“Fast urban model-making”: constructing Moroccan urban expertise through Zenata Eco-City

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Morocco’s ambitions to become a city-building “expert” in Africa through Zenata Eco-City, a project being built near Casablanca as part of Morocco’s national new city-building strategy. Despite being in early stages of construction, Zenata’s builders enthusiastically promote the future city as an urban model for Africa and have begun to export it long before the project’s completion. Building on urban policy mobilities literature and research on emergent new city models, we examine Zenata as an example of “fast model-making”, and analyze how authority is constructed for a model based on ideas rather than on a completed city. We explore the process of policy research and “learning” used to create and legitimize the model and investigate how promotional strategies to export it produce narratives about the city’s success and the expertise of its developers. We raise concerns about Zenata’s fast model and the circulation of expertise without content.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy mobilities
• urban models
• fast urbanism
• new cities
• Morocco

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was conducted while the first author was based at McGill University, and greatly benefited from the financial and academic support of McGill’s Department of Geography. We thank the anonymous peer reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments on previous versions of the paper. We also extend our deepest thanks and appreciation to all participants who contributed their time, knowledge, and insights through interviews that inform this research. Thanks are also owed to Simon and Marianne Turcotte-Plamondon and Joanna Ondrusek-Roy for many productive conversations that helped to shape this paper. In its later stages of development, this paper benefited from the insights and stimulating conversations shared with members of the Asian Urbanisms Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since writing this manuscript, the new city’s official website, which informs a part of this analysis, has been taken down and replaced by a new version.

2 Enabled through the project’s public interest status, expropriations started in 2008 and are ongoing. Over 20 informal housing settlements will be cleared, and onsite relocation is planned for 50,000 residents from these settlements (SAZ, 2013).

3 In 2018, built components of the city included: the primary motorway access and large arteries of the city’s road network, the brand-new Ikea store, phase 1 of the Al Mansour-Zenata neighbourhood for informal resident relocation, and main sewerage, electricity, and drinking water networks.

4 The AFD’s role in Zenata’s development also reflects the path dependency of some urban policy flows and the enduring importance of ties with France, which was similarly engaged in new city development in Morocco during the protectorate (1912–1956).

5 Zenata’s Eco-City reference framework does not have a legislative or regulation role, nor is it intended to regulate the attribution of a centrally determined eco-city status like with China’s national eco-city framework (Li & Qiu, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

The research conducted for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under a Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Doctoral scholarship (# 767-2017-1180), a Masters Graduate scholarship, and Insight Grant (#247641), as well as academic awards including: the Rathlyn Fieldwork Award, the GREAT travel award, the Lorne Trottier Science Accelerator Fellowship, and awards from McGill University’s Geography Department and Institute for the Study of International Development. Writing and development of this manuscript was completed with the support of a Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (#298628).