The world-class city comes by tramway: Reframing Casablanca’s urban peripheries through public transport

Abstract

Although framed as projects targeting the improvement of public transport, the reduction of traffic congestion and the integration of urban peripheries, tramways are often inscribed to political ambitions of modernisation and urban renewal. As such, Morocco’s tramway projects constitute a distinct feature of national urban worlding ambitions promoting ‘world-class’ cities. Likewise, Casablanca’s tramway is closely entangled with political discourses on the urban integration of politically marginalised working-class neighbourhoods. However, this article sees the tramway as a symbol and driving force of a new distinction of the urban peripheries of Casablanca – separating it into ‘old’ and ‘new’, desired and undesired population groups. On the one hand, the tramway has fostered the incorporation of the traditional working-class neighbourhoods – the old peripheries – into Casablanca’s urban ‘world-class’ project. On the other hand, the tramway is the flagship of urban renaissance policies that have pushed stigmatised street vendors and shantytown dwellers from the working-class neighbourhoods to isolated new towns – the emerging ‘new’ peripheries. Here they are kept – spatially and discursively – outside the ‘world-class’ city, largely dependent on inadequate, costly and insecure urban public transport. These dynamics not only conflict with the tramway’s objectives to decrease traffic congestion and to promote socio-spatial integration, they also show the power of urban worlding projects to reframe urban marginality and to define who does (and who does not) have access to the ‘world-class’ city.

FROM VISIBLE INFORMALITY TO SPLINTERED INFORMALITIES: Reflections on the Production of ‘Formality’ in a Moroccan Housing Programme

“…However, as many residents did not possess this document because of conflicts with their tiers associé , they held a sit‐in in front of the Lahraouiyine town hall, and in response the municipality dropped this requirement to appease the residents. Similar protests and associated initiatives have led to improved, albeit informal transport arrangements (Beier, 2020b). Elected local authorities have also altered regulations as a form of co‐optation prior to elections.…”

“…The article builds on different periods of field research in Casablanca, the economic centre of Morocco, between March 2015 and July 2019. This also builds the foundation for related research (Beier, 2019;2020a;2020b). Research methods included 870 questionnaire-based interviews with resettled inhabitants and bidonville dwellers.…”

Critical geographies of transport and mobility: Studying power relations through practice, academia, and activism

“…These smaller, old‐fashioned systems operate with a touch of nostalgia while simultaneously driving gentrification through opening up disinvested neighborhoods for a new round of accumulation (Brand et al., 2020). In the Global South, investment in new, large‐scale metro or light rail projects signal a city's or country's openness and modernity, even if the rail network only serves a fraction of the population or even displaces transit‐reliant populations in the process of being built (Beier, 2020; Chava et al., 2019; Terrefe, 2020; Turner, 2020). In either case, the imaginaries that elected officials put into play are powerful and forward‐looking, making it difficult to argue against them without being seen as backwards.…”

The Making(s) of an Alternative Urban Policy: What Happens When Free Fares Come to Town?

“…This trend is particularly evident in the field of urban transport and mobility. Across diverse urban contexts, investment in “sustainable” PT infrastructure such as tramway lines, bus rapid transit systems, and cable cars has formed part of place attractiveness strategies and portfolios of standardised policy “fixes” and “models”, which focus on territorial “rebranding”, central to competition‐driven entrepreneurial urbanism (Álvarez Rivadulla and Bocarejo 2014; Beier 2020; Wood 2015). A handful of cities have become celebrated as “best practices” of limiting the presence of cars in urban cores (e.g.…”