Displaced but happy? Making sense of shantytown dwellers’ divergent views and experiences of resettlement in Casablanca

Abstract

While researchers have observed a global rise in displacement, many countries in the Global South have set up large-scale housing programmes, aiming to ensure access for all to ‘affordable’ and ‘adequate’ housing. For residents of Casablanca’s shantytowns, this has created a paradoxical situation—enhanced displacement threats and hopes to be soon moving into a higher-quality home. The situation challenges common conceptualisations of displacement seeing it as a merely negative, forced moving. Therefore, this paper opens up the debate on how to account for heterogeneous or even contradictory experiences of displacement. Through the example of shantytown resettlement in Casablanca, it calls for more people-centred empirical research that explicitly acknowledges internal neighbourhood diversity and difference. Promising approaches may focus on displaceability, the analysis of people’s residential trajectories, and heterogeneity within post-displacement perspectives.

Keywords:

• displacement
• adequate housing
• affordable housing
• residential trajectories
• displaceability
• informal settlement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I understand resettlement as a distinct form of predetermined residential mobility that always and inevitably combines aspects of displacement and rehousing (Rogers and Wilmsen 2020, 256; Beier et al. 2022, 5).

2 Complementary empirical analysis and a more detailed description of the methodology beyond the scope of this paper may be found in Beier (2019).

3 This group of people does only include resettled residents from Karyan Central who were actually living in Nouvelle Lahraouiyine. People who did either not move to the resettlement site or who moved out again could not be included by the survey. However, because of the rather affordable resettlement conditions, such departure from resettlement housing was rather low (Beier 2021).

4 For example, statistical analysis did not show any impact of resettlement on the employment rate, which seemingly contradicted other quantitative data that listed a “lack of jobs” among the most frequently stated disadvantages of the new site. Qualitative data helped to relate such contradictions to a more complicated search for work as well as longer commutes to work.

5 Empirical analysis of the third-party scheme shows that notwithstanding its positive effects on the affordability of resettlement housing, the scheme has entailed severe risks related to limited profit margins and financial difficulties of third-party investors that led to botched-up and uncompleted constructions. Likewise, long-term affordability of housing maintenance and services has remained an unresolved issue. For more details, please refer to Beier (2021).

6 All names are pseudonyms.

7 Since the suicide bombings of some shantytown dwellers in Casablanca in 2003, the stigmatisation has significantly increased also because King Mohammed VI has considered them repeatedly as a threat to Morocco’s progressive economic and social development (Zemni and Bogaert 2011).

8 This also relates to Wang’s (2020) notion of ‘in-situ marginalisation’.

9 In fact, in several cases in Casablanca, different options have already been available through post-displacement negotiations between displaced residents and local authorities. However, so far they represent rather hidden forms of bargaining, strongly dependent on people’s social capital and individual negotiation capacities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research School, Ruhr University Bochum [grant number DFG GSC 98/3].

Notes on contributors

Raffael Beier

Raffael Beier is a postdoctoral research fellow of the International Planning Studies (IPS) research group at the Faculty of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University, Germany. Email: [email protected]