“A city,” wrote British town planner and polymath Patrick Geddes, “is more than a place in space. It’s a drama in time.”
Casablanca — celebrated by colonial architects as a laboratory for visual and architectural experimentation and long-romanticized by Hollywood — is a quintessential example of such urban spectacle.
Emerging as a modern metropolis in the 20th-century, “Casa” is a city of chaos and contradiction, the cherished and kitsch, the brutal and beautiful. At once unsettling and inviting, uncertain and yet enduring, the city’s future, past, and present collide in a merger of Moroccan artisanship with European modernism.
Striding through its streets with a palpable sense of familiarity and pride, you might come across young author and architect Alaa Halifi. He wrote the book, In Praise of Madness (مديح الجنون) , the only Moroccan work to receive the Al-Rafidain First Book Prize. Distinguished by the judges for its “deep dive into the worlds of Casablanca,” Halifi said he wrote the book to “reflect the complex reality of my city” and “shed light on the marginalized and chaotic part of the city’s underworld,” by putting on paper things that he and his generation see every day of their lives. The result is a book that fuses reality with fantasy, a vision for the city as it is, but also for what it could become.
Halifi brings this same energy to his architectural designs. He has designed award-winning mobile health clinics, transforming old city buses to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic and envisioned a network of green spaces in a city in desparate need of them. His hope is that his work can speak for a generation of Casawi — native Casablancans — who are too often left out of discussions of the city and its future.
“Without art or concrete forms of expression, we will be forgotten. Instagram posts and TikTok videos aren’t enough,” he said, “and so I write, design, and dream of a world that could be, in the midst of the one that is.”