ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The urban heritage in Northwest Morocco has to be understood not only in function of the geographic and environmental conditions but mainly in the application of the rules which organizes the social order. It is the key element for understanding the specific urban morphology of these cities, both in the Old city (medina) and in the new, western oriented, city. The policies and measures to recover the meaning and the material legacy of the traditional islamic city have to be based on three different levels of analytical enquiry: its origin, its evolutionary process and its transformation. For this purpose, it is important to get away from conventional western concepts -as the monument like approach-and to be close to the deep cultural structure of the islamic city as a whole. From this knowledge, both for the urban scale and for the territorial scale, it is possible to get the necessary references for an adequate recovery, development and reassessment of this urban heritage.
