Abstract

I examine three episodes where seemingly hard-and-fast distinctions between formal and informal, planned and unplanned, authorized and illegal reveal instead contested, yet markedly porous, boundaries. Tracing the shifting assertions of state agency and its ghosting retreat requires refocusing attention from questions of form to excavate instead rapidly changing legal frameworks and regimes of land management. Heralded as the first state-sponsored housing development for Moroccans undertaken by the protectorate government, the Cité des Habous actively participated in the systematic restructuring of land held in trust. By contrast, intersecting strategies of land subdivision and speculative real estate development that shaped the Maarif and Derb Ghallef unfolded initially in the seeming absence of state intervention, even as these initiatives would ultimately pave the way for what Ananya Roy has described as unmapping. As Roy argues in her analysis of forced resettlement campaigns undertaken in Calcutta in the 1990s, by designating urban areas as unplanned, irregular, or illegal, the state aims to ensure a constant negotiability regarding land rights, property titles, and land use in order to facilitate territorial flexibility that ultimately deepens state control over the land in question. Such dynamics took even more unexpected form in the initial establishment of what would become the Carrières Centrales/Karian Sentra district. While the photographs of the Carrières Centrales/Karian Sentra district with which I began, like the urban landscapes they depict, appear to be defined by absolute distinctions between state-funded experiments in housing for Moroccan residents and unauthorized, self-built shantytowns, this operative dichotomy is itself a state effect.