Concrete Futures

Struggles over critical urban technologies during and after Morocco’s French Protectorate reveal a fundamental conflict over the nature of decolonization in the country.

Concrete Futures is a history of concrete that complicates our view of the building material, revealing it as a site of contestation over resources and authority in twentieth-century Morocco. Beginning with the French protectorate period between 1912 and 1956 and continuing into the post-independence era, Daniel Williford uses debates surrounding concrete building technologies as a conduit through which to explore struggles over colonization, modernization, and decolonization. The half-finished cinder block buildings found in cities all over Morocco, he shows, are a product of the system that colonial engineers and officials developed to deal with labor disputes, contests over knowledge, and anticolonial unrest.

By exploring concrete and its uses, Williford discloses how conflicts between experts, workers, and residents over construction and urban renewal—from the introduction of reinforced concrete to strategies of slum clearance—shaped the meaning and the trajectory of decolonization in Morocco.