Capital Exclusion —

Forestier and the Espaces Libres

June 2023, published in L’Atelier magazine, EPFL

At the turn of the 20^th century, Nicolas Forestier and Henri Prost’s planning efforts turned the city of Rabat, Morocco into the ideal capital of the French colonial administration. Indeed, the 1912 Fez Treaty marked the beginning of a French protectorate in Morocco. Its first resident general, Marshall Louis Hubert Lyautey commissioned landscape architect and urban planner, Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier in 1913 to propose a plan for the development of Rabat, appointed as the new seat for French administration. The latter, inspired by Frederic Law Olmsted and America's park system theory, envisioned a network of urban parks, gardens, promenades to connect the city’s new administrative, residential and commercial quarters. More importantly, Forestier’s assessment was concerned with the provisions to ensure a controlled growth of the metropolitan city that Rabat was set to become. A careful analysis of the area’s landscape and natural assets helped him identify reserves of non constructible areas, that he called “espaces libres” and that would serve as boundaries between existing or hypothetical denser urban fabrics. If Forestier’s ideas apparently leaned towards more social justice through social mixing and equal access to green space, in Morocco’s Rabat, they only served to strengthen the hold of an inherently unjust colonial regime. Hence, within a little more than a decade (1912-1926), Forestier’s vision executed by his protégé and fellow urban planner Henri Prost, turned Rabat into an apartheid city. A careful analysis of the colonial superstructure in relation to land ownership, resource extraction, and outlook on indigenous population, will demonstrate the induced fragility and precarization of proletarian native populations.

First, the environmental conditions that made Rabat’s settlement possible in a fertile valley open to the sea, will be explored. Second, the colonial infrastructure of information, pacification and transportation that allowed the French to secure full control of the territory, will be developed. As will be seen in a third part, a military hold of Moroccan lands, coupled with mass expropriation through the protectorate legal framework meant that resource extraction and industrial production by private monopolies could begin. This capitalist enterprise would not be complete, without the simultaneous dispossession and integration of the Moroccan workforce, on ideological and moral grounds. The fourth part of this essay will expose the preservation of the indigenous as an argument for spatial exclusion and the pervasion of this orientalist paradox into Forestier’s theory of the espaces libres. Last but not least, the translation of Forestier’s ideas and colonial mindset into Prost’s executed project for Rabat will be assessed. Morocco’s capital turned into apartheid gardens, in which european settlers experienced the bucolic landscapes of a provincial town as well as the hubbub of a bustling metropolis. Their native counterparts all the while were kept out of sight in an impoverished medina or in overpopulated ghettos on the city’s outskirts.

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