TITLE:
The Urban Governance Crisis: When Housing Cooperatives Make the City—The Case of Khenifra in Morocco
AUTHORS:
Mohamed Marou, Said Azelmad
KEYWORDS:
Housing Governance, Housing Cooperatives, Sustainable Urbanism, Urban Planning, Morocco
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.8 No.2,
May
25,
2020
ABSTRACT: The abuse in public land assets with no particular effort to renew it,
and the implementation of Law 25/901 have led to a dizzying rise in land
values that continue to affect urban land on a sustainable level. The following
situation is combined with the scarcity or even absence of varied social
housing2, which
affected directly the conditions of access to land assets in the city of
Khenifra and Morocco in general. Today, housing costs are rising faster than
household income levels. This situation has resulted in the development of a
group of housing cooperatives that play a dual role of
collecting and encouraging savings, carrying out subdivisions and
infrastructure construction meanwhile. The birth of this self-help housing type
in Khenifra dates back to 1993, when a first housing cooperative called Al Arz,
initiated by a group of teachers, laid the foundations for a practice that
would later become a sustainable phenomenon that impeded the city’s urban
planning and governance.