CASABLANCA, MOROCCO Negotiated Territories: Experiences in Adapted Habitats in Casablanca

Welcoming modernity from its inception, Casablanca, Morocco was above all a laboratory for the modern project in architecture and urban design in the twentieth century. The city allowed for — perhaps even called for — radical investigations into the urban form that pushed boundaries: constructive and material, formal and architectonic, domestic and social.
As the city becomes increasingly invested in the preservation and promotion of this significant built heritage, led in large part by OUALALOU + CHOI’s devising of a Plan of action for the Urban Agency, this installation presents key moments in Casablanca’s ‘modernist adventure’, positing the streetscape as a negotiated territory existing in a state of evolution and transgression. Investigations include the medina of the early 1900s, the ‘European plan’ of the 1930s, the Cité musulmane d’ain chock of the 1940s, through to the ‘satellite city’ (carrières centrales) and the Cité israélite el hank of the 1950s and 60s.
A series of intricate models explore these spatial transformations within the city, from the street to the enclosure, from public to private and in-between. Instances of sometimes-rapid multiplication, contraction, dilatation, and intersection portray Casablanca as a territory continuously in search of a terrain d’entente between its various stakeholders and inhabitants.