Episode 229: Concrete Futures: Cementing Colonialism in Morocco and Decolonizing Construction Technologies

During the French Protectorate (1912-1956), migration, epidemics, scarcity, and urban unrest transformed cities like Casablanca into sites of experimentation with new forms of governance. Technologies that were new to the country such as reinforced concrete not only changed the way that Moroccan cities were built but also rearranged relations of authority among engineers, officials, workers, and residents. Daniel Williford’s book titled Concrete Futures: Technology and the Uncontrollable in Modern Morocco, demonstrates that struggles over critical urban technologies reveal a more fundamental conflict over the nature of decolonization in Morocco and the extent to which practices rooted in colonial projects could enable other types of political organization and action. These technologies—from materials like cinder blocks and techniques of demolition to forms of housing finance and labor organization—enabled colonial and postcolonial experts and officials to harness the skills and knowledge of Moroccan workers while restricting their capacity to shape the urban environment. At the same time, Moroccan residents put new methods for building and financing to their own, often anticolonial, ends. Drawing upon oral and archival research, this project tracks colonial engineers and architects, Moroccan cement plant workers, urban Muslim notables, and postcolonial officials as they designed, adapted, and deployed construction technologies to promote conflicting visions of social and political order. The ultimately uncontrollable qualities of colonial technologies made them ambiguous sites for both contestation and control. In Morocco today, desires for concrete futures continue to shape political and technical imaginaries, as well as their limits.

Daniel Williford is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-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 technological labor, and the remaking of urban environments in the region. His research has been funded through awards from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund, and now by AIMS. Daniel’s current book project entitled, Concrete Futures: Technology and the Uncontrollable in Modern Morocco is a history of colonial construction technologies, their role in framing the politics of decolonization in North Africa, and their postcolonial afterlives. Daniel’s other research interests include the history of disaster, infrastructures and the environment, the politics of expertise, and the prehistory of neoliberalism. He also teaches courses in the history of technology, environmental history, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa.

This episode was recorded on August 17, 2023 Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM). 

Recorded and edited by: Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi, Outreach Director at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM).