New State Space Formation in Morocco: The Example of the Bouregreg Valley

Abstract

Most scholars working on the Arab World typically view the state’s power as something congruent with its cartographic boundaries. Power emerges from an institutional core—the regime—which exerts its hegemony over subordinated institutions, spaces and scales. Thus, the regime presents itself as the privileged site of political formation, intervention and inquiry. The result is a body of scholarship that has largely neglected the dynamics of ‘new state space’ formation at the urban scale. Drawing on the case of the Bouregreg project, a massive high-end urban development scheme positioned between the twin cities of Rabat and Salé, Morocco, this paper investigates the dynamics of agency formation implicated in the creation of a new state space and considers what it reveals about state respatialisation and the rise of new governmental arrangements that have been elided by mainstream accounts on the Middle East and North African region.

As economic actors and experts, the users of this guide are certainly aware that the current intensive shift towards globalization is putting the economies of developing countries, such as Morocco, under increasing pressure and requires large scale reforms and structural adaptations. For this reason, the Kingdom of Morocco is now engaged in huge reforms, initiatives and restructuring programs to accelerate its integration into a broad free trade zone alongside Mediterranean countries, Arab countries, the United States of America, and other nations as part of the globalization process (Mustapha Mechahouri, former Moroccan Minister of foreign Trade; quoted in American Chambers of Commerce, 2007, p. 6).

References to the ‘global’ continue to affect contemporary political discourse and stress the inevitability of ‘reform’ and—more specifically—the necessity of reorganising national economic and political life to reflect the demands and incentives of the ‘global market’. There is of course no shortage of critique of the ways in which neo-liberal assumptions have managed to articulate themselves to the charisma of contemporary globalisation. Yet, in spite of the compelling nature of this broader critique (for example, Peck and Tickell, 2002; Robinson, 2004; Harvey, 2006), there is still room for more explicit cases studies, especially in the developing world and more particularly in the Arab world, that explore the contingent formations of neo-liberalism on the ground and the specific ways in which neo-liberal agency shapes the possibilities and constraints of political life in particular places. This essay argues that, while most scholars on the Arab world typically view the state’s power as something emerging from an institutional core—the regime—which exerts its hegemony over subordinated institutions, spaces and scales, this view largely neglects the dynamics of ‘new state space’ formation at the urban scale and other related modalities of political transformation.

Increasing global market integration has triggered radical reforms in Arab countries. In Morocco, due to a severe deficit crisis, an IMF structural adjustment programme was introduced in 1983. In less than three decades, the economic landscape of the Kingdom has been radically transformed (Catusse, 2008; Zemni and Bogaert, 2009). These reforms also brought forth specific political transformations that still remain largely unrecognised in the area studies literature. Structural adjustment initiated the elaboration of new forms of spatially differentiated government and regulatory arrangements that manifest themselves differently across space and make up the specific forms of “actually existing neo-liberalism” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). As a result, new—seemingly dispersed—spatial constellations are produced and undermine the coherence of concepts like the ‘nation-state’ or the ‘regime’ that traditionally serve as a focus in the analysis of political power and change in the Arab world.

Both in the US and Europe (Keynesianism) and in many former Third World countries (developmentalism), the crisis of the Fordist developmental model in the 1970s and the 1980s gave way to a process of ‘glocalisation’ which resulted in a rescaling of politics and a restructuring of the institutional state space from the national scale both upwards and downwards (Swyngedouw, 2004). It is at the urban and not the national scale that the scope and significance of these changes are most clearly revealed. Consequently, the city presents itself as the site par excellence to study the current political transformations in Arab political life. As Neil Brenner has highlighted, the urban scale represents the strategic institutional arena in which current neo-liberal forms of government are unfolding. State power has been rescaled and reterritorialised into ‘new state spaces’ that reflect the dominant neo-liberal political strategy within an increasing globalising world. These state spaces must be understood as new institutional configurations in which political power has been resituated in an attempt to influence the geography of capitalist accumulation (Brenner, 2004). Especially, since King Mohamed VI’s accession to the throne in 1999, Morocco has willingly presented itself as a model reformer. Cities like Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier and Fez are being redesigned and restructured to satisfy the desires and interests of global capital. However, the new state space framework can seem rather structuralist and tends to take the focus away from important questions of agency and strategy (MacKinnon and Shaw, 2010).¹ Therefore, these new arrangements of state power are best understood as assemblages of political actors (both public and private) “lodged” within a particular site (Allen and Cochrane, 2010). Consequently, a new state space such as the Bouregreg Valley should not only be viewed in terms of a rescaling of state power (spatial height) but also as a reassemblage of power in terms of “spatial reach” (Allen and Cochrane, 2010). In the following remarks, I illustrate this spatial reach through some of the agencies involved in the production of spaces that are seen to exemplify Morocco’s openness to global capital (and its wider will to reform). In doing so, I attempt to reveal a specific political narrative that elucidates the contemporary metamorphosis of Moroccan cities. The research data presented are based on multiple visits to the site between 2007 and 2010, a careful reading of policy documents and the collation and analysis of 38 semi-structured interviews including 11 with officials from the Bouregreg project, and 27 with other experts (such as journalists, architects, consultants, academics and state-officials).

My concern here is to suggest the significance of these changes for the government of people and places in contemporary Morocco; and—scaling up—to think about what these changes might imply for mainstream accounts of Arab political life, which remain locked in debates on mere endogenous trajectories of regime change, democratic transition and authoritarian persistence (for example, Brownlee, 2002; Ghalioun, 2004; Ottaway and Dunne, 2007; Joffé, 2009). Moreover, I argue against the often taken for granted hypothesis that “the political and social cleavages between those who profit from globalization and those who do not can be bridged by ‘modern’ or ‘good’ governance” (Lemke, 2007, p. 54). Contrary to this hegemonic discourse, the implementation of neo-liberal reform does not bring forth overall economic growth and prosperity but leads to a geography of uneven development in which some places are privileged over others (Harvey, 2006). The reality of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism leads not so much to an unevenness between nation-states or between centre states and peripheral states as it produces a geography of uneven development within national and regional boundaries, and especially within the arising megacities of the global South. It is creating the Manichean city described so vividly by Mike Davis (2006a) in his famous book Planet of Slums.

James Ferguson stated that

It is worth noting that the movement of capital ... is ‘global’ in the sense that it crosses the globe, but it does not encompass or cover contiguous geographical space. The movements of capital cross national borders, but they jump point to point, and huge areas are simply bypassed. Capital does not ‘flow’ from London to Cabinda; it hops, neatly skipping over most of what lies in between (Ferguson, 2005, p. 379).

According to Ferguson, this process leads to the exploitation of separately administered enclaves within the national boundaries of states. The Bouregreg Valley is such an enclave. Chosen to be developed as a tourist and commercial hub, the valley now constitutes a local destination ready to be connected to the global chain of capital. Hence, the development of the Bouregreg Valley is a salient example of how cities are redesigned by transferring and assembling particular political powers and competences into a new state space. Additionally, these large urban development schemes create new spatial logics in the regulation of capital, investment and labour and alter the motion of goods and people in the city. They are primarily shaped to fit the requirements of a global market instead of meeting the pressing demands and social needs of the majority of its urban residents. Despite radical neo-liberal restructuring over the past three decades, the economic and social development of the majority of Morocco’s population has continued to slacken, causing stagnation in per capita income, increased poverty and urban unemployment (D. Davis, 2006).

The Moroccan Urban Revolution

Unlike other Arab countries—like for example Egypt—where the influence of Arab socialism had a significant impact, Morocco never completely embraced a state-dominated economic sector (Najem, 2001). This did not mean, however, that the economy did not contain specific characteristics of a state developmentalist model—for example, via redistributive policies and the expansion of the public sector (Catusse, 2009). Also, substantial state support was given to domestic industry and the agricultural sector. Yet, this was not at all inspired by socialist or populist motives, but by mere economic necessity. State intervention during the 1950s and 1970s could be attributed more to the structural weakness of the domestic private sector than to a coherent developmentalist strategy (Kaioua, 1996). Furthermore, the monarchy deliberately developed and prioritised the agricultural sector over the urban-based industries after independence in 1956. The palace saw a stable rural landowning class as one of the essential foundations of its power base. Investments in the countryside were an attempt to pull the landowners into the patronage network of the palace and halt the continuous rural exodus towards the cities. Moreover, the monarchy wanted to limit the political weight of the cities and the urban-based nationalist movement. Consequently, public authorities largely ignored the industrialisation and planning of Morocco’s urban agglomerates (Naciri, 1984). Nevertheless, despite the prioritisation of agricultural development, rural migration continued and rapid urbanisation profoundly modified the structure of the Moroccan society (for example, the emergence of a growing urban middle class). During the early 1970s, there were some efforts to shift the focus towards developing the urban economy and the monarchy tried to encourage private-sector involvement with the ‘Moroccanisation laws’, which intended to secure at least 50 per cent of Moroccan ownership in domestic firms and to co-opt the emerging corporate class (Cherkaoui and Ben Ali, 2007). However, it was not until the adoption of IMF-promoted structural adjustments—foreign public debt increased from 19.6 per cent of GDP in 1975 to a staggering 85 per cent in 1983—that the development of the urban economy became the primary government focus.

The implementation of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) in the beginning of the 1980s generated new and radical reforms. It was the watershed moment from which the current political transformations and the concomitant Moroccan state reformation process are to be explained (Catusse, 2008). The state bureaucracy and its public administration had to be downsized to meet the new requirements of neo-liberal reform. The well-known formulae of market liberalisation, deregulation, fiscal discipline and the privatisation of industrial activities and public services constituted the new governmental toolbox to decrease public deficit. Characteristic of neo-liberal reforms is the reconfiguration of political and economic life so as to reflect market incentives and demands. Often, these reforms have been associated with a retreat or a hollowing-out of the state (Strange, 1996). This, however, is a misconception. Structural adjustment did not entail the roll-back of the state per se, but rather the roll-back of particular (developmentalist) state functions. Neo-liberal reform leads not so much to the reduction of state sovereignty, but rather to its displacement into new institutional arrangements. It implies a particular kind of statecraft (Parker, 2009). New forms of spatially differentiated government and regulatory arrangements are introduced which transfer the ability to govern political and economic life from traditional state institutions to new governmental arrangements that are often—at first sight—not associated with the government or the state. The growing reliance on market-oriented policies thus not only entailed a process of deregulation but also re-regulated political life across an increasingly variegated landscape of spaces to be governed. Arrangements such as in the Bouregreg Valley (discussed in detail later) constitute such new forms of state power. These new modalities of governmental power facilitate and co-ordinate the various processes through which societal spaces are being produced and reproduced by capitalist strategies. Béatrice Hibou (1998) has called this process the “redeployment of the state”. It is an evolution in which the state is fundamentally involved in the political construction of (new) markets and in which modes of government are modified under the influence of national and global transformations.

Within this context, the city provided the privileged site for the reconfiguration of political, economic and social power, a process that radically transformed the cityscape itself. Cities and city-regions are the sites through which the global economy is co-ordinated, where surplus value is realised and accumulated, and where new frictions and social conflicts arise. In Morocco, policy-makers are of course very much aware of that. In its recently published ‘national strategy for urban development’, the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism underlines the necessity to prepare the Moroccan cities in order to expand their share of global investments and financial flows (MHU, 2009, p. 30). Structural adjustment has accelerated the urbanisation of capital. Especially, since the accession to the throne of Mohamed VI in 1999, governing élites have been trying to reinforce the Moroccan cities’ competitive positions within the context of rapidly changing global conditions. Several new urban development schemes, such as the Bouregreg project, are becoming the showcases of an “urban revolution”—as it was referred to in the local press.² The attraction of “global fixed capital investments” (infrastructural projects) and “circulating capital” (for example, tourism) is now a component of a “nearly universal economic development strategy” (Paul, 2004). The restructuring of the Moroccan city is inscribed in this global political project that reflects and defends (global) market requirements and connects local business networks with the outside world. In 2009, the head of the Casablanca Stock Exchange (CSE) Karim Haji told the international press that Morocco wants to become “a stepping stone for investors from the US, Asia, Europe and the Middle East looking for opportunities to diversify investments”.³

The new determined priorities within this competitive urban logic are real estate development, international trade and investments, offshore activities and tourism. Although Morocco’s rural economy (agriculture, forestry and fishery) is still the most important sector for employment (34.3 per cent), the urban economy is today by far the most significant producer of national economic growth. Three-quarters of the national GDP is generated within the urban economy (MHU, 2009, p. 21). Today, several large urban development projects are reshaping the cityscapes of Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, Fez and Marrakech. The Tanger-Med project, a new international seaport with an industrial hinterland of 550 square km (Tangier Free Zone), is definitely the flagship project and symbol for Morocco’s commitment to global market integration. Designed to exploit the strategic location of Tangier as a redistribution centre for international trade with an estimated capacity of 8 million containers and 7 million passengers by the year 2016, the first section of the port became operational in 2007. When Tanger-Med becomes fully operational, it will be the biggest commercial port in Africa, and on the Mediterranean Sea. The same competitive logic applies to the Casanearshore park in Casablanca. It was the first Moroccan offshore park and at the moment is the largest in North Africa. Promoted as “the dream of every outsourcer” it advertises top-notch, low-cost services to multinational firms (Zemni and Bogaert, 2009, p. 99). Five city-regions in Morocco developed or are set to develop offshore zones: Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Tangier and Marrakech. Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi sees Morocco as “a magnet for many companies who want to relocate”.⁴ These industrial free zones and offshore zones are newly reconfigurated islets inscribed into the Moroccan national territory, where specific laws and regulations exist from site to site. Besides industry and outsourcing, Morocco’s urban economy and new investment strategies focus particularly on its most valuable sector: tourism. Several large and luxurious projects are being developed, especially in the neighbourhood of Marrakech. The prestigious Plan Azur (involving the creation of six seaside resorts), the development of the marina in Casablanca, the Saphira project developing the coastline in Rabat and the planning of the Bouregreg Valley are among the most prestigious endeavours to promote luxury tourism (Barthel and Mouloudi, 2009).

Nonetheless, mainstream political analyses of the Arab world have seldom paid attention to the ways in which a cityscape reflects a hegemonic political project. As Christopher Parker (2009, p. 113) stated: “while pavement, steel and concrete can be rolled out to enable and direct the flow [of capital], they do not set it in motion”. Human agency and political intervention are thus at the centre of the process that mediates the global accumulation flows (Ong, 2008). Consequently, in contrast to a notion of globalisation that is often presented by neo-liberal development discourses as an inevitable force—and hence beyond the scope of national political agency—the various projects involved in its making are actually not so politically neutral as they appear to be (Parker, 2009, p. 113). Various actors, extending far beyond national boundaries, are involved in the (re)shaping of the urban space and the reconfiguration of the urban economy. Yet this has not necessarily implied a loss of political and economic power for the traditional ruling élites in Morocco. Although, the existing political networks of patronage and clientelism have changed drastically since structural adjustment and the subsequent privatisation of public assets during the 1990s and the 2000s, the pace and the particular way in which economic restructuring and the privatisation policies took place in Morocco suggest that traditional élites from within the entourage of the Monarchy, together with large foreign investors from France and Spain, were the first and main beneficiaries of the capitalist transformations (Catusse, 2008, pp. 83–125; Vermeren, 2009, p. 51). The privatisations were the instrument of the reproduction of the Moroccan élite system, but this time adapted to the new international economic climate. The future of the Moroccan bourgeoisie seemed well assured with the selling of state-owned economic assets and the adoption of free market policies (Clément, 1986, p. 17).

Mapping the New State Space of the Bouregreg Valley

In Morocco, the key decisions regarding major urban infrastructure, socioeconomic development and the various development plans on tourism, crafts and offshore industries, are generally made outside the scope of democratic institutions and public debate (Tozy, 2008, pp. 37–38). Beside the elected government bodies, the monarchy’s real political power is located in a hierarchical political and administrative apparatus, also referred to as the Mahkzen, centred around the Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of Interior is one of the so-called sovereign ministries which means that its head is directly appointed by the King regardless of the results of legislative elections, the political majority in parliament or the composition of the national government. At the urban level, the King is represented by Walis and governors. Since the 1980s, the Moroccan major urban centres have been increasingly sub-divided into prefectures (headed by governors) and co-ordinated by administrative super-governorates, the Wilaya, at the regional level. The Wali is responsible for the preservation of security and the promotion of economic development in his designated territory. The creation of the Wilaya was a response to the nation-wide social disturbances and riots during the 1980s following government-imposed austerity measures on public spending (Rachik, 1995). Since then, urban planning—especially in important cities such as Casablanca and Rabat—has become an absolute priority. During the two following decades, urban planning agencies were established in every major city in order to try to control and plan the urban transformations and the increasing expansion of Moroccan cities.

With the accession of Mohamed VI, the involvement of the state in urban restructuring has increased rapidly. The increasing world-wide mobility of capital implies that investors carefully seek out the most favourable investment conditions. Their desire to capture the highest return on investments has resulted, in Morocco as elsewhere, in the creation of an “archipelago of specialized ‘clusters’” scattered across the national territory (M. Davis, 2006b, p. 62). This “spatial selectivity” is produced by state power by ways in which state policies target particular kinds of investments in particular zones and spaces (Bunnel and Coe, 2005, p. 834). The Bouregreg project is probably the most salient example of how state power has been resituated in a specialised growth-oriented enclave in order to enhance a certain regime of capital accumulation. The Bouregreg Valley is one of the icons of Morocco’s commitment to waterfront development and “showcase urbanism” (Barthel and Mouloudi, 2009, p. 56, author’s translation). On 7 January 2006, Mohamed VI officially launched the ambitious project for the restructuring of the valley. This royal project is situated alongside the Bouregreg estuary within the valley between the twin cities Rabat and Salé. It occupies a territory of approximately 6000 hectares. Promoted as an “opportunity ... for all the actual and future inhabitants” of the two cities, the project tries to invigorate the capital’s prestige as an attractive destination in the Mediterranean area.⁵ A new bridge (Moulay Hassan), a tramway and a tunnel underneath the historical Oudaya—an old fortress at the seashore—aim to improve the mobility between Salé and the Moroccan capital and reconcile the twin cities in a symbolic way after centuries of historical rivalry (see Abu Lughod, 1980). In six different stages, the Bouregreg project entails the construction of a port for cruise ships, two marinas, luxury hotels and apartments, commercial centres, a conference centre, offices, a high-class residential islet (Amwaj), an amusement park, a technopolis, a golf course and eco-tourism facilities. The bridge and the tramway are planned to be finished by the end of 2010. On 12 May 2009, the construction works of the first stage ‘Bab el Bahr’ (gateway to the sea) started and are scheduled to be finished by 2013 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Bouregreg Valley project.

The preparations for the project started back in 2001 when the King expressed his explicit wish to develop the Bouregreg Valley. On the initiative of the late Abdelaziz Meziane Belfqih, one of the most influential royal advisors, and the direction of Lemghari Essakl, the Société d’Aménagement de la Vallée du Bouregreg (SABR) was established with the specific assignment to work out a plan for the future of the valley. SABR was a branch of the Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion (CDG). CDG is a financial institution established in 1959 to manage public servant pensions. It has become the largest publicly owned investment bank and a major stakeholder in several urban and regional development programmes across the country (amongst others, the Casanearshore park and the marina in Casablanca). Both the director of SABR and CDG are directly appointed by the King. The project became a royal priority but the actual implementation of the project could create difficulties or at least a delay as the project’s designated territory fell under the authority of the locally elected city councils of both Salé and Rabat. With the then recently adopted Communal Charter in 2002, local city councils had gained some considerable control over construction licences, spatial planning and local government (Catusse et al., 2007). In order to avoid a potential institutional battle, SABR was resituated and became a branch of a newly created autonomous governmental agency, the Agence pour l’Aménagement de la Vallée du Bouregreg (AAVB). The AAVB was established by law 16-04 and promulgated by Dahir (royal decree) on 23 November 2005 with the specific mission to develop the valley. Basically, law 16-04 prescribes that the agency has exclusive authority over the project within its legally determined territorial boundaries. Moreover, all public competences related to the Urban Planning Agency of Rabat-Salé (AURS), the prefectures and the local municipalities are transferred to the AAVB (Dahir no. 1-05-70, 2005). The only exception is that the AAVB does not officially appropriate the territorial space of the two municipalities and local taxes are still due to be paid to the proper municipality (interview with the AAVB director, Rabat, 18 May 2010).

In order to fulfil its mission, the AAVB is authorised to deliver construction permits, regulate all deeds of sale, buy land and expropriate landowners (54 per cent of the land was in private hands before the project started). “We are the state in this site”, as the director of Bouregreg Marina, an AAVB branch, made it clear to me (interview, Rabat, 20 May 2010). And, in some cases, the powers of the AAVB even exceed those of traditional state institutions that are subjected to public law. Law 16-04 adopts a special expropriation procedure. Morocco’s normal compulsory purchase act states that expropriation can only occur when its purpose is declared as a public interest. In accordance with law 16-04 (article 34) and decree 2-05-1514 (article 10), the AAVB can declare the whole urban planning zone of the Bouregreg Valley as a public interest. Furthermore, the law modifies some of the conditions in order to speed up the process and enlarge its control (Dahir no. 1-05-70, 2005; Decree no. 2-05-1514, 2005). Anticipating my question of what the public interest was in the construction of a marina, luxury apartments and five-star hotels, the Head of Corporate Finance and Partnerships of the AAVB answered: “creating wealth is also a public interest” (interview, Rabat, 20 May 2010). The question is of course, for whom? Not surprisingly, the popular reactions that have risen against the project so far, were all related to the issue of expropriation (Mouloudi, 2010).

According to a former high-ranking official within the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, the creation of the AAVB had the explicit intention to exclude the locally elected municipal councils and centralise the political decision-making process (interview Rabat, 7 May 2009). The AAVB is placed under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Interior, governed by an administrative council and directed by the former director of SABR, Lemghari Essakl, who was appointed by the King (Dahir no. 1-05-70, 2005; Decree no. 2-05-1514, 2005). The administrative council is represented by all important local government officials, amongst others, the Minister of Interior, the Wali of the region Rabat-Salé-Zemmour-Zaer, the governors of the prefectures of Rabat and Salé, the director of the AURS and even the presidents of the locally elected councils of Rabat and Salé. Nevertheless, according to a former consultant for the Bouregreg project, this administrative council should be seen as “divided between those members directly appointed by the King who make the important decisions and those who are there just to nod their heads and approve the made decisions” (interview, Rabat, 12 May 2010). Whatever the precise balance of power is in the administrative council, there is little transparency about the final decision-making process.

As a specific kind of institution, the AAVB is still an exception in Morocco. Only the international port of Tangier is governed by a similarly powerful institutional configuration, the Tangier Mediterranean Special Agency (TMSA), which was established in 2002 (Barthel and Planel, 2010). However, although TMSA has considerable powers and autonomy to govern the port and the surrounding special economic zone, it does not dispose of all the extensive prerogatives that are attributed to the AAVB. TMSA is a public limited company controlled by the state and not a complete public agency that replaces all other local governmental institutions. Other prestigious projects such as the Marina and the Royal Avenue in Casablanca are co-ordinated by CDG subsidiaries but still remain accountable to the competent urban local government institutions. Similar configurations of sovereignty can also be found in other Arab cities, such as the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, Mawared in Amman and Solidere in Beirut (see Parker, 2009; Krijnen and Fawaz, 2010). If the Bouregreg project proves its success, it is not unlikely that its institutional design could become a model for future development schemes, as I was told by several people within the agency. Despite its still unique configuration, the AAVB gives an indication of how state power in Morocco has been reshaped and respatialised at the urban scale and how real decision-making power has shifted from more traditional state institutions—that are under pressure for democratic reform—to new state spaces that are not at all subjected to popular control. The local specificity and contextual embeddedness of these new state arrangements increasingly confuse the image and understanding of the actual Arab state. Whether in Morocco or elsewhere, the state reflects more and more a dispersed and divergent ensemble of institutional practices and modalities of government, not at all matching the commonly perceived and generally accepted idea of the state as a coherent unity (Hansen and Stepputtat, 2001).

A common explanation for these reforms is that Morocco must compete with other countries in the region to attract foreign investments and adapt to a global competitive climate. Since 9/11, investments from the Arab Gulf have found their way more easily to the Maghreb countries and Morocco attracts almost 80 per cent of their foreign direct investments (Vermeren, 2009, p. 264). Yet in order to secure this flow, the AAVB is a salient example of a structure that—to quote a Moroccan geographer—“concentrates only on the attraction of capital ... its central power adapting itself to the economic context” (interview, Rabat, 19 October 2009). Speed, efficiency, the incompetence of locally elected governments and economic necessity are some of the main reasons for the legitimation of by-passing more democratic procedures and reforms. As an official of the AAVB argued

the people that govern [the zone of the project] are not elected and that is why we can work in the long run without indulgences to any political colour (interview, Rabat, 18 May 2010).

The former mayor of Rabat, Omar El Bahraoui, emphasised this necessity and legitimised the establishment of the AAVB in a documentary on the Bouregreg project

We consider that it is the only way to proceed more quickly, to proceed very fast ... and to transcend all the difficulties and the administrative procedures that are very slow. ... We have seen several projects that are completed, whether in Paris, London, Rome, Dubai ... Well, they all have created an institution that enables the concentration of all competences in order to be able to authorise very quickly.⁶

As a result, displaced forms of state power like the Bouregreg example are legally and practically disconnected from the discursive realm of politics and resituated within a more politically neutral discursive of economic growth and technocratic management. Of course, the production of the Bouregreg space is far from apolitical or a-ideological. However, it has become a politically privileged and almost exclusive space for state technocrats and private investors.

The Geography of Uneven Development within the City

While having an obvious economic purpose, a project like Bouregreg is not just some other vehicle for capital accumulation. These infrastructural endeavours lay down certain patterns and structures within the cityscape that will determine the mobility and movement of people, goods and capital for the coming decades. Once finished, the estuary will be transformed into a space of high-income consumption and tourism. It will attract a specific kind of people, forge new connections and social relations. The tramway, for example, will cut through Rabat and Salé and drastically change the motion and flow within and between the twin cities. The numerous petits taxis (city taxis) will have to compete with this new means of transport or turn to alternative routes. The Bouregreg project will also contribute to the projection of a specific image of the Moroccan capital. As Darel Paul (2004, p. 575) observed, such projects “narrate and advance a particular definition and interpretation of the city”. The political power behind such a project imposes its vision of “cosmopolitanism, global connectivity and wealth embodied in transnational capital” upon urban space and tries to cultivate it in the minds and actions of its residents (Paul, 2004, p. 575). Hence, the built environment around the Bouregreg Valley with its specific architecture can be considered a ‘statement’ of a certain discursive formation and its underlying power relations (Hirst, 2005, pp. 156–158). In this regard, the slogan ‘redefining skylines, redesigning lifestyles’ of Sama Dubai, one of the (ex-)partners in the Amwaj project, should be taken almost literally.⁷ The valley is to represent a ‘new style of living’ according to one of the billboard slogans promoting the Amwaj project.

It is still too early to evaluate the overall social impact of the Bouregreg project. However, some tentative conclusions can be drawn. Sala alMoustaqbal (the future of Salé), an association that tries to provoke a critical debate on the project, gathered a round table on the Bouregreg project in 2005 and formulated some major concerns. First of all, the project turns its back on the historical medina of Salé and creates a barrier between the city centre and the riverside. The first stage, Bab el Bahr, is built right next to the medina, but the height of the planned buildings actually hide the medina from the view of people looking from the quay of Rabat. This is already clearly visible today when one visits the construction site. Secondly, the medina of Salé is an impoverished area that lacks access to collective services. When one walks through this medina, one quickly notices that it bears little resemblance to some of the more romantic alleys of the medina of Rabat or the well-known medina of Marrakech with their specialised shops in Moroccan arts and artisanal products. In fact, many of the historical medinas in Morocco, also in Rabat, degraded socially over the years. They have become transit zones for rural migrants and are therefore inhabited by many poor tenants (Balbo and Navez-Bouchanine, 1995). Hence, the social constitution of the urban area immediately surrounding the Bouregreg project will contrast strongly with the lifestyle and prestige promoted by the private developers. In the case of the medina of Salé, it will be literally enclosed by luxury and its corridors, with Bab el Bahr on one side and the bridge and the tramway on the other. Just as the French had built their new modern cities around the Arab medina during the Moroccan Protectorate (1912–56), imposing a design of spatial and social segregation, the current project imposes an almost-similar segregation (see Abu Lughod, 1980). As a result, the project “turns its back on the historical patrimony of Salé” and is most likely to turn out to be the creation of “heaven next to hell” as I was told by an architect and initiator behind Sala alMoustaqbal (interview, Rabat, 27 April 2009). Finally, the creation of a ‘city of arts’ in Bab el Bahr, where artisanal products will be promoted and sold, will cause competition with many small businesses in the medinas of Rabat and Salé who depend on this economic sector. In general, the infrastructural project of the Bouregreg project will set out and defend the demarcations between those who can afford to invest, live and consume in these newly created consumption spaces and those who fall by the wayside. The project will be responsible for the creation of new spatial boundaries including a privileged few and excluding the grand majority of people living in the surrounding areas. According to Jamila Bargach

the logic of the marina, the practice of equipment-oriented nautical sports, the very high-standard housing units as well as luxurious offices will mark the Bouregreg Valley as a space belonging to the wealthy, shaped by international and transnational movement of capital (Bargach, 2008, p. 114).

The result is most likely to be—and this is becoming clearly visible today—a spatial segregation between an enclave that is tailored to the benefit of international investors and rich tourists, and the average Moroccan citizen who will be largely absent from this area or, at best, be invisible in the role of one of the serving jobs such as waiters, receptionists, cleaners (Zemni and Bogaert, 2009).

Urban development strategies such as the Bouregreg project lead to the juxtaposition of privileged zones of inclusion where capital can design luxury and grandeur into its space, and the outside spaces where urban poverty and exclusion constitute the other side of this spatial division of consumption. When talking to local inhabitants about the project, many suspicions bubble up. I once asked a car-park attendant on the construction site of Bab el Bahr what the advantage of the project was for the people of Salé. He said

We don’t earn money with the bourgeois; they want to stay in their hotels with hotelkeepers with diplomas. But we don’t have diplomas. They are not going to come to our hotels.

A young man who used to live in the Oudaya looking over the valley, told me that Bouregreg was “a project of false promises ... it’s a project merely for the rich while the ordinary Moroccan will be victim of this project”. On the other side of the social ladder, the director of the Bouregreg Marina complained that the two cities still did not have enough hotels to host all future tourists: “We only have the Hilton in Rabat and Salé has no hotels” (interview, Rabat, 20 May 2010). When I asked him about some other hotels that came to my mind, he answered “Oh yeah ... we have also the Tour Hassan and the Golden Tulip is getting there”. These hotels are very luxurious and this gives some indication of the kind of tourist they want to attract. While it is still too early to draw any conclusions, it is not unlikely that a process of gentrification will unfold in the neighbourhood of the project and alongside the new tramway cutting through the two cities. If a gentrification process takes place, it will push poor populations further towards the outskirts of the cities and away from the centre on which they often depend for their livelihood. The expected influx of wealthy tourists and high-class consumers will probably push up the prices of consumption goods and real estate (see for example, Hackworth, 2007).

There are thus obvious limits to this kind of enclavisation of international investments. As a public agency, the AAVB is funded by public money but operates in reality as a private company. The AAVB is permitted by law 16-04 to participate in private enterprises within its designated area when it is in conformity with the mission statement of the project. Thus, Bab al Bahr, the first stage of the Bouregreg project, is developed by the Bab al Bahr Development Company, a joint venture between the AAVB and the Abu-Dhabi-based property development company Al Maabar. The second stage of the project, the development of the Amwaj residential isle, was a joint venture between a branch of the sovereign wealth fund Dubai Holding, Sama Dubai (50 per cent), CDG (20 per cent), the Moroccan public pension fund (10 per cent) and the AAVB (20 per cent). However, recently, Sama Dubai withdrew from the project due to the financial meltdown of 2008. As a result, the AAVB has expropriated Sama Dubai in June 2010 and is now looking for new private partners. In 2007, the AAVB created its own subsidiary to exploit the marina and in 2009 the AAVB created a another branch, the Société du Tramway de Rabat-Salé (STRS), to co-ordinate and commercialise the tramway project. Consequently, government in these urban spaces becomes accountable to investors over and above the citizens whose lives are influenced by their operations (Parker, 2009, p. 115). This is a salient feature of the neo-liberal urban logic. New urban structures are shaped more by the logic of the market than by the needs of its residents (Bayat and Biekart, 2009, p. 817). Ironically, as Bayat and Biekart (p. 818) point out, “many of the agents of change (such as global capital) are not even residents of these cities”. Many foreign investors and corporations, from France, Italy and especially from the Arab Gulf, are contributing to the spectacular change in the urban landscape between Rabat and Salé and benevolently join in the privatisation of public space. As a result, the design of this new urban landscape is primarily determined by private capital and worked out by prestigious architectural firms like, for example, the UK-based Foster and Partners (consultants for Bab el Bahr). Their private interests do not always correspond with the public interest. The message of the managing director of Al Maabar on the company’s website is very clear in this regard: “our focus is to create landmark properties which provide a maximum return on investment to our stakeholders”.⁸ What is left for the ordinary citizens is the promise of a better world, intimately related to the self-regulating utopia projected by neo-liberal theory. On the promotional websites of Bab el Bahr and the Bouregreg project, one can see Rabat pictured as a future fairy tale, a real fantasy world. Within this neo-liberal dream world, the poor are believed to be dependent on these projects as leverages of economic growth (the notorious trickle-down effect).

Conclusion

Parker concludes that

contemporary theories of transition can accommodate the idea of multiple pathways to the global, but have more trouble with the possibility that the global might refer to a variety of heterogeneous and even contradictory destinations (Parker, 2009, p. 119).

Likewise, he states that

accounts concerned with the non-occurrence of regime transitions in Arab political life typically follow the map of globalist assumptions, but ignore scope and significance of boundaries and connections being etched into the terrain itself (Parker, 2009, p.119).

In this article, I have tried to shed light on the new boundaries and connections that are drawn today in Moroccan cities, more specifically Rabat and Salé, and the particular political narrative behind its urban metamorphosis. The current political transformations in Morocco are intimately related to the power configurations and social contradictions that are embedded within the contemporary neo-liberal capitalist logic. As a result, Moroccan cities are turned into spaces of extremes and the ruling élites are making this choice consciously.

The AAVB is an example of how political power has been resituated in order to pursue strategic development choices. As an institution and a new state space, it replaces traditional state institutions—that are still the dominant focus of studies on Arab democratisation—and it greatly impacts on the daily lives of urban residents. In the case of the Bouregreg project, all public competences are gathered and enforced by law into one technocratic entity that operates outside the scope of traditional government institutions. The AAVB is at the same time urban planner, developer and private investor. “It is the flexibility of the private sector conjoined with public prerogatives” (interview, Director of Bouregreg Marina, Rabat, 20 May 2010). Obviously, such schemes of state power transfers are not unique to the Moroccan case. To capture global flows of capital within a globalised production chain, national states are increasingly transferring responsibility and regulatory capacities to new urban and regional governmental arrangements for tasks such as economic development, services and infrastructural restructuring (Martin et al., 2003, p. 115). However, the exceptional amount of legal autonomy still makes the Bouregreg case rather an exception than the rule.

Neo-liberal urban development schemes such as the Bouregreg project strongly enhance the urban geography of uneven development that has been a feature of so many developing countries for decades (M. Davis, 2006a). Actually existing forms of neo-liberal agency privilege the desires of private capital at the expense of some of the pressing social needs in the country such as the severe shortage of social housing (in spite of the in 2003 adopted ‘cities without slums’ programme), the crisis in education and the poor quality of public health care. In addition, research on earlier so-called mega projects has shown that in most cases the added value is heavily overrated (Flyvbjerg, 2005). It thus remains to be seen whether the Bouregreg project will even fulfill its promises to its investors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank especially Christopher Parker and Sami Zemni for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article; also Montserrat Emperador for her support during the fieldwork and Pascal Debruyne for our co-operation on similar issues and themes. The author wishes also to thank Béatrice Platet for the map of the Bouregreg project and, finally, thank the anonymous referees for their useful comments. This research was made possible thanks to a scholarship funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Of course, the author remains solely responsible for the arguments presented here and any remaining errors of fact or reasoning.

Notes

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