• 1 For example, the micro-history of Haddada, a village built to relocate a rural community on the out (...)

1In this dissertation, I examined the construction and design of villages, alongside the development of planning schemes aimed at the so-called “modernization” of the rural landscape in late colonial and post-independence Morocco, spanning the years 1946 to 1968. I focused on a series of agricultural, infrastructural, and community development initiatives that took place in the Gharb Valley, a coastal plain north of the capital city, Rabat, as well as projects conceived by the Service de l’urbanisme and its successors. These projects ranged from the construction of individual villages,1 rural workers’ quarters, and service centers (fig. 1) to the design of regional-scale schemes that translated into tangible, built territorial forms the different ways in which the future of the Moroccan countryside was re-imagined.

• 2 Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions (1912-1986), Princeton, NJ: Pr (...)
• 3 Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansi (...)
• 4 The so-called décennie des campagnes (the “decade of the countryside”) refers to the period from th (...)

4The periodization I chose aimed to highlight dynamics and imaginaries only partially shaped by the national political framework. Instead of assuming that Morocco’s political independence in 1956, though undeniably significant in many respects, necessarily marked a sharp break in territorial policies and practices, I traced a trajectory marked by both continuities and ruptures. In this context, the Gharb Valley is examined as a space that, in different phases, embodied key aspects of what could be called the Moroccan agrarian dream. A dream—or perhaps a mirage, as Swearingen2 would describe it—that initially took on the distinctly Orientalist form of reviving a lost past as the “granary of Rome”,3 later evolved into the promise of agrarian reform, and ultimately transformed into the techno-developmentalist vision of the décennie des campagnes.4

• 5 For the use of this expression, I’m indebted to James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Sc (...)
• 6 Monique Eleb, “An alternative to functionalist universalism: Ecochard, Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique,” (...)
• 7 These arguments were later revisited and expanded in Michele Tenzon and Axel Fisher, “Foreign aid f (...)

6Yet, the trajectory of architectural practices and thought that I describe—closely aligned with the “high modernist” paradigm5 of technocratic governance imposing rationalized spatial and economic structures on society—reveals contradictions and ambiguities. Through various phases, from the late and self-proclaimed progressive stage of French colonial occupation in the 1940s to the tensions that surfaced within public institutions amid repressed demands for independence, and finally to the postcolonial reassessment, dissonant voices and underlying ambiguities emerged. The ambiguous universalism of the Service de l’urbanisme, caught between the conflicting demands of generalizable standards and contextual specificities,6 coupled with the increasing prevalence of a space-blind rationale in the development ideologies of the 1950s and 1960s, charted a trajectory of change. This trajectory was reflected not only in the effort to rethink architecture and planning from within but also in the evolving relationship between these fields and their competing counterparts.7

• 8 Adam Guerin, “Disaster ecologies: land, peoples and the colonial modern in the Gharb, Morocco, 1911 (...)
• 9 Edward Soja, The Geography of Modernization in Kenya, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968

9Although modernity in Morocco has often been depicted as an inexorable force imposed upon the entire territory,8 the case of the Gharb reveals a trajectory marked by failures and disillusioned ambitions. This process unfolded through varied spatial strategies (fig. 3), alternating between moments of expansion to phases of reconnection or mending of fragments. My attempt to reconstruct the geography of the Gharb development project was inspired by the observations of scholars dealing with the history of colonialism and the spread of modernization in non-Western countries. As Edward Soja pointed out, modernization is neither “an abstract process divorced from time and space [nor] a temporal development which only incidentally varies areally.”9

• 10 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in the European Empires, New York, NY; C (...)

11Following Lauren Benton, who highlighted how “Empires did not cover space evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings,”10 I propose in my dissertation to examine the patterns of rural transformation in the Gharb through the lens of fragmentation. I use the term in a broad sense to indicate the divide between different sectors in terms of infrastructural investments, financial capacity, and technology. This, I argue, has produced a stark and visually manifest dualism, making the Gharb’s rural landscape appear to be an archipelago of “fragments.” Along this line of thought, the reforms and development schemes that I have described can be seen, both metaphorically and in concrete spatial terms, as attempts to mend these fragments, stitching them together while simultaneously tangling and untangling strings across the physical landscape.