IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Local culture is a complex construction, particularly in Morocco, where French architects and planners project their concepts of an ideal Moroccan experience onto the landscape. Hidden imperial and colonial histories are embedded almost everywhere on earth. In Casablanca these histories shape the entire visible city where the French constructed a series of large scale experiments too difficult politically or financially at home. Writing in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues literature connects culture and empire by justifying, legitimizing, and promoting the imperial project. Left out of the discussion is the physical environment that records imperial concepts and a corresponding uneven geography. The architectural history and contemporary urban space of Casablanca is precisely expressed in the sequence Said lays out through the overlapping territories, consolidation, resistance, and a compromised freedom that is shaping current development. Specific interventions within initial French occupation, expansion of an imaginative ideal, and finally large scale urban planning illustrate a panorama of scalar modernist projects that both question and define culture and space. Modernism is deployed first to reinforce an imperial ideology re-shaping culture. Second the modernist project creates conditions for resistance and uneven geography between the colonized and occupiers. Finally, imperialist attitudes re-emerge in the city with large scale infrastructure and commercial development in the rapidly developing city of capital. Through Said, the French imperial project in Casablanca is a dynamic process that continues today through foreign investment, expansion of infrastructure, and territorial speculation.