Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco

Description

Using rich ethnographic detail, Precarious Modernities offers an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca’s margins as part of ongoing and contingent processes of ‘modernization’. Through a focus on the everyday lives and spatial materialities of Hay Mohammadi’s inhabitants, and their interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas, and technocratic planning regimes, the book documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders. The result is a unique account of the political continuities, security logics, economic ideologies and competing forces that shape the possibilities open to precarious communities in a storied and sprawling metropolis. As marginalized inhabitants develop pragmatic ways of appropriating or resisting powerful statist and developmentalist agendas, unanticipated and novel forms of political engagement emerge, signaling the revival and reconfiguration of notions of class through creative and alternative spatial practices and their attendant vocabularies. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Map of Hay Mohammadi and Casablanca, Morocco Note on language and transliteration Acknowledgements Introduction Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca: Between myth and reality Moroccan urban spaces: Some conceptual anchor points Whose modernity/modernism? Classed spaces: Marginality and precarious lives Background of the study and fieldwork context The protagonists Language and/as class politics ‘Mediated’ approaches Plan of the book Chapter 1: Genealogies of the urban margins ‘A laboratory for modernity’: Colonial interventions and the birth of the urban margins ‘Marginalize it, to punish the people’: Political violence and post-Independence struggles Instrumental commemorations Conclusion Chapter 2: Iconographies of the margins: Plans, maps and affective spaces Seeing like a grid Mapping memories of violence Gameboard tensions Affective cartographies Sara’s mapping Asma’s mapping Adil’s mapping Fatna El Bouih’s mapping Conclusion Chapter 3: Disciplining the margins: Streets, youth and social development programmes The street seen through moral and policing discourses ‘Responsibilizing’ marginal youth Pacification by ‘artification’ Posing dissent: Rebellious youth and neoliberal class affects Conclusion Chapter 4: Dwelling on the margins: Housing architectures, gendered skills and the ‘unhomely’ in Hay Mohammadi Homes as social and cultural facts Domesticity as ‘unhomely’ Spaces of embodiment and enskilled routines Public baths Gendered skill Conclusion Chapter 5: The future on/of the margins: Relocations, aspirations and emergent mobilities ‘Cities without Slums’: From marginalization to the periphery Ideal homes: Investing in dreams and securing local moral futures Mobilities, reparations and aspirational ‘non-places’ Conclusion Conclusion The centrality of the urban margins in contemporary Morocco For a renewed anthropology of post-colonial urbanity Everyday politics in everyday spaces: Finding hope for the struggles to come Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Bibliography Index