2 minute read
Precedent: Africa
AFRICA
Morocco’s rehabilitated city
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Classified as a world heritage site in 1981, Morocco’s cultural and spiritual center hosts over 500 urban facilities, more than 8,000 historic houses, as well as 5600 handicraft activities with guilds amounting to a total of more than 30,000 craftsmen.
The city’s urban fabric, surprisingly, has not seen much change since its heyday. The problems it does face consist of overpopulation, and the resulting deterioration of its buildings. Although the city’s surroundings are off limits to new construction, the land is still vulnerable as there is always some form of ‘uncontrolled urban development’ ongoing.
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Unlike in former precedents in the Western continents, where the dilapidation of urban cores occurred due to expansion of the city and resultant desertion of the core, in Fez, it was the influx of new residents into the core, resulting in overpopulation, which is what endangered its structures and the integrity of the urban fabric.
Together with traffic issues, and deteriorating water and sewage systems, the city began to experience an almost domino effect of deterioration.
By the time Fez entered the 1970s, its problems were realized by people around the world, and frantic brainstorming ensured in order to turn this situation around. Since assigning this entire city as a frozen moment, in a city-wide museum exhibit, was impractical and against the intention of letting Fez thrive and stay alive as it always has, another method had to be found. Eventually, a city-wide rehabilitation was proposed, composed of individual building rehabilitation projects.
As such, Fez saw over 120 individual buildings rehabilitated, as well as the implementation of over 100 interventions, with communal help and investment. Public spaces were created from the evacuation of 16 plots of deteriorating buildings. Over 50 housing units on the brink of collapse have been repaired, and 2 original public spaces of historical importance were restored. These instances resulted in the generation of 1,000 jobs.
Although this project is on a large, city-wide scale, there is still no doubt that adaptive reuse can have a tremendously positive effect when implemented with care and consideration of all stakeholders (including the environment).
As Boussaa states,
“some general guidelines can be outlined that might be relevant to enable a sustainable future of the historic centers in North Africa and the Arab world:
● Respect community life, with specific emphasis on the local values and traditions; ● Improve the quality of life for the local inhabitants; ● Maintain identity, diversity and vitality; ● Minimize the loss of non-renewable heritage assets such as the built heritage; ● Involve different actors from both the public and private sectors in conservation; ● Empower community action and responsibility through participation; ● A bottom up versus a top down approach is needed to involve the community; ● Gentrification, segregation and authenticity issues should be taken into consideration when applying sustainable development in the historic city.
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