When urban shrinkage goes South. Morocco's extreme management of declining mining towns between paternalism, entrepreneurialism and abandonment

Résumé En

Urban abandonment has become a hot topic in Morocco since 2019, because of the hirak (social movement) of Jerada, a shrinking town located close to the Algerian border where clandestine mining has caused the death of several young people. This article has three objectives. First, it introduces the issue of urban shrinkage in Morocco, a North African country where shrinkage has never been identified by public policies or research. We will show that its territorial decline is a major phenomenon that currently affects a fifth of its cities. Second, this article aims to demonstrate that while some factors of territorial decline in Morocco are often highlighted for the North (namely, demographic transition, urban spread and deindustrialisation), other factors are more country specific. Thus, we highlight three factors that are particularly linked to the Moroccan context: the climate’s impact on the decline of agricultural regions; the role of geopolitical conflicts and their consequences for the borders; and, lastly, the role of politics in a state governed by an external regime (during the colonial period), and then by an authoritarian regime, where peripheral regions were sometimes dependent on or even abandoned by the centre. Third, we propose preliminary channels of reflection on the different ways urban decline has been silently managed in Morocco. While the process, as we will see, is likely to trigger major social action, the public authorities’ failure to identify the issue is cause for concern.