor. This effort would not be on the part of the individual, as Western thinking
would have one believe, but would become possible due to the abolition of individualism,
a capitalist notion, arguing it would be “the first to disappear” (Fanon 38). Thus, Fanon
uses the spatiality of colonialism as a crux of the Western colonial project. He himself says
“to break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished
lines of communication will be set up between two worlds” (Fanon 33). Perhaps what
Fanon is implying is that while colonialism was a spatial enterprise, its underlying
coerciveness relies more on a psycho-social element that binds people to assumptions of
superiority engrained by colonialism.
12
Pettit
This paper seeks to synthesize these three critical theorists into a theory of the
reappropriation of colonial Othering utilized by contemporary international actors at the
helm of a repackaged project of modernity. Quijano’s theory on the postcolonial
reappropriation of the modernity/rationality paradigm is valuable and remains
unquenched in its project to interpellate everyone into its universalizing aim.
Accompanying this is a discourse that geographically locates sources of social ills,
economic disinvestment, and fear-fear of violence, fear of revolt, fear of difference, fear of
intractability. While there is a large body of literature about the French protectorate’s
approach to the preservation and management of “tradition” in regards to the medina,
there is substantially less work done on the continued spatial and linguistic Othering of
the bidonville as an outlier to Moroccan modernism. To situate this reappropriation of
colonial thinking about the Other, it is necessary to turn to a brief review of the history of
urban planning in Morocco under the French protectorate, its designers and its architects.
Land Ownership and the Right to the City
A quick note should be made about the use of land as it relates to the ideological
manipulation of otherwise non-commodity resources. Land ownership became a central
component of the French regime in Morocco, especially as more people flocked to the
cities and the French continued to build outwards from the overfilled medinas (Abu-
Lughod 1980). Not unlike contemporary attempts of the state and multinational
construction corporations to corral and utilize land for private investment, land outside of
the medina under the protectorate was also highly contested. Urban planners assumed
that the land was not significant to the Moroccans because it was outside of the walls of
the medina, when it had actually been used for communal purposes. Planners noted this
13
Pettit
land as not only devoid of physical buildings or planning but also that it was “ideologically
empty”, an untapped resource from which to expand the modernist project (Abu-Lughod
1980). Land, and what is done with it, is subject to the ideologies and meanings that
humans ascribe to it.
Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city as an egalitarian notion of access,
engagement, and decision-making underlies the contestation of land on which colonial
cities were established and how they still stand today. Scholars such as Mark Purcell trace
the genealogy of the “inhabitant”-subject of the city back from colonial structures to the
present day (Purcell 2002). The shifts and consistencies of who constitutes an “inhabitant”
initially relied on differentiated function within the city but have shifted also towards a
discourse of nationality and who constitutes a “legitimate” citizen in order to also be a real
inhabitant. The notion that the constitution of an “inhabitant” in Morocco is useful in
assessing the bidonvillois’s role in the city that they are more or less attempting to be a
part of. This relies on a certain idea of the city that defaults to a Western set of principles
that dictated a city’s social and physical construction. Land usage (and Western economic
principle would prescribe land ownership) is a central issue laden with meaning for the
legitimacy of the bidonville’s claim to usage and access of the city, one that has
increasingly been shifted first towards the state and now towards multinational
development corporations (Purcell 2002, Bogaert 2013). The notion of “participation”,
then, becomes a central tenant in the discussion of what constitutes the city and its
inhabitants.
I focus here more specifically on the insistence of state and non-state actors on
participation as it pertains to joining the formal land and housing markets but also
14
Pettit
participation in a new “lifestyle” that accompanies such a physical transition. What “right
to the city” has been and is being proclaimed by those in power to define that right seems
often to rely on top-down determination rather than determination coming from those
spaces and peoples being contested. I argue that this trend carries from the protectorate’s
insistence on knowing what is right for the Other into the present day by multinationals,
NGOs, and the state. This is present in the narratives that inform and argue policy
decisions that end up affecting marginalized (physically and socioeconomically) urban
residents today.
Urbanism and the French Modernity Project in Morocco
Modernism was of the ideological orientation that its principles were advanced in
time and space ahead of whatever its thinkers deemed to be the “old”. When the French
protectorate began in Morocco in 1912, Résident-Général Hubert Lyautey began enacting
these principles through city planning, utilizing Morocco’s land and its preexisting cities as
components of a “laboratory” of modernism. This development was concentrated mostly
in Rabat, the decided capital of the protectorate, and Casablanca, which would become the
primary industrial city. Emphasizing a departure from planning methods used in French
Algeria under Le Corbusier, including interventionism and altering the structural
components of the medina, Lyautey built Rabat and Casablanca so that the modern city
could gaze upon the old.
Michel Ecochard, who followed Lyautey in the 1930s as the Général, interpreted his
job to be more about finding middle ground between “tradition” and “modernity”, but
nonetheless treated urban spaces as workshops for modernist ideas. The modern city was
constructed in such a way that facilitated the “modern” gaze upon the “old city”,
15
Pettit
emphasizing not only difference but also direct opposition. In the present day these
“experiments” in Moroccan urban planning are recognized by international bodies such as
UNESCO as “heritage cities”-of both tradition and an initial attempt at constructing the
modern city. This recognition of Rabat as a “heritage city” is a marker of the foreign gaze
that makes Moroccan cities marketable for international tourism due to its constructed
“unique” dualities-able to balance its modern sensibilities with its preserved tradition.
The two major approaches to French urban development in Morocco demonstrate
the intertwining of spatial planning with systems of values and ideology. I will later argue
that Moroccan urban space continues to the present day to be imbibed with meaning as it
pertains to the principles of modernism-efficiency, specificity, pacification, consumption,
and socialization-though shifting away from the medina as Other and instead refocusing
on the bidonville. The first approach, Lyautey’s techno-cosmopolitanism, sought to
preserve spaces of “tradition” and Moroccan-ness, predominantly the medina, while
simultaneously developing a ville nouvelle informed by French modernism expanding
outwards from the walls of the medina. Lyautey believed in the idea of patrimoine in his
planning, or the preservation of what he perceived to be a Moroccan “heritage”
represented by the medina (Walter and Minca 2014). His equal dedication to association,
relation by difference, inspired the dichotomous city he was to build, based on the
principles of “culturally appropriate housing” that emphasized social hierarchy. The new
city was an experiment for city planners to exercise Eurocentric ideals of modernism
(specialization of sectors, service provision, monitoring) all while enclosing the medina
under a narrative of “preservation”. This duality of tradition/modernism served tourism
and investment in urban development greatly during and after the protectorate.
16
Pettit
Nevertheless, Lyautey and his team did not account effectively for the mass
migrations that would take place as major cities were constructed and became loci of
industrialization, administration, and labor. Bidonvilles were essentially self-made
neighborhoods built by rural migrants who became the urban poor and working class. The
growing numbers of people constructing and living in the bidonvilles forced the Général to
reevaluate his initial designs, especially based on increasing concerns over potential for
uprising via the uncertain masses of people gathering along the formal city’s periphery. At
first ascribing bidonvilles to his principles of patrimoine and association, Lyautey valorized
bidonvilles at first as reflections of “naturally-occuring” Moroccan style housing (Goodman
2010). Still desiring to incorporate Moroccans into the formal urban fabric with this in
mind, Lyautey and his architects Prost and Laprade worked to provide a “new” medina
filled with a reenvisioning of the way the preexisting medina was set up, but with some
values of modernism such as production, order, and hygiene in mind as well. The Quartier
Habous, one of the most famous versions of these new medinas in Casablanca, remains
today as a major tourist attraction to the city, described in travel books as “Moroccan-lite”
and “toy-town” with “neat little rows of shops and houses” (Lonely Planet Guidebook-
Morocco).
17
Pettit
Figure 1, French postcard of Casablanca reading
“indigenous agglomeration” (Wright 1991)
In contrast, the next phase, Ecochard’s “middling modernism”, responded to the
perceived inadequacies of housing provision under Lyautey within a new schema: modern
public housing tracts. During Ecochard’s term, bidonvilles continued to spring up along
the outskirts of the medina and the ville nouvelle as cities were rapidly developed into
economic metropoles. However, Ecochard took a different approach to finding a solution
to these unplanned developments that stood so starkly in contrast to the rationally laid
out streets and civic centers of the new city. While still attempting to promote a hierarchy
between native and colonizer, Ecochard’s approach demanded that universalism be
physically manifested through his trame, rows and rows of homogenous housing
structures designed specifically for the “Moroccan proletariat”-affording some degree of
modernity to otherwise disenfranchised Moroccans. He also experimented in hybridizing
“indigenous” housing with modernist planning in his tracts, calling for a “middling
modernism” that socialized Moroccans to the introduction of modernism to their city
while simultaneously keeping them contained and within housing that facilitated a
“Moroccan lifestyle” (Rabinow in Al-Sayyad 1992). Emphasis was more so placed on
quantitative demands for housing over social differentiation.
Yet this attempt struggled to keep up pace of production and was challenged and
contested by the residents’ own touches and transformations to the cookie cutter houses
they were forced into. The project only accomplished housing a minority of new arrivals to
the major cities (Rabinow in Al-Sayyad 1992). While attempting to diffuse segregation and
emphasize humanism, Ecochard has been criticized for fostering greater social separation
18
Pettit
because of the strange hybrid nature of the tracts he developed without addressing any
social aspect other than his default European ideals. A living testament to Ecochard’s
principles, Casablanca’s Carriére Centrale stands to this day, altered by its residents to
best suit their own needs yet still underserviced and structurally unsound near the center
of the city.
Figure 2, Trame Ecochard aerial photograph, 1944
Figure 3, close up of housing design in Carriére Centrale in Casablanca
Neoliberalism and VSBP actors
19
Pettit
Examining the narratives that inform and justify policy prescriptions of the Villes
Sans Bidonvilles Programme, or VSBP, I cite recurring themes and stories told about the
Other (the native or the bidonvillois) that imply a continuation of negative attitudes and
coercive actions towards marginalized groups. It also demonstrates a return to the logic of
Othering bidonville residents as outliers if not dangers to modern Moroccan urbanism and
way of life, people who must be socialized and coaxed into the legal urban fabric and
therefore the civilized way of life.
Government policy and law have gradually become the regulators of truth and
power in a given society, described as bio-power by Foucault, starting in the West and I
would argue transitioning into a global scale over the past half century due to colonialism,
imperialism and globalized norms (Foucault 1977-78). Bio-power and resulting bio-
politics emphasize state management with a focus on the future, especially in terms of
securitization and integration of the population into nation-based truth claims for more
effective management. “Truth”, now defaulted to the state, is a lens that filters events and
phenomena to explain their occurrence, problems, and solutions. Truth claims are
informed by the cultural, political, social and economic history of people and places, and
are deployed through policy in order to demonstrate the lack of a suitable alternative.
They are present, for Foucault, in the ways that the average person speaks, is understood
and accepted as logical and rational within a society. But today they are most powerful
when they are deployed by the state in ways intelligible to the vast majority of the
message’s receivers, often made through illusions to or metaphors of a cohesive national
body, religion, cultural values or historical reference. The state as the purveyor of truth
and often the sole body powerful enough to act upon its claims can quite easily contest
20
Pettit
outlying opinions, groups, and actions as irrational and incoherent, though this does not
make one policy hold truth just because it claims to do so (Roe 16).
Narrative policy analysis intervenes in the midst of the controversial political
decisions of the present day to examine proclaimed truths and how they are argued as
truth. Revisiting Quijano’s modernity/rationality paradigm here is relevant to
understanding truth claims in a postcolonial sense, because a perspective claiming “truth”
inevitably argues that alternatives to such truth are illogical and invalid, even if that is not
directly articulated. Presenting strategic narratives or specific readings of narratives are
ways of insisting on certain truths, especially if they rely on collective memory, economic
interest, or religious affiliation.
Narratives of neoliberalism: participation, dignity, safety
Neoliberalism stems from a history of Western interventionism and recent
Western dominance as a political and economic hegemon. It distinctly ties in human well-
being into its framework, proposing that “human well-being can best be advanced by
liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”
(Harvey 2007). Neoliberalism is not only typified by a set of economic policy prescriptions
that rely on the intervening role of the state but also more colloquially as a discourse
articulated through hegemonic power structures (political, economic, cultural, etc). It
began being practiced through the reformation of the state in the 1970s with the
neoliberal adjustment in Chile by the group of economists called the “Chicago boys”, who
worked alongside the International Monetary Fund to restructure the Chilean government
through the Pinochet regime. Neoliberalism became the common grounding in the 1980s
21
Pettit
onwards of the work of international governing bodies such as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank. Much of neoliberal theory relies on the role of the state as the
enforcer of free market and free trade policy, feeding back into businesses and elite
interests to foster the good of the whole. Through a postcolonial lens, neoliberalism relies
on ensuring the well being of the state and investors, usually in the West or through
Western institutions, at the expense of many under the assumption that what is good for
the state and business is good for everyone.
Scholars have noted that the repetition of such policy and its informing ideology led
to its eventual assumed “common sense”, because of the relevant cultural and traditional
values used to justify its pervasiveness and good sense. Neoliberalism, much like the logic
of colonialism coming from the colonizer, creates the illusion of consensus through state
coercion (Harvey 2007). “Participation”, a growing buzzword of neoliberalism,
emphasizes compliance in a system whether on the part of a socialization into neoliberal
practices (establishing credit, paying rent, belief in individualism, etc.) or due to
incitement to integration into this framework via facilitating faculties (microcredit/loans,
free trade partnerships, etc.). Other such notions as “freedom”, “dignity”, “individuality”,
and “entrepreneurship” are given such positive reception that it is very hard for a
collective, let alone an individual, to identify and act on any disassociation from
neoliberalism.
The politico-economic elite (and here I will add both Western and
colonial/postcolonial) that grew out of pre-neoliberalism and flourished as its subjects
had its interests protected under the guise of not only market freedom but also fears of
violence and uprising from those disenfranchised by the shift. In this section, a discussion
22
Pettit
of neoliberalism as discourse provides a way of reading invocations of certain values and
policies informed by those values, which are introduced as totally logical with no
alternative. These can help in tracing those same conversations of inevitability back to
colonial discourse about modernity.
Villes Sans Bidonvilles Actors, Coloniality and Policy Narratives
As previously discussed, the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme in Morocco signaled
a shift in urban development policy towards direct management of slums through
intervention. It responded to the 2003 Casablanca bombings, which localized terroristic
violence in the formal city from within the slums, as well as attempted to corral people still
outside of the framework of housing and economic legality into the rest of the city. It set
out to eradicate slums in 85 towns and cities across the country, affecting millions of
people, before the year 2020. The program was initially projected to cost about 25 billion
dirhams (approx. 26 billion USD), with the state subsidizing about 10 billion dirhams
(approx. 1 billion USD) of the total (UN Habitat 2012). The VSBP receives support through
USAID, the European Investment Bank, the French Development Agency, and the World
Bank (Bogaert 2013). Its three central tenants are restructuration, relogement, and
recasement, or upgrading, rehousing, and relocation (Rapport National 2012, Al Omrane
2010). The Government of Morocco (GOM), the UN Habitat, World Bank, and Cities
Alliance all have roles in the execution of the VSBP in Morocco, its design originating from
the Cities Alliance and the Millennium Development Goals at the turn of the 21st century.
The most important aspects of the VSBP to understand in the context of neoliberal
restructuring are the emphasis first on participation of the slum dweller and second, a
public-private partnership between the state and private urban development corporations
23
Pettit
and conglomerates, facilitated by the backing of NGOs like the Cities Alliance. It utilizes
public land to develop housing that “competes with insalubrious and informal housing”
with the help of international development companies. It is funded in part by NGOs and
the Solidarity Housing Fund of the GOM (UN Habitat 2012, Al Omrane 2010).
Approximately 9,000 hectares of public land were “mobilized” by the state for the
purposes of the VSBP between 2003 and 2009 alone (UN Habitat 2012). According to the
UN, four years before the program began, approximately 24.2% of Moroccan living in
urban areas resided in slums. Only a few years later in 2007 and three years after the
VSBP was instituted, that percentage was reduced to approximately 13.1% of urban
residents living in slums (UN Data, Slum population as percentage of urban population,
2000 and 2007).
The VSBP occurs through a “redeployment of the state” (Bogaert 2013) after
decades of focus on the eradication of slums rather than the “participation” of bidonvillois
in their own relocation and upgrading. While insisting on difference from past programs
and claiming to train its attention on both the social and technical aspects of slum
upgrading and relocation, in practice the social element is subsumed to “creating
responsible citizens” (maîtrise d’ouvrage social, MOS) in the interest of managing a security
state (Bogaert 2013, Huchzermeyer). Security concerns are centered through the required
participation of slum dwellers in resettlement and resocialization. This is embodied in the
component of accompagnement social or AS designed to accompany slum dwellers
through the process of moving as well as the facilitation and guidance of slum dwellers
toward accessing financial institutions, especially in the realm of micro-credit. This
“resocialization” component is, in fact, contingent on neoliberal values of modernity,
24
Pettit
including market integration, competitiveness and private property. Developers often
can’t keep up the pace of relocation over eradication, so slum dwellers must find
temporary housing and also must rely on microfinance to pay for their new housing. Thus,
the newer social aspect of the VSBP becomes an attractive bonus to the work of
developers that helps them capitalize further on investment, especially as groups like Al
Omrane, the largest commissioned firm working on the VSBP, opens its company to the
stock market (Bogaert 2013).
Additionally, the “participation” narrative of the VSBP is boiled down to an empty
sort of participation in which the slum dweller does not approach the actors and have
their own wishes facilitated, but instead the actors decide where, when and how people
will be brought into the program. The self-constructed homes of the bidonvillois are
sometimes destroyed before their new dwellings are constructed and they are able to
move into the next phase of the program, leaving them to seek shelter elsewhere and/or
take out loans to finance a forced move in the meantime (Bogaert 2011). However, as
noted in a 2008 report by USAID on the progress of the VSBP, no one in the lowest income
bracket in Morocco could even afford to take out such a loan, making the time between the
slum demolition and relogement a dangerous time for slum dwellers who often constitute
the lowest income bracket (USAID Report on Housing Finance in Morocco, 2008).
Relocation programs move slum dwellers away from their former communities and
networks into “awarded” housing further out on the periphery of cities and even out in
previously “undeveloped” quasi-rural spaces without connection to a pre-existing city,
town, or village.
Methodology: Narrative policy analysis
25
Pettit
Narrative policy analysis as a qualitative analytical tool seeks to identify and
investigate the various stories about policy told by actors involved in a controversial topic.
It then attempts to synthesize logics and overlaps in reasoning about the problems at hand
connecting them to a proposed solution. It does not necessarily seek to homogenize
narratives or find cohesiveness, instead choosing to rely on maintaining the “uncertainty,
complexity, and polarization” it encountered in the policy issue when it first began to
approach it, perhaps instead finding a new light to view the controversy within (Roe 17).
The most useful aspect of narrative policy analysis for the purposes of this paper is
the focus on identifying metanarratives and contesting policymakers’ and technical actors’
desire to present their policy narratives as new or wholly broken from the past.
Understanding the dynamics of power and politics is central in this type of lens on policy
narratives. The governing bodies sharing roles in the implementation of the VSBP all argue
somewhere in their policy documents that the VSBP articulates a conscious shift away
from old methods of slum management (eradication methods of the 1980s and 90s and
economic restructuring that led to massive riots in Casablanca and across the country).
However, to what degree power relations stay the same despite changing terminology or
methodology is contestable, and narrative policy analysis seeks to dig out the
metanarratives rearticulated through updated policy. Additionally, this analysis will
incorporate the concept of coloniality to better situate these recurring yet presented as
new narratives within the framework of postcolonial theory, teasing out how the reasons
for involvement in such a project are not simply neutral and rational but draw on both
history and present day interests that incite each actor to participate.
26
Pettit
This approach has great salience in the case of the VSBP, especially with the
amount of literature each individual actor has published on the background and role they
play in the project. The Millennium Development Goals marked slums as a high priority
item on the UN’s agenda for eradication, situating them as the ultimate outlier to global
development and ending poverty. Additionally, the Moroccan government and the king
have recognized in their words and actions the perceived urgency of addressing slums in
Morocco. Finally, burgeoning international firms in the region such as Al Omrane, a
conglomerate of urban development and planning corporations, bring the interests of
their multiple sectors to the table as well. Public, private, and international norming
bodies have their stakes in the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme.
Identifying the Other through absence: Assumptions as text
One voice the reader may find missing from this collection of actors is that of the
bidonvillois, those who actually live in the slums and are experiencing this type of slum
policy. However, the purposes of the analysis are to focus on the actors who create and
justify their own policies that are then given credence and implemented on a larger scale.
Othering is about representation of another group in relation to the speaker. In this case,
approaching the representation of the problems and concerns of the bidonvillois by the
multiple actors listed above, I chose to focus on the narratives of those directly informing
and carrying out policy related to the bidonville, whose representations of the Other and
the spaces they inhabit carry serious consequences for their livelihood. This does not seek
to deny the agency and role that the bidonvillois have in their own lives under the VSBP
project. Rather, this paper attempts to discover how the relocation of the Other into the
bidonville in the contemporary discourse of development reinscribes a hierarchy of power
27
Pettit
that centers the knowledge and alleged wisdom of the institutional bodies that control the
program.
To the degree that Othering is about discussing difference without making direct
comparisons, my analysis focuses not only on what is said about the Other, or the
bidonvillois, but also on what is said about the conditions of modernity and development
aspired to even in the absence of the Other. As Said has made an extensive case for,
sometimes more is said about a place or group imagined as Other through describing only
the dominant or oppositional group isolated from the other group. For example, as we will
see later, if King Mohammed VI calls upon “faithful subjects” when discussing the
Casablanca suicide bombings and the perpetrators, one can wonder what then qualifies as
an “unfaithful subject”, or if that person would be considered a subject at all. This also
locates them outside of the definition of a good citizen, relegating them to the socio-
economic position of the bombers, who were also bidonvillois. Assumptions about what
the Other is and is not through solely evoking language about the dominant framework
can also be read as a text on the Other.
Discours Royal and Imagining Opponents to Modernity
With a framework of coloniality in mind, I will use narrative policy analysis to draw
out the varying aspects of narratives that inform the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme in
Morocco. I will examine on a 2010 description of the Moroccan Villes Sans Bidonvilles
Programme on the part of Al Omrane conglomerate, the collaborative UN Habitat, GOM,
and World Bank text of the VSBP, as well as statements made by the King of Morocco in
regards to the bidonvilles and the 2003 Casablanca bombings perpetrated by residents of
28
Pettit
Sidi Moumen. Each of them present justifying narratives rooted in collective history of the
nation and of urban development, yet via differing approaches.
At the end of May of 2003, King Mohammed VI of Morocco delivered a speech to the
nation reflecting on the tragedy of the Casablanca bombings. He called upon the “fidéle
sujets et citoyennes”, or faithful subjects and citizens, of the nation to collectively recognize
the attacks as contrary to a the nation’s collective Islamic faith. He claimed that the
Moroccan people had “come together as one person”, a “perfect cohesion between the
many fringes of society”, to rally against the negative interpretation of their faith that he
claimed the attacks were predicated upon (Discours royal, May 2003), asking that this
collective body continue to uphold the “obligations and duties of citizenship” they were
acting upon. It is important to note here that in this discours royal and elsewhere, the king
refers to the Moroccan people by the informal, singular “tu” form, invoking a condition of
unity and familiarity in his rhetoric.
Later, he remarks that Morocco must uphold and act upon its “international
commitments” to combat terrorism, emphasizing the necessity of an anti-terrorism
strategy to “…educate, to form the citizen by instilling them with the virtues of openness,
of modernity, of rationality, to hard work, to human rights, to moderation and to
tolerance” (Discours royal, May 2003). In closing, the King notes that Morocco’s struggle
against “terrorism” will become part of a “global strategy, integrated and
multidimensional”, which exists within the “effective framework of democracy and
supremacy of the law” and relies on “putting energy into the service of development and
solidarity” (Discours royal, May 2003). Excerpts of this speech are referenced in the
29
Pettit
narratives of NGOs working in urban development policy towards slums (UN Habitat
2012, Bogaert 2011).
In another statement made a few years later, the king remarks specifically about
the bidonvilles and the Moroccan state’s attempts to ameliorate the perceived problem. He
traces the trajectory of the throne’s view of bidonvilles since a speech in 2001 in which he
“sounded the alarm” about the proliferation of slums, “anarchic houses” making up “truly
savage cities” that “constitute an affront to the dignity of the citizen” and a “menace to the
cohesion of the social fabric” (Discours royal 2006). The king identifies the Moroccan city
as “at risk”, via the proliferation of the bidonville, of no longer being a space of “social
solidarity, economic production, urban development and openness to culture and
civilization”, instead becoming a “gateway to exclusion, ostracism, or hate” (Discours royal
2006). He proposes a solution to the “ignorance” found in these oppositional spaces,
fostered by “illiteracy and social isolation” and general “lack of intellectual stimulation”,
which is to enstill young people (primary group of dissatisfied or disenfranchised people,
also who perpetrated the Casablanca attacks) with “the virtues of patriotic engagement…
through education into modernity that will allow them to add value to our civilizational
heritage” (Discours royal 2006).
In a 2006 speech made at a national meeting of local economic collectives, King
Mohammed VI , had this to say about the VSBP in relation to previous attempts to house
the urban poor:
“What we aim at, in fine, is not simply to have shanty-free cities, still less to set up
soulless concrete slabs which thwart all forms of sociable living. We rather intend
to evolve cities that are not solely conducive to smart, friendly, and dignified living,
30
Pettit
but also investment-friendly and productive spaces-urban areas, that is, which are
attached to their specific character and to the originality of their style.” (Discours
royal, December 2006)
This section of the 2006 statement can also be found immediately preceding the
preamble to a 2012 UN HUPC and UN Habitat report on the status of the VSBP nearly eight
years after its initial implementation, as well as in the preamble to a French language
version of a similar document produced by the GOM. The King has made statements
elsewhere about the values of free trade, the inevitably of conforming to modernity, and
openness to economic development such as initiating the Tangier-Mediterranean port as
conducive to a “positive experience with globalization” (Discours Royal 2007). We will see
this language of modernity and danger in opposition recurring within the VSBP policy
documents themselves as well.
International Governing Bodies and VSBP
The UN’s 2012 report on the Cities without Slums project in Morocco, titled
“Making Slums History”, begins its background on slums in the country with a history that
situates their development in the 1920s, mostly in Casablanca. However, it makes no
reference to the French protectorate at all, noting instead the setting up of a heating plant
in Casablanca which led to the autoconstruction of a shantytown and other makeshift
housing along the periphery of the building. It traces the shifting of shantytown policy
during the late 20th century from hands off to purely technical to incorporating social
aspects into the program, such as “the participation of urban residents”. Urbanization and
the economic development fueling it are not attributed to anything in this document, and
intervention in slums is marked in six phases, all after the protectorate ended in 1952 (UN
31
Pettit
Habitat 2012). The narrative coming from the UN is that the VSBP includes new, essential
social aspects as well as technical that allow participants in the program to voice their
concerns and have them addressed by the governing bodies.
However, what the document focuses on are the “successes” of the program in
terms of amounts of slums cleared and relocated, with no mention of the contributions
made by the social program to the execution of VSBP. Some notes are made on the
socialization of former bidonvillois into their new houses, including that the number of
persons “dwelling in the same unit [has decreased] from 6.3 to 5.5 persons, noting what
may be not simply the ability of the program to provide enough housing for many people
but may also point to an emphasis on reducing family size as is typical in urban spaces (UN
Habitat 2012). In the realm of visual representation of the Other, pictures are provided of
housing in addition to maps showing where slums have been cleared, yet the houses
appear distanced from city centers and in rows of high rise, flat looking buildings. There
are no pictures of people using their new homes, only pictures of people in what appears
to be classroom-style rooms captioned by text stating that they are “social follow-through
cells entrusted with the task of working closely with the population” (UN Habitat 2012).
Figure 4, Resettlement housing several kilometers outside of Casablanca (UN Habitat 2012)
32
Pettit
Figure 5, Aerial photos demonstrating completed slum eradication in Agadir (southern Morocco), no indication of where bidonvillois were relocated (UN Habitat)
Third Party Private Firms and the VSBP
Al Omrane is the primary private group of development partners representing the
Ministry of Housing in the execution of the program’s moving parts. In their policy
description of the VSBP, they describe themselves as a group that “intervenes within a
global vision of human development and social integration” and it lists its major
achievements in terms of the successes of the number of slums cleared (about 43% by
2010). Al Omrane’s goals and objectives include achieving the MDG Goal 7 Target 11,
“ensuring social advancement” through the ability to consume and own-land and home
titles, entering the credit market, “social inclusion” (undefined), and specifically “involving
the private sector”.
In a section titled “Sustained behavioral change”, Al Omrane explains that
ownership not only allows bidonvillois to have control over their own living conditions
but also that it “includes a new social behavior as well as increased involvement in local
affairs” (Al Omrane 2010). This “new social behavior” includes “responsibilization” of
beneficiary households, focused on the “capacity building” of the poor through
microfinance through the Guarantee Fund (FOGARIM). Town planning favors “social
diversity” under the accompagnement social model of VSBP, but does not provide
33
Pettit
information as to how newly constructed housing will be not just for the former
bidonvillois but also for other classes.
Assessment: Representation and metanarratives in policy narratives
From a careful reading of these texts, three major components of narratives about
the bidonville and the bidonvillois arise. First, that the bidonville and its inhabitants pose
a security threat, second, that the bidonville and bidonvillois are not integrated into the
rest of society, and third, that their socialization differs from that of the urban resident.
These themes are explored through observing how policy narratives compare the
bidonvillois to the desired subject, explicitly and implicitly, by relying on assumptions
about a superior ideology, expressed as neoliberalism and aligned discursively with
colonialist concepts of the self and Other.
34
Pettit
Figure 6, Chart grouping policy narratives about VSBP actors and slum dweller
These narratives are not unfamiliar to the dichotomization of the poor from the “rest” of
the residents of Morocco. First, these narratives all stem from the major actors who have a
hand in carrying out the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme in Morocco. Each actor has
power over the people they are describing, and do not inhabit their spatial or
socioeconomic location. Each actor is compelled by international norms of nationalized
politics and economic integration set forth by norming bodies themselves (Huchermeyer,
forthcoming). The power of such actors to speak about a group with little self-
representation in these bodies is therefore great, especially through the words of the king,
Security
Refernce to Bidonvilles
"Menace", "Savage/unruly",
terrorism, indecent
Reference to collective
"faithful citizens", "at
risk" "friendly" "dignified"
*Assumptions about bidonville
do not fully constitute
citizens, not posessing dignity,
embodiment of risk
Integration
Reference to Bidonvilles"anarchic", incohesive, "isolated"
Reference to collective
"Participation", Supremacy of the law,
global strategy, "international
commitments", "civilization", "add
value", "productive", "investment friendly"
*Assumptions about bidonville
lawless, inwards-looking, unproductive, investment-thwarting,
Socialization
Reference to Bidonvilles
"exploit democracy", "ignorant"
Reference to collective
"Obligations and duties", "rationality",
"hard work", "moderation",
"tolerance", "social solidarity/fabric",
"evolve"
*Assumptions about bidonville
irrational, intolerant, outlier,
static
35
Pettit
who holds a very captive audience and is considered a figure of “high trust” for developing
and maintaining trust with development actors (UN Habitat 2012, World Bank Report
2006).
Second, the linguistic representation of slum dwellers, as one can see from these
examples alone, is starkly polarizing, even if the methods of slum policy have shifted and
language has been channeled through neoliberal filters instead of familiar colonial
discourse. Said and Fanon both emphasize the spatial location of the Other as well as the
ability for an actor in a discursively powerful position to amalgamate the Other into a
teeming lumpenproletariat of sorts that takes little account of internal diversity but claims
opposition, whether physical or ideological, to the actor doing the representation. None of
the policy documents refer to the French protectorate’s urban modernism project as the
starting point for the growth of bidonvilles in Moroccan cities or as having any role in
interventionism in the bidonvilles. This signals an attempt at breaking from colonial
reference for urban policy through erasure of the era entirely, but policy metanarratives
about the informal city versus the formal city and their respective residents will tell
another story.
Reading neoliberal “dignity” and the outlying Other
In the case of discussing the bidonville and its residents, the Other is articulated
within both a narrative of desirability and of danger, similar to Orientalist rhetoric in that
there is a tendency to project reflections of the self through fears and differences through
representation of the Other. On one hand, the bidonvillois is constructed as isolated, on
the “fringes” of society, and their non-integration is what leads them to potentially be
weaponized against the state and the society. On the other, this makes them an untapped
36
Pettit
potential subject of neoliberalism, if they are not only given the proper tools but the
socialization as well into the accompanying ideology. This is not only monetarily profitable
to the state, to development firms executing the VSBP, and to banks financing ownership,
but also to the state as a source of security for state-determined beliefs and from further
violent attacks. If the Other can be defined, it can be controlled. If the Other is anarchic and
produces things that are “anarchic” in nature, it means they are opposed to order, to law
and to the formal state apparatus that would otherwise regulate it and be able to control
it.
Ideology, in this case the ideology of neoliberalism, is a series of assumptions about
the ideal way to interpret and function within the world (Althusser 1970). Interpellation
of the object of the VSBP leads to the creation of neoliberal subjects: responsible citizens
who contribute and produce, who abide by the law, who are open to modernity, and by so
doing are afforded dignity. “Dignity”, in a neoliberal era, is constituted by the “capacity” (to
use policy narrative language) to produce, to own, and to consume (Harvey 2007). Social
cohesion then is predicated off of collective home ownership, access to credit and
therefore consumption, and the formal economy including employment within private or
public sectors instead of petty jobs or unemployment.
This capacity is tied to notions of citizenship and the duty of upholding the nation-
state through becoming a part of an allegedly already cohesive society (Purcell 2002). The
right to the city is intimately connected to the way in which VSBP actors attempt to
construe the policy as fostering such a capacity, which, under neoliberalism, is supposed
to constitute that right. The implications of categorizing the Other as incapable of
achieving full citizenship unless facilitated into the formal economy and being physically
37
Pettit
displaced run contrary to this notion. Not possessing the capacity required to compose
this full citizen, the inability to become the neoliberal subject ideologically constructs one
as the Other in the case of the disenfranchised bidonvillois. Instead, the integrated
“citizen” owes their livelihood to the state for being afforded the rights of a citizen
(services, safety, social cohesion, etc.) and no longer constitutes a threat to the dominant
socio-economic system and ideology perpetuated through institutions. This desire to
interpellate is also present in Al Omrane’s inclusion of education for children in their
development platform, encouraging youth to adopt ideas channeled through the Moroccan
education system that will keep the student within the bounds of the dominant neoliberal
ideology (Al Omrane 2010).
Conclusions and implications
Through narrative policy analysis, this paper has sought to identify stories and
representations of a specific group by policy actors, which are then used to justify state
action towards the group. Extreme poverty, isolation, and disenfranchisements are huge
controversies of the contemporary era, but this paper has sought to intervene in the midst
of such controversy to point to alternative readings of the solutions proposed to such
issues. Metanarratives, stories told about the self and the Other since colonialism, have
been identified as perpetuating “us and them” characterizations that have the potential to
allow if not encourage intervention predicated on the basis of extending modernity and
rationality to the Other.
Systemic poverty is still a problem created and fostered by global capitalism,
building off of colonial enterprise. This paper incites further questions about what a truly
participatory program looks like, if it would be able to resist or circumvent existing the
38
Pettit
powerful forces of a global neoliberal order. Is community driven, anti-capitalist
development possible, and would it necessarily function outside the demands to rely on
the nation for its fruition? It also raises questions about the monetary benefits the state
reaps from integrating the urban poor into the city, for the benefit of the state tourism
industry (Morocco’s most profitable) or for the pockets and votes of politicians.
Moreover, it might be useful to read outlying narratives about the bidonville that
recount the Casablanca bombings in a light which seeks to understand the full picture of
existence in the bidonville rather than being reductive and focusing solely on how to
incorporate it into the preexisting urban space. One example of this is the novel Les Étoiles
de Sidi Moumen by Mahi Binebine, which traces the lifespan of the boys who grew up in
Sidi Moumen who later became the Casablanca suicide bombers in 2003. Binebine
develops a fictitious yet captivating perspective on lived experience and tight-knit
community in the slums of Casablanca.
The suicide bombings targeting sites of foreign investment and wealth in
Casablanca’s ville nouvelle informed the VSBP’s speedy implementation. The association of
acts of violence, categorized as irrational affronts on civilization, with a vulnerable, self-
constructed location on the periphery of a city and the availability of discourse about a
violent, brooding Other are both apparent in the policy narratives that feed into the VSBP.
In this light, bio-power, manifested in the securitization of the formal city, arises as a
major motivation for the VSBP’s implementation. Acts of violence against the city, the
location of major investment flows, labor, and globalized interactions constitute a threat
not only to the physical safety of the populace but the insured continuation of investment,
proliferation of modernity as ideology, and the stable nation-state as well.
39
Pettit
As we have seen during the protectorate, both Lyautey and Ecochard acted with
intentions to retain difference while promoting urban development at the beginning of the
modernity project in Morocco. While Lyautey moved to construct “culturally appropriate”
housing and even romanticized the bidonville, Ecochard’s work to “middle” the urban
poor between modernity and ignorance by constructing mass housing projects to shelter
the masses. Ecochard never envisioned the protectorate ending, proposing that this style
of housing would be conducive to the “lifestyle” of the Other while still maintaining
distance from the location of modernity and mobility in the ville nouvelle. Though this
project was never completed, the Villes Sans Bidonvilles Programme echoes its
sentiments, attempting to incorporate the undignified poor into preexisting financial and
social systems in order to mitigate risk and create more profitable subjects.
40
Pettit
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Rabat, Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1980. Print.
Al Omrane: Leading Actor for Settlements Upgrading. Publication. Kingdom of Morocco,
July 2010. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
Althusser, Louis. "On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production." On the
Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
Verso, 1970. 288. Print.
Bogaert, Koenraad. "The Problem of Slums: Shifting Methods of Neoliberal Urban
Government in Morocco." Development and Change 42.3 (2011): 709-31. Web. 18
Feb. 15.
Bogaert, Koenraad. “Cities Without Slums in Morocco? New Modalities of Urban
Government and the Bidonville as a Neoliberal Assemblage.” In Locating the Right
to the City in the Global South, ed. Tony Samara, Shenjing He, and Guo Chen, 41–
59. 2013. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Print.
"Curbing Shantytowns: The Moroccan Experience." Proc. of Making Slums History: A
Global Challenge for 2020, Rabat, Morocco. UN Habitat and Moroccan Ministry of
Housing, Urban Planning and City Policy, Nov. 2012. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.
Chandhoke, Neera. "On the Social Organization of Urban Space: Subversions and
Appropriations." Social Scientist 21.5/6 (1993): 63-73. Web.
"Discours De S.M Le Roi Mohammed VI Suite Aux Attentats De Casablanca Du 16 Mai
2003." Maroc.ma. Government of Morocco, 25 Mar. 2013. Web. 1 Mar. 2015.
41
Pettit
Fanon, Frantz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. The Wretched of the Earth. New
York: Grove, 1965. Print.
"Discours Du Trône." Maroc.ma. Government of Morocco, 25 Mar. 2013. Web. 1 Mar. 2015.
Foucault, Michel. “Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78”.
Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana (ed.). Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Print. 464 pages.
Goodman, Anna. "Imagining the Bidonville: Tradition and the Modernist Utopian Project in
Morocco." 2010 IASTE Working Paper Series. Proc. of IASTE Conference, University of
California, Berkeley. International Association for the Study of Traditional Environment.
Web. 4 Apr. 2015.
Harvey, David. "Introduction." A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 1-4.
Print.
Harvey, David. "The Construction of Consent." A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005. 39-63. Print.
Harvey, David. ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, Vol.53, (2008). pp. 23-40.
Housing Finance for the Poor in Morocco: Programs, Policies and Institutions. Rep. no.
MicroREPORT 96. Washington, DC: USAID, 2008. Print.
Huchzermeyer, Marie. “’Slum’ Upgrading and ‘Slum’ Eradication under MDG Seven Target
Eleven”. Langford, M., Sumner, A. and Yamin, A. (eds). Millennium Development Goals and
Rights: Past, Present and Future. Forthcoming.
Jones, Branwen Gruffydd. (2012) “‘Bankable Slums’: the global politics of slum upgrading”, Third
World Quarterly, 33:5, 769-789.
42
Pettit
Kingdom of Morocco Poverty and Social Impact Analysis of the National Slum Upgrading
Program: Final Report. Rep. no. 36545-MOR. Finance, Private Sector and Infrastructure
Department, World Bank, June 2006. Web. Accessed 13 Feb. 2015.
Purcell M. “Excavating Lefebvre: the right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitants”,
Géojournal 58(2-3), 2002. p. 99-108.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”. Cultural Studies 21(2-3). (2007). 168-
178.
Rabinow, Paul. “Colonialism, modernity: The French in Morocco.” In Al Sayyad, Forms of
Dominance. Ashgate Publishing Group, 1992. 170-82. Print.
Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. University of
Chicago Press, 1995. 464 pages. Print.
"Rapport National: Résorption Des Bidonvilles, L'Expérience Marocaine." Proc. of Conference
Internationale << Sortir Des Bidonvilles >>: Un Défi Mondial Pour 2020. Royaume Du
Maroc, Nov. 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.
Roe, Emery. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. Print.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979. 368 pages. Print.
"SIDI MOUMEN. From Terror Slum to Open City: A Project with and by the People." Mass
Housing Competition, MA-CAS-317-Report (2014): 1-31. 2014. Web. 3 Apr. 2015.
"Slum Population as Percentage of Urban Population-Morocco." UNdata. United Nations, 27 Oct.
2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
Wagner, Lauren and Minca, Claudio. “Rabat retrospective: Colonial heritage in a Moroccan urban
laboratory”. Urban Studies 51 (14), 2014. 3011-3025.
43
Pettit
Wright, Gwendolyn. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. University of Chicago
Press, 1991. Print. 389 pages.
44