The Political Implications of Urban Displacement: Notes from Two Fieldwork Research Projects in Casablanca

Resettlement programs have always been in the political agenda of public institutions and administrators of Casablanca since its growth during the French Protectorate. Today real estate and private multinational capital sneak into local and national powers, pushing public authorities to clear land for new urban development through demolition and resettlement of local residents. The dwellers of areas such as the old town centre (medina) and the slums (karyan) increasingly react to displacement by challenging this urban agenda frontally with their bodies and words, but often also deploying what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak”, i.e. implicit acts of resistance and symbolic dissent. Reversing Asef Bayat’s statement, we consider residents of these stigmatized neighbourhoods “revolutionaries without a revolution”, partisans of an intimate cause of their own, that aims at having a home and surviving in a hostile city. Our reflections are the product of two separate fieldwork researches: one with the inhabitants of informal neighbourhoods, another with residents and former residents of the old medina. The two cases show how resettlement affects the sense of belonging and of cohesion of low-income classes by uprooting the founding element of the everyday life: the house. The uncertainty about the possibility to keep their own home deeply conditions the implicit social pact with the monarchy apparatus, and may represent one of the conditions that are undermining the allegiance to the monarchy itself.