Precarious Modernities

"Using rich ethnographic detail, Precarious Modernities offers an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca's margins as part of ongoing and contingent processes of 'modernization'. Through a focus on the everyday lives and spatial materialities of Hay Mohammadi's inhabitants, and their interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas, and technocratic planning regimes, the book documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders. The result is a unique account of the political continuities, security logics, economic ideologies and competing forces that shape the possibilities open to precarious communities in a storied and sprawling metropolis. As marginalized inhabitants develop pragmatic ways of appropriating or resisting powerful statist and developmentalist agendas, unanticipated and novel forms of political engagement emerge, signaling the revival and reconfiguration of notions of class through creative and alternative spatial practices and their attendant vocabularies"--