ABSTRACT
The modern Moroccan cities of Rabat and Casablanca were a showcase for a French urbanism built around the hygienic management of space and populations, and an architectural dream of clean lines, planned space and gleaming surfaces. The outbreak and subsequent imbrication of plague and other infectious diseases in the Villes Modernes of Rabat and Casablanca therefore posed a particularly acute challenge to colonial ideologies of race, hygiene and hierarchy in North Africa. This stubborn, syncopated, episodic presence of plague in the modern cities was a political and intellectual challenge to colonial authorities and called for permanent vigilance and scrutiny of the cities and for new theorisations of urban ecologies and the relationship between cities and their rural hinterland. The presence of plague in Rabat and Casablanca was both a colonial scandal – a secret that had to be suppressed – and an everyday planning heuristic which re-shaped knowledge about the spaces and dispositions of the Moroccan body in the city. In this paper I contextualise the response to plague outbreaks in Rabat and Casablanca between 1914 and 1945 within a modality of French planning – aménagement du territoire.
