Rabat retrospective: Colonial heritage in a Moroccan urban laboratory

Abstract

Louis H-G Lyautey’s legacy as colonial regent of Morocco and as an innovator in French urban planning resonates through his transformation of Rabat according to entirely new spatial logics of modernity. While his plans produced conditions for structural difficulty in indigenous housing, they also enabled the preservation of historic monuments as spaces for tourist consumption – that are now, post-Independence, considered part of Moroccan national history. The grand colonial vision of Lyautey is in many ways perpetuated in contemporary developments of the region, in particular through the current Bouregreg Valley project that will dramatically redesign the landscape of the capital in the next few years. While the project involves massive neoliberal flows of global capital, its goals reflect much of Lyautey’s lasting influence on mapping heritage and Moroccan modernity, and the path of the European tourist through the Moroccan landscape.

Keywords

French colonialism heritage Lyautey modernity tourism UNESCO

Introduction

Rabat falls behind other Moroccan cities in notoriety: Tangier is ‘dangerous’, Fes ‘mysterious’, Marrakech a ‘cosmopolitan hotspot’ (Sherwood, 2007; Williams, 2010). Yet Rabat embodies a century of entanglement between pre- and post-colonial Morocco and the modernisation efforts of the French Protectorate. While pre-colonial Rabat was a minor presence in Morocco – a lesser imperial city to the active capitals Fes and Marrakech, and half of a twin with its infamous neighbour Salé across the Bouregreg river (Chastel, 1994) – colonial Rabat became the sole capital city and a parasitic twin, enduring explosive growth under meticulous, and possibly controversial, French city planning.

Louis Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, the first and longest incumbent French Protectorate Résident-Général, pushed a singular vision for redesigning Moroccan landscapes that has left a lasting legacy on pathways for development in many Moroccan cities. Having learnt hard lessons from French colonial failures elsewhere, Lyautey conjured resources from the moment of his arrival in 1912 to build and enforce a ‘dual city’ within Rabat, one side focusing on the preservation of Moroccan ‘heritage’, with the other focusing on the acceleration of (French) modernity. The paths Lyautey and his cohort of planners chose for development have had lasting impacts on Rabat since the very first moments of the Protectorate. The combination of a purpose-built tourism industry based on the consumption of living heritage, along with the boom of a new capital city fuelled by steady bureaucratic wages (but divided by ‘race’), created the unpredicted consequence of a housing crisis for the Rabat-Salé region that has persisted in waves to the present. The landscape of the region was thus forever changed, not only by shifts in population and land use, but also by the strategies of the colonial planners about what to protect and valorise – meaning that Lyautey’s definition of le patrimoine marocain, or Moroccan heritage, remains in many ways ‘preserved’ today.

The choices of Lyautey, as we will demonstrate here, echo in contemporary discourses (and decisions) on heritage conservation and development in Rabat. We review historical material about Lyautey’s project in light of two new events in Rabat’s history, both implicating how broader influences of money and power from elsewhere are playing a role in the city’s key spatial developments. First, the new Bouregreg Valley development project (http://www.bouregreg.com, Aménagement de la Vallée Bouregreg, hereafter AVB), is on a par with the scale of Lyautey’s remaking of the region, but embedded in new sources of investment and power drawn into spaces for dwelling and living (cf. Bargach, 2008; Bogaert, 2012). Second, new iterations of Lyautey’s principles of patrimoine – in the form of UNESCO – are valorising the landscapes Lyautey himself created as part of the global heritage of modernism (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012). While the first event promises an economic revitalisation of the entire Rabat and Salé region, with new luxury housing paired with spaces for aspirational lifestyle consumption (see AVB, 2012), it also continues to structure certain zones as heritage – literally ‘mémoire de lieu’, or place memory – including the monuments and archaeological sites originally designated for protection by Lyautey himself. The second event effectively transforms Lyautey’s project of modernity itself into heritage, making the whole city centre and its history – from ancient to the early 20th century modern – a protected area, to be overseen by an internationally governed, generally Western-centric body. By reflecting on this former colonial capital at a moment when a new, massive spate of development promises another intense decade of reshaping of its physical and ideological landscape, we examine here the layering of spatialising theories of modernity in the ongoing evolution of an urban laboratory.

In this reflection on Rabat, we deliberately underplay the role of other urban planning projects between these two periods, which have been amply explored elsewhere (Abu-Lughod, 1980; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003; Wright, 1991). While these intervening expansions, particularly in housing, have no doubt contributed to the shape and structure of Rabat-Salé today, our focus remains on 1912 and 2012 because they are moments of extraordinary massive financial investments in redesigning the city’s built history. Other housing developments and major planning projects were indeed undertaken in the intervening period – Bargach (2008), for example, describes the successes and failures – but these two dates are moments of significant redesign of the city’s public buildings, intended as patrimoine for future generations. The continuities between colonial grand spatialities and their then-future plans for the city-region, and contemporary international ‘partners’ and their aims at creating a new futurist city – where colonial modernity is part of its heritage – are striking to us as similar strategies by which global forces are manifest in master planning in Rabat. Putatively new rhetorics are repeating old strategies by instructing (foreign) gazes over certain parts of the ‘heritage city’ in contrast with other pieces of its cutting edge progress.

Our contention is purposefully framed through the consuming gaze of a European visitor as a subject who Lyautey explicitly courted, and who is still implicitly courted in today’s formations. To elucidate this claim, we first trace Lyautey’s legacy through his philosophy and approach to creating the dual city of Rabat; namely, by combining the colonial principles of association and his respect for le patrimoine marocain. We then reflect on how Lyautey’s influence reverberates in documentation produced by the Bouregreg Valley project and in the UNESCO decision to preserve Rabat as a ‘modern capital and historic city’ (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012). Though these projects are beyond a scope Lyautey could have imagined, they both reflect, in some ways, the legacy he left inscribed in this city, for him an urban laboratory to experiment with a new social modernity (Rabinow, 1989). Finally, we seek to synthesise these historical episodes by exploring how theories of heritage expand and contract to these discourses of history, preservation and progress, looking forward to what kind of Morocco might emerge from this new layer of historicisation.

Lyautey’s Rabat: Urban laboratory of association

But how much more interesting the municipal life reveals itself to be when one does not have to content oneself (like in civilised countries) with conserving an organism perfected over countless generations, but to create, so to speak, from all the pieces, to innovate in all domains, to preside over the birth of the city itself! That has been the lot of those who took on, in these last twelve years, the heavy charge of creating this Morocco, finally opened to our civilising influence, of great cities that the foreigner admires so much today. (de la Casinière, 1924: ix–x; authors’ translation).

Henri de la Casinière, one of Lyautey’s personally selected municipal planners, here exemplifies the potency and excitement of the project Lyautey created on Moroccan soil through the idea of presiding over the birth of a city, though the site had been inhabited for several hundred years already. This rebirth was in many ways rooted in Lyautey’s personal experiences as a colonising soldier, a politician and an aesthete, writ large through his disciples onto Moroccan urban landscapes. This spatial design paved the way for a (foreign) gaze upon Rabat as both a modern capital and a living museum – effectively, a laboratory for modernity – through the colonial principle of association paired with the increased value of native patrimoine, visible in preservation or in flattering imitation.

Having trained under legendary General Joseph Gallieni (see Rivet, 1980, 1988), Lyautey led several key strategic campaigns towards French dominance in North Africa, and was named as the Protectorate’s first Résident-Général when Morocco became one of the last French overseas possessions in 1912. As believer in the potential (re)generative power of spatial planning in colonisation, evidenced in his many writings and biographies (see Barthou, 1931; Beauregard, 1924; Benoist-Méchin, 2007; Britsch, 1921; Hardy, 1949; Marrast, 1960; Mercier, 1994; Venier, 1997; Willette, 1932) he immediately enlisted planners coming out of the Parisian Musée Social urban design movement, along with architects who had been inspired by ‘Oriental’ classics as much as ‘Occidental’ ones. His instructions to them were consistent and singular: to preserve a historical and cultural Morocco-for-Moroccans alongside the founding of a modern Morocco for the French.

This strategy reflected Gallieni’s colonial principle of association – a reversal of elsewhere unsuccessful assimilation (Lyautey, 1995) – dictating that ‘those in command had to acknowledge the diversity of peoples over whom they wielded power’ (Wright, 1991: 76) by separately accommodating to the spatial and cultural definitions of individual ‘races’. In hindsight, association often translated into a problematic forced stagnation by transforming colonised sites into living heritage, disallowing innovation for the indigènes while promoting technologies of modernity for the colons. At the time, however, Lyautey’s experiment pushed forward at full throttle with the certainty of nearly a century of lessons from the French empire. He managed to enact his spatial planning policies of association in Rabat within a few short years, so that by the time European visitors arrived after the First World War, their dominant impressions were of the contrasts between the medina and ville nouvelle (Montfort, 1917; Tharaud and Tharaud, 1918). His aims in building this contrast were distinctly modern: the European was now able to gaze on ‘traditions’ – the still intact medinas of Morocco – while comfortably inhabiting the technological modernity of the ville nouvelle, designed and built with the intention of attracting European settlers who required Western sanitation and infrastructure (Bahi and Alami, 1992).

The process of creating separate zones for European and Moroccan residents was the basis for Janet Abu-Lughod’s later analysis of an enforced and pervasive ‘urban apartheid’ in her influential Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (1980). While the maintenance of racial divisions in the built environment was explicitly intended – through the logics of association – to protect diversity, its effect was much more dramatic. As the administration developed land surrounding the walled city for European housing – much of which was, to them, ideologically ‘empty’, but had in fact been used by citizens collectively (Abu-Lughod, 1980) – space available for Moroccan internal migrants was diminished, as ever-increasing numbers of both groups arrived as the city boomed economically with the newly installed bureaucracy. This predictable error created an initial housing crisis in the region, beginning with the overpopulation of the Rabat medina, expanding into slums around it, and then spilling into Salé – a process which has not yet ceased (Abu-Lughod, 1980; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003). As much as it might be interpreted today as a purposeful economic and social ‘apartheid’, though not nearly as violent or stringent as the term implies, the division of population along spatial lines reflected the ideological spatial arrangements of association, dividing Rabat into ‘rational’, ‘modern’ France and ‘traditional’ Morocco.

Patrimoine, real and imagined

By isolating ‘Moroccanness’ from its protagonists through association, Lyautey nourished a specific, colonial re-framing of Morocco as a set of real and imagined places in the two sides of this dual city, where the built environment became ‘patrimoine’ as imagined through the European gaze (Naciri, 1984). Like many other colonial powers of the time, he and his architects actively ‘reduced’ Morocco in cognitive terms and simultaneously textualised it, thus enframing it within a number of new cartographies, new representations, new measures of space and culture (Bancel et al., 1997; Blanchard and Chatelier, 1993; Blanchard et al., 2005; Vaillat, 1931; Vatin, 1984). This redefinition of the city included heritage as both a project of preservation and a project of imitation.

On one side, the walled medina itself – effectively the entire city of Rabat as it existed before the Protectorate (and by extension the people living in it) – became a heritage site. To regulate this patrimoine, in 1922 Lyautey changed the dominion of the Bureau of Fine Arts, Antiquities and Historical Monuments to include building codes in the ‘old’ cities because, according to one anecdote, the anachronistic technology of a telegraph wire crossing a door to the Rabat medina had escaped the attention of the city planners, causing disruption to the picturesque view on the gateway’s ‘traditional’ architecture (Wright, 1991: 133). In the name of patrimoine, objects such as that wire, and any other potential shifts towards modern technology, were barred from entering the medina, creating tangible and lasting effects of association by reinforcing and regenerating the ‘traditions’ of Moroccan architecture as fixed in time and appropriate to the ‘race’ living under those roofs.

On the other side, Lyautey instructed the architects commissioned for the new Protectorate buildings, from government offices to housing projects, to design them in a manner that accommodated modern infrastructure but was recognisably ‘Arab’ (de la Casinière, 1924; Laprade, 1934; Prost, 1932) – a mode labelled by Béguin (1983) as arabisance. This focus on aesthetics fostered replication and innovation of traditional North African architecture in an entirely colonial interpretation. New monuments were built in this style, including the Bank of Morocco, the central train station and the Post-Telephone-Telegraph office (see Minca and Wagner, 2014: Chapter 3), all located on the boulevard between the station and the main gate to the medina (today, Avenue Mohammed V). For the arriving visitor, they attested to French dominance of modernity and technology in the landscape of the dual city.

In combination, these two strategies helped create a sort of architectural unity in the colonial capital, though marked by a geographical cordon sanitaire around the medina dividing the dual city architecturally, spatially and socially between Moroccan tradition and French arabisance. Yet, by radically separating the Moroccan city from the French one, the former was not simply excluded from modernity, but rather preserved for viewing in contrast. As Mitchell elaborates (Mitchell, 1991: 163), Lyautey was profoundly conscious of the spatial order he was creating through this planned exhibition: the new city exhibited the power and the collective ingenuity of modern France as an updated imitation of the ‘rediscovered’patrimoine, including the ‘old’medina as well as other designated archaeological sites of ‘Moroccanness’ around the city. As those monuments had been isolated into the faded glory of Morocco, presented for consumption through the Orientalist gaze in contrast to their modern versions, all that was needed were European Orientalists to enact that gaze.

Promoting colonial visions of heritage

To publicise and encourage this discourse of preservation and colonial benevolent power, Lyautey personally hosted internationally known journalists and writers, giving them guided tours of his construction sites, accommodating them in his own home and providing them with transportation to tour the newly rescued patrimoine throughout the country (Maurois, 1931; Wharton, 2004 [1920]; Willette, 1930, 1932). In return, consciously or not, they promoted his vision and charismatic persona, often presenting him as a celebrity figure taking charge of a new, modern French experiment. Their adoration contributed to publicising the ‘Moroccan’ landscapes created by separating the modern villes nouvelles from the traditional, preserved medinas. American writer Edith Wharton provides one characteristic example of this newly formed Western understanding of Morocco:

Before Morocco passed under the rule of the great governor who now administers it, the European colonists made short work of the beauty and privacy of the old Arab towns in which they established themselves … the harm done to such seaboard towns as Tangier, Rabat and Casablanca is hard to estimate. The modern European colonist apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, cafés and cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his domination.

Under General Lyautey such views are no longer tolerated. Respect for native habits, native beliefs and native architecture is the first principle inculcated in the civil servants attached to his administration. Not only does he require that the native towns shall be kept intact, and no European building erected within them; a sense of beauty not often vouchsafed to Colonial governors causes him to place the administration buildings so far beyond the walls that the modern colony grouped around them remains entirely distinct from the old town, instead of growing out of it like an ugly excrescence. (Wharton, 2004 [1920]: KL 211–221)

Wharton’s impressions, like those of others who visited and wrote glowingly on the Resident-General’s valiant effort to ‘preserve’ Morocco, fed the curiosity and hunger of contemporary audiences to discover this stronghold of pre-modern ‘heritage’. Recognising the value of tourism in its ubiquitous rise in the early part of the century, Lyautey’s attention was directed towards encouraging this sector with efforts that went beyond his contemporary colonial governors.

Lyautey articulated the conscious effort to promote a tourist industry by maintaining the visual charm of Morocco’s cities and countryside. ‘Since the recent, intense development of large-scale tourism,’ he explained to a gathering in Paris, ‘the presentation of a country’s beauty has taken on an economic importance of the first order. To attract a large tourist population is to gain everything for both the public and the private budgets’. (Wright, 1991: 134)

With these specific economic goals to attract tourism, he established national syndicates for tourism, indigenous heritage and fine arts as an early part of his urban planning machine. While the Bureau of Fine Arts catalogued and publicised what would be counted as valuable Moroccan patrimoine, the Bureau of Tourism financed French artists to produce materials about Morocco, using their work to multiply the spread of exotic imagery and attract increasingly intrigued visitors (Blanchard and Lemaire, 2003). Lyautey directed the installation of a museum for indigenous heritage at the Casbah of the Oudayas, and selected historical buildings and sites, such as the Hassan Tower and the pre-Islamic ruin of the Chellah to restore for tourist visitation (Wright, 1991). His selections were then publicised for the new modern traveller: the 1925 Guide Bleu for Morocco, endorsed by Lyautey in the frontispiece, advises visitors that ‘one day is enough to visit Rabat’ (Ricard, 1921: 213), with an itinerary that meanders the medina, the Casbah des Oudayas, the local souks, the Hassan Tower and Chellah – all the sites Lyautey himself had chosen for restoration.

The laboratory of modernity that Lyautey created became a tight machine of its own reproduction. The principle of association ideologically distinguished between the needs of a European population and of a Moroccan population in such a way that the built environment of one was transformed into patrimoine for all, while the built environment for the other became a celebration of technological progress in a cohesive aesthetics. Monuments were chosen on one side for preservation as part of imperial historical interests (even if inhabited by living populations), and on the other side for construction of new monuments to a new era. Both sides were designed to be appreciated by contemporary European visitors, able to gaze upon and comprehend the two sides of the city in a way Moroccans somehow could not access. Thus, while Lyautey’s design for Rabat may have implicitly included Moroccans as residents – in zones constrained by planning laws – it was produced as a project of modernity: a matched set of historical and contemporary monuments that together displayed the progress of France for the paying (tourist) visitor.

New visions for Rabat-Salé: Between a colonial past and a global future

By valuing certain histories and sites as part of the French-determined patrimoine for Morocco, Lyautey made Rabat into a colonial exhibition of modernity and preservation. These conditions for spatial developments were partly driven by an imagined consumer of le patrimoine marocain: the European settler and tourist, who would appreciate both the historicity of preserved Morocco and the progress of French modern Morocco, as long as they were kept rigorously separate. In doing so, Lyautey also had a hand in shaping the colonial (and post-colonial) pathways for potential growth in both cities, as his determination of what was and was not patrimoine remains embedded in development discourses today revolving around tangible and intangible heritage of Morocco (Minca and Borghi, 2009). While much of the Moroccan landscape has changed since Independence in 1956, traces of Lyautey’s patterns are still visible in planning processes of choosing which spaces to develop, which spaces to leave aside, and how new development should recreate the ‘heritage’ of Rabat, and Morocco in general (Minca, 2006).

The newly implemented Bouregreg Valley project, which will expand the urban region by occupying parts of the floodplain of the Bouregreg river dividing Rabat and Salé, includes plans to develop massive housing subdivisions, significant luxury leisure zones and shopping complexes, as well as changes in transport infrastructure (AVB, 2012). This project is the first since Lyautey to initiate a coherent reworking of the region at such a grand scale, including six sequential steps stretching along the river, beyond the current edges of the urban agglomeration. Initiated in the upswing of the recent economic and housing boom, the project has funding from central government and private sources, notably investors from Persian Gulf countries (Bogaert, 2012). Since the global economic downturn in 2009, construction has slowed but not stopped, as elements of the project are recently completed – such as the tramway connecting Rabat and Salé, and the vehicle tunnel under the Casbah des Oudayas, both inaugurated in May 2011 – and others are underway.

Jamila Bargach (2008) and Koenraad Bogaert (2012) have recently presented this project as a daunting process of privileging capital over the will of the ordinary citizen. Yet, through our tracing of colonial processes in historical materials that contributed to development in Rabat and Salé, we read this ‘departure’ into neoliberal development as a continuation of the trajectory inaugurated by Lyautey: gearing this landscape towards the global luxury consumer and the tourist by creating a new iteration of the city-as-exhibition through dividing its ‘heritage’ from its future. In our critique we also contribute a new step: the recent naming of Rabat as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, encompassing both its ancient and modern histories into one package of exhibition, pushed to the side of the coming era.

Association circa 2012: Lifestyle consumption

Unlike many previous post-colonial efforts at development in this area, the Bouregreg project is not providing housing for those in crisis (Bargach, 2008; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003). Instead, it is oriented towards an imagined, non-specific luxury consumer. Orientation towards this elite consumer is both explicit in the design, and implicit in how the development restructures access to urban centres.

The prospectii for the various phases show plans for mixed-use spaces of living, working, shopping and cultural consumption (AVB, 2012). These follow the style and rhetoric of ‘aspiring cosmopolitanisms’ (Schwedler, 2010), providing spaces for elite consumption which serve to entice lower and middle class consumers into leisure practices of elite lifestyles and attract foreign capital to the city. Notably, the consumers implicated in these materials are not specifically or explicitly Moroccan. Given the investment of Middle Eastern capital as developers, and the strong international presence of the diplomatic community, they could be imagined as any modern global consumer able to afford this lifestyle in Rabat.

This profile still, however, does not describe the majority of current residents (Bargach, 2008). With the realisation of these new consumption spaces, the footprint of Rabat-Salé will be pulled far from its current central points, making transport distances longer for working class residents while abandoning the Rabat medina as the heart of the city and effectively extending its previous decoupling from the city infrastructure through highways (Balbo and Navez-Bouchanine, 1995). For Bargach, discourses around the project delineate intentions to transform ‘an “administrative” capital, quaint and boring to one of high modernism and dynamism’ (2008: 109). Bogaert, likewise, sees this project as a signal for a broader audience:

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. (Bogaert, 2012: 11–12)

Both indicate an interpretation of this project as creating new spaces in Rabat oriented towards a new international public, pushing the city forward as an exhibition of wealth with the potential to attract investors and tourists. The city itself is being redesigned as an exemplar at the forefront of technology, rendering its older parts more starkly dated in contrast, shifting the ‘modern’ into a new slot alongside the ‘traditional’ as zones no longer able to be developed for new modes of dwelling and being. Lyautey’s modernist buildings, once the beacon for what a city could be, now become the background for a new horizon, in favour of new futurist architecture (see AVB, 2011).

In one sense, this new Rabat follows what might be called a post-colonial logic of association in light of neoliberal philosophies: promoting luxury consumption as a means to spread wealth and create stability between diverse groups. Part of the accomplishment of this logic requires a spatial shift, pushing previous eras of development into the past and constructing a new futurist present through the prism of a rarefied consumer, whether s/he is from Morocco or – mirroring Lyautey’s design for the city – from elsewhere.

Redefining patrimoine: The present is now past

Much in the way that Lyautey’s designation of heritage sites as patrimoine were part of his strategies for creating a consumable Moroccan landscape, the current projects isolate certain spaces as mémoire de lieu to remain part of the consumable heritage of the new Rabat. Yet, their selections are by no means new: the AVB’s list of 18 heritage sites in the Bouregreg Valley highlights 12 excavated and studied ancient and Islamic monuments on the Rabat side – nearly all of which Lyautey had formally designated as Rabat’s patrimoine – along with six lesser known and still under-investigated sites on the Salé side (AVB, n.d.). This dispersion of ‘heritage’ to mostly previously designated locations reflects, to some extent, the financial priorities of Morocco since independence, which have not consistently funded preservation outside the existing, post-colonial structures provided by UNESCO (Roussillon, 2010). This punctual geography of ‘heritage’ sites, however, indicates how strongly Lyautey’s mark remains on the landscape, not only in choosing what to preserve but also in his choice to invest in their restoration a century ago. Other possible sites for historical preservation in this region, less relevant to his cultural cartographies, continue to deteriorate and be marginalised without a similarly powerful voice to speak for them (Bargach, 2008).

The directionality of international mainstream debates, however, is shifting from ancient heritage to new iterations. Through the Modern Heritage Programme – a 21st century project, funded primarily by the Netherlands, focused on the preservation modernity as a movement (‘Modern Heritage Programme’, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.a) – UNESCO named several new sites to the World Heritage list, including ‘Rabat, modern capital and historic city: A shared heritage’ (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012) as of 2012. The criteria for preservation cited in the public documents identify Rabat as an important site for the ‘interchange of human values’ in relation to urban planning and landscape design (criterion 2), and as an outstanding example of settlement reflecting a particular culture or cultures (criterion 5). Along these lines, the city is described much as Lyautey intended: demonstrating modern planning practices, such as rational coherence of public spaces and implementation of theories of sanitation, alongside the preservation of Arabo-Muslim architecture and styles (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012). Notably, in this description the ‘diffusion of European ideas in the early 20th century’ (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012: 96) is celebrated as specifically ‘incorporate[ing] the cultural values of the past in the modernist project’ (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012: 96). ‘The synthesis of decorative, architectural and landscape elements, and the interplay between present and past, offer an outstanding and refined urban ensemble’ (Advisory Body for UNESCO, 2012: 96).

The presentation of this site made by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture and the Wilaya (province) of Rabat to UNESCO is largely grounded in this discourse on Rabat as a site of ideal combination between tradition and modernity. The proposal to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre argues that all eras of Moroccan history, from ancient to colonial, are found in this compact urban space, and thus can be preserved together (Royaume du Maroc, 2011: 21). Furthermore, the proposal cites the developments underway in the Bouregreg Valley as moves towards maintaining Rabat as cultural capital of Morocco (with a new national library, national theatre and art museum), orienting the city towards the future while saving and preserving the past. Naming Rabat as World Heritage at this juncture is, according to the proposal, necessary to reinforce these efforts for preservation, and ‘guarantee the specificity and integrity of all the elements of this unique historic ensemble’ (Royaume du Maroc, 2011: 22, authors’ translation). In fact, the suggestions for implementation in the World Heritage Committee’s decision (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.b: ‘Decision-36COM 8B.18’) include monitoring projects of property preservation in contrast to construction, monitoring population density in the buffer zone, documenting the status and authenticity of buildings, monitoring and aiding the conservation of the urban habitat, and carrying out heritage impact studies for the new projects, ‘in order to guarantee the visual integrity of the property and its surrounding areas’ (‘Decision-36COM 8B.18’, part 4d).

In some ways, this UNESCO seal on the entire city, incorporating its ancient heritage as cultural preservation and its modern heritage as landmarks of cultural exchange, is the very definition of the post-colonial: it renders colonial spatialities as part of the past to be gazed upon by the Moroccan future. Yet, it also validates and perpetuates Lyautey’s vision of this urban laboratory as a (successful) experiment in planning, integrating traditional design into modern architecture and use of space. It glides past the problematic freezing of the medina and its population, past the colonial principle of association, towards a step Lyautey could not possibly have imagined. Modernity thus becomes part of the past worth valorising; what Lyautey built as a position to gaze upon the preserved medina becomes joined with that medina as a single entity of preservation. Alongside this now museumified ‘contact zone’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), Morocco can make space for new (neoliberal?) vantage points, new symbols of the state in its capital, that again look over the compacted and contained past in its surrounding landscape.

Future perspectives: Gazes on new heritage

The view-from-above maps of the Bouregreg Valley project (www.bouregreg.com/tiki-index.php?page=Situation) and the UNESCO designated heritage site and its buffer zone show a curious superposition. The first phase of the project seems to engulf the heritage site, though the proposed construction is only on its edges. In fact, development and preservation dovetail together, implicating each other in their spatial arrangements without competing for dominance. They become mutually sustaining spaces, the second becoming a visual landscape for the first, embodying the connection to layers of historical Morocco, while the first safeguards the second by allowing new expansion and evolution that would normally mean destruction.

One particular element of the Bouregreg project highlights this symbiosis. The Grand Theatre of Rabat designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (known for landmark buildings in several global cities, and receiving the Pritzker Prize) will be a new showpiece for the capital city in the second phase of development. The building has an emphatically futurist design, explicitly echoing the movement of the river next to which it is deliberately located (for images and details, see AVB, 2011). The text accompanying its photo presentation situates it in a landscape with the Casbah des Oudayas and the Hassan Tower: ‘emerging from this new site are stunning views of the river Bouregreg and the historical heritage of the medina of Rabat’ (AVB, 2011).

Much like Lyautey’s strategic positioning of modernity to-be-seen-by-the-European-consumer, this landmark is presented as new cultural capital for the Moroccan state, visible and consumable by a global audience. Physically located next to some of the oldest parts of the city, it becomes a powerful statement about the success of the post-colonial nation and its ability to engage a new foreign gaze as a means for development – that of the elite, global consumer of culture. Interestingly, it becomes both an object to be seen – a masterpiece by a master craftswoman – and a standpoint from which to see the heritage city. Separated from that city by inscribed UNESCO borders, the Grand Theatre helps enact that borderline in the same way Lyautey’s cordon sanitaire acted to preserve the medina: by giving the (foreign) tourist a place from which to observe the coherence of heritage that constitutes Moroccan history, a place that is geographically – architecturally, spatially and socially – divided from the ‘authentic’ life under the gaze. Now, however, the colonial period becomes part of that history, pushed into the past.

Discussion: Heritage of modernity – the next wave of post-colonial?

Postcolonial strivings for a new identity do not completely banish the colonial past but involve the selective retrieval and appropriation of indigenous and colonial cultures to produce appropriate forms to represent the postcolonial present. (Yeoh, 2001: 459)

Lyautey’s production of history as heritage may sound familiar in a contemporary landscape of monuments, landmarks and museums. His creation of Rabat as an exhibition space, however, was rather original when conceptualised and implemented by his urban planners. The contemporary literature on post-colonial heritage is vast and complex and we have no space here to discuss it in detail (on critical heritage studies see, among others, Anheier and Isar, 2011; Graham et al., 2000; Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Winter, 2010, 2012a). In general, the heritage global machinery promoted by international institutions (including UNESCO) and many post-colonial states has arguably become a tool for new forms of governance that border on neocolonial, determining which histories must be saved, by whom, and how (see Dicks, 2000; Mitchell, 2002; Shepherd, 2006; Winter, 2012b). As Yeoh describes above, new cartographies of heritage in many former colonies select and incorporate the past using existing built remnants (Timothy and Nyaupane, 2009; Yeoh, 2001), sometimes according to modalities that allow it to appear as unproblematic (Oakes, 2012), and whose exposed materialities are presented as the proof of inherent value to specific cultural objects in certain locations (Graham et al., 2000). Zoning as ‘heritage’ has unpredictable results – sometimes effectively protecting, other times drawing crowds that contribute to degradation (Di Giovine, 2009). Heritage as a prism through which to conceptualise and manage the city and its complicated spatialities often becomes a lever that acts to freeze certain spaces, allowing certain visitors/consumers in and keeping other user/dwellers out.

Rabat is no exception: her new heritage geographies are driven by parallel desires to contribute to a revised conception of post-colonial nationhood and an expanded globalised urban economy, exposed to and built through foreign capital and foreign visitors. What emerges in this analysis of the new-Rabat-in-the-making – very much in line with Lyautey’s legacy – is that the process of designating heritage is strongly marked by this post-colonial perspective, not only in the places revisited through the contemporary lenses of cultural patrimonialism, but in the architectures of heritage appreciation that mimic, in many ways, Lyautey’s design. In the newly planned cultural landscape of Rabat, the urban framed as ‘heritage’ is there to be consumed. Histories are rewritten to incorporate existing structures while ‘containing’ the colonial past and its legacy of political violence, and, at the same time, make that landscape economically part of what Lyautey would call le Maroc utile.

Similarly to Amman (Jacobs, 2010; Schwedler, 2010), modern and modernist architecture in post-colonial contexts may be translated into patrimony to be preserved. Consequently, the colonial modern through its built realisations is incorporated in a neoliberal spatial production for consumption, with parallel but distinctive dynamics of disenfranchisement. The borders are no longer ‘racial’, drawn with building codes, as with Prost and Lyautey, but rather with regimes of capital flow. This is particularly true for Rabat’s new developments: still state-sponsored, because the government is promoting this kind of development as ‘beneficial for all’ (Bogaert, 2012), yet now with the main focus on consumption as unifying – contrasting Lyautey’s focus on pacified governance through division.

However, despite the revised language employed in order to make the new urban scenarios compatible with post-colonial state mainstream rhetoric, these new developments tend to incorporate a remarkably similar heritage to what Lyautey and his experts mapped out a century ago. This operation is propelled by the production of new ‘heritage capital’, valuing the historical, archaeological and timeless ‘objects’ making the past of the city visible to the visitor and the Moroccans themselves – something clearly expressed in the AVB’s documents describing ‘what should be preserved’. This whole wave of change resembles a startlingly parallel contemporary attempt to divide and map the ‘modern’ (now ‘future’) with ‘tradition’ (now modernity), following Lyautey’s overall philosophy of intervention. UNESCO, in their definition of what should be valorised and protected, appears attuned with the rhetoric of future development accompanying the new grand plans, but also with how Lyautey himself had envisaged his dream of Morocco (Minca and Wagner, 2014), through le patrimoine of the capital city – a patrimony that now must be preserved and celebrated in new forms in order to make history part of the future development of the city.

Conclusion

The architectural legacy and the inertia of a built environment conceived as part of a grand theory for the production French social modernity have left a profound mark on the development of Rabat. The colonial capital, reinvented by Lyautey as an ambitious urban laboratory, was also the place where new ideas of heritage and of urban and cultural regeneration were experimented. The possibility of creating a new modern society, away from the metropole, through a specific understanding of spatial planning was central to this project. The principle of association, that is of two ‘races’ living side by side but spatially separate, was key to the ways in which the capital was reinvented as a space of (colonial) exhibition. Architects and planners were asked by Lyautey to operate as social engineers, as the founders of a newly imagined urban modernity. Heritage preservation was implemented from the very start of Lyautey’s regime, together with an experimental arabisance for new buildings, which soon became exemplary of the European gaze on Morocco and the Orient in general. In addition, tourism and the tourist were included in this new urban framing, together with the necessity to attract potential new, much needed, European settlers.

Lyautey’s impact is part of Rabat’s history that cannot, and perhaps should not, be effaced. Yet, like many other post-colonial states, crisscrossed with vying histories of powers and heritages, the Kingdom of Morocco seeks to capitalise on intangible assets as tourist products representing national unity, which may involve revising or overwriting colonial narratives. Endowed with a legacy of infrastructure for (primarily European) tourist consumption of its particular ‘Orient’, developments of this sector have been encouraged by the government with interventions aiming at consolidating a specific interpretation of the complicated links with European history and, at the same time, aiming at capitalising on this process by attracting foreign gazes and investments.

Likewise in Rabat, today’s planners, who select histories to maintain or silence whilst rethinking urban spatialities, are inherently connected to the colonial formation of the capital city. Yet, these new actions seem to be heavily reliant on the plans of predecessors, beginning with Lyautey, whose selective development of Rabat enabled many of its cultural ‘assets’ to exist in their present form. As recently consecrated by UNESCO, Rabat thus represents an example of how ‘the colonial’ – colonial architecture and colonial urban planning more specifically – are becoming ‘heritage’, that is, a new form of urban cultural capital to be valorised and somewhat reinvented in its spatial post-colonial realisations.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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