Conference Abstracts
3. Bargach, Jamila; Ecole Natonale d’Architecture-Rabat,
Morocco:
"Sale between the planned city and the memorial city"
Cities are, in part, a product of historical processes
as both historians and anthropologists inform us. Fernand Braudel,
Arnold Toynbee or André Leroi-Gourhan speak of the cities’
memory when locating the genesis of their birth whether on the long
or short term, the differences between the functionality of the
morphology of each and show the extent to which cities produce and
live by their proper memory. This latter is embodied in those who
reside in them and who then pass such heritage/knowledge from generation
to generation, it is a living entity that characterizes these spaces
as special. Some cities, like human beings, may be eccentric, exclusivist
while others more generous and open. It is out of such collective
memory that an “urban identity” is forged, that identity
politics and belonging to a site are embedded. It is out of the
contemporary landscape in post-colonial cities with its much known
problems ranging from inadequate housing, shantytowns to poverty
that emerged the philosophy of ‘new cities.’ In Morocco,
Sala-Jadida is similar to a Chandhigar in India or to a Brazilia
in Brazil. Sala-Jadida is a newly planned city, erected in an area
far from the now ‘old’ Salé, the site of centuries
of history. The paper I propose here will explore and locate the
elements that constitute (or are prone to constitute) a communal
identity in the true example that this planned post-colonial agglomeration
happens to be. Theoretically, the paper questions the existence,
role and function of communal memory in Sala-Jadida especially when
taking into consideration the fact that it is out of this element
that governance and identity politics are mustered. Post-colonial
planned cities as a solution to overpopulation and misery within
‘organic’ cities produce other processes of violence
and alienation that will also be discussed in this paper.
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