Marrakech Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

All the stories about the slums immerse us in muddy, damp streets, where architecture is essential, the houses are built with waste materials. Food is scarce, but diseases are numerous. The slums are synonymous with extreme poverty, a reflection of these peasants, worn out by their fruitless lands, who have come to break their last strength against the impenetrable gates of the city.

For several years, however, these assumptions have tended to disappear. Faced with the human and social emergency that may have reigned in marginal urban areas, solutions had to be found.
For urban planners and architects, slums have become urban opportunities, laboratories for the city of tomorrow. In these chaotic areas of high urban density, we experiment, we look for urban models, with the only constraint, simplicity.
In these urban margins we have nothing more to lose, so we can build everything.
If our urban planners and architects seek and explore innovative solutions to respond to these extremely precarious situations, “are we now ready to see our slums as an opportunity and an opportunity for an urban laboratory at home?”

If the image of slums is associated with negative feelings, this relationship now tends to evolve. We talk more and more about these urban fringes as urban laboratories. Faced with the urgency of certain situations, solutions have been found, inventing new forms of urban organisation. While many observers in the city have already explored the issue, a new study reminds us of the potential wealth of these slums.
The planetary dynamic of urbanization passes through the expansion of shanty-towns in developing countries. Today, 930,000 people, or one eighth of humanity, live in these marginal spaces. Tomorrow, in 2030, they will represent 2 billion people. While some see these spaces as a threat, others see them as a potential, even a wealth from which we should be inspired.

For various reasons, the urban model developed in the heart of the slums would be an example of a sustainable city. Indeed, the inhabitants move on foot, due to the lack of infrastructure large enough to accommodate the motor vehicles’ passage. Children play in the streets. In these overcrowded spaces, the challenges of urban density have long been in the process of being resolved. Like small houses, buildings are optimised and living spaces are adaptable and multifunctional. Public spaces are genuinely public and for everyone. In the slums of Marrakech people get married on the street, with their neighbours. For lack of public services, they clean in front of their houses. The intensity of this city is linked to the porosity between public and private spaces. When something breaks, they repair it (there is a strong logic of recycling). Mutual aid systems are developed. Local economies are being created, so that today these slums generate money. Therefore these spaces are therefore increasingly perceived as a sustainable city, at the same time pedestrian, ecological, participatory and recyclable.

We understand that specific social or ethical rules prevent us from allowing these camps to settle culturally and legally, and choosing not to accept that this precariousness is a city model. A praiseworthy and understandable approach. In general, the slum has always been equated with the instability of developing countries. However, the influx of migrant populations causes a displacement of these forms of settlement. While these forms have long been transit structures, today they tend to become perennial forms of organisation. So we choose to destroy, for various reasons, which poses a problem of ownership.

We understand that certain social or ethical rules prevent us culturally and legally from allowing these camps to settle. However, if you think about it, the slum model, if it gives us the keys to the development of sustainable cities, seems like a model we know in another form. Like the ephemeral city, the slum could become an opportunity. An opportunity to redefine together the codes of the city of tomorrow. An opportunity, in the crisis, to create together and humanly a revolution. An opportunity to highlight urban and social potential for collective innovation and better living, in the creation of an urban planning of simplicity. In the same way as ephemeral urbanism, this new form of urbanism could become a laboratory of the city from below, of the city made by and for the inhabitants.