The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown

Throughout history, architects, politicians, and planners have framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper—merely as problems to be solved. Describing a site as a bidonville—the Francophone equivalent of shantytown—positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural projects, anticipating and authorizing its targeting, control, and dispossession. Sheila Crane charts the emergence and consolidation of the term bidonville, first in Casablanca following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912, and its subsequent use to categorize and systematically target urban areas across Morocco and Algeria, and, by the 1950s, across and beyond France—processes that continue to shape planning and urban landscapes today. No matter the specific circumstances of a site’s development, Crane reveals, its designation as bidonville effectively recreated it as such. These external definitions were challenged at every turn. Far from self-contained enclosures, sites deemed bidonvilles were shaped by dynamic human and non-human entanglements central to this study.