Concrete Futures: Technology and Decolonization in Modern Morocco, (Paperback)

<p><b>Struggles over critical urban technologies during and after Morocco's French Protectorate reveal a fundamental conflict over the nature of decolonization in the country.</b></p><p><i>Concrete Futures</i> 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. </p><p>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.</p>

• Concrete Futures: Technology and Decolonization in Modern Morocco, (Paperback)
• Author: Daniel Williford
• ISBN: 9780226854168
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-12-14
• Page Count: 304