Concrete Futures: Matter, Method, and Violence in Morocco’s Urban Environment (1912-1952)

Concrete Futures: Matter, Method, and Violence in Morocco’s Urban Environment (1912-1952)

Since the early years of the French Protectorate (1912-1956), Morocco’s political and environmental history have been entwined with concrete. Colonial engineers cast concrete as the quintessentially “modern” material—a means of securing hygienic forms of life in cities plagued by housing shortages, epidemics, and popular unrest. Moroccan residents, artisans, and construction workers also repurposed new methods and materials in ways that troubled their smooth deployment within housing and infrastructure projects. Following concrete from its central role in stabilizing colonial labor relations to its disruptive potentialities in the hands of nationalist insurgents, this talk will consider the relationship between colonial engineering and anticolonial violence—a relationship that continues to structure the possibility and the meaning of decolonization in the country.

Daniel Williford is Assistant Professor of History at UW–Madison. He is a historian of technology with a focus on twentieth-century North Africa and the Middle East. His work examines the links between colonial modernization projects, the construction of racialized technical hierarchies, local forms of political contestation and labor, and the remaking of urban environments in the region.