ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some new information about Bousbir, a red-light district established in Casablanca, Morocco, by French colonial authorities in 1923. It focuses on the imaginative geographies embedded in the district by two different stakeholder groups: town planners and architects who imagined this enclosed city within a particular urban ideology, and those who visited Bousbir in hopes of realizing their oriental fantasies. The chapter outlines the ideological, historical and spatial contexts that underscore Bousbir's very existence. It focuses on Michel Foucault's theories of bio-power and apparatus, the material geography of Bousbir is analysed in order to understand the rationalities of this suburban sexscape. The chapter explains the imaginative geographies of Bousbir's urban landscape and architecture via an orientalist lens, and demonstrates the exoticization and eroticization imposed on the space. It concludes with an overall contemporary narrative of Bousbir today and reflections on relevant ethical issues tied to its history as a red-light district.
