Cristiana Strava

LeidenASA Research Leave by Cristiana Strava: Urban Futures in North Africa: From Colonial Grand Schemes to Contemporary Mega-Projects

As a university lecturer in the School of Middle Eastern Studies at LIAS, a fellow of the ASCL, and the coordinator of the new North Africa Research Program at LUCIS, Cristiana Strava is interested in developing new research directions and relationship between scholars of North Africa and colleagues working on Sub-Saharan Africa at Leiden. The proposed project aims to do this by conducting 1) new comparative research on urban processes in the region, as well as organizing at the end of the leave 2) an international workshop bringing together ASCL, LIAS and Moroccan experts on these topics.

In recent years the North African Kingdom has embarked on a series of ambitious billion-euro projects to overhaul the country's infrastructure on an exceptional scale. Capitalizing on the ongoing crises precipitated by the Arab Spring revolts in the region and its own comparative political and social stability, the Moroccan regime has been attracting global as well as regional investors with the promise of new 'mega projects' that aim to transform natural, economic and social landscapes.

During the research leave she will conduct archival and field research in Morocco to document and critically interrogate the historical genealogies of cultural and political ideas driving the current wave of urban mega-projects.

Drawing on the theoretical insights of AbdouMaliq Simone and Filip de Boek’s work in West Africa, Cristiana Strava's hypothesis is that beyond envisioning a radical transformation of the image and fabric of urban spaces such projects signal the production of shifting conceptions of governance and local political imaginaries related to citizenship. However, such comparable urban transformations have been too frequently addressed in isolation from each other. The goal is to generate an ethnographic and historical analysis of planning histories and practices in North Africa, and place them in a comparative framework with West African examples.

Publication linked to this project:

2018. “A Tramway Called Atonement: Genealogies of Infrastructure and Emerging Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Morocco”, Middle East Topics and Arguments, Vol. 10, pp. 22-29.