The "new generation" of New Cities in Morocco: from the "dormitory" city to the "sustainable" city, what has changed?

Résumé

The present contribution is interested in the study of New Cities built by large private developers in the outskirts of Morocco's big cities. These projects, which are most often carried out within the framework of so-called ‘derogatory’ urban planning and based on international urbanism models, are often presented by their developers as being sustainable and innovative projects that would be completely different from the ‘struggling’ New Cities launched a few years ago by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning. Analyzing the process of their production as well as the logic of their integration in their territories of implantation, the contribution questions how these so-called "new generation" projects can represent a break from their predecessors. Where does the local territory stand in the process of their production and management? Based on a series of investigations around some of these ongoing operations, and combining literature search and interviews with project developers, associations, and local populations, this work shows that these operations, described as as ‘ecological enclaves’, simply rehash opportunity urbanism, which is mainly focused on the international market and disconnected from the local territorial context.