This publication charts the consolidation of the idea of the bidonville, as it initially emerged in Casablanca in the decades following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912, as well as the shifting urban landscapes that were thereby categorized and targeted across Morocco and Algeria. Through the examination of a series of critical inflection points that extend into the post-independence period, this study reveals that the bidonville was a potent artifact of colonialism, even as it became a formative site for anticolonial thinking and action. Countering entrenched perceptions of the shantytown as a marginal, ephemeral, and unauthorized development, the book excavates the layered histories and plural lives of the bidonville through sustained analysis of the extractivist logic of colonialism and its strategies of dispossession, as well as the efforts of residents in shaping, sustaining, and re-envisioning their own living environments.

Sheila Crane is chair and associate professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which received the 2013 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research explores how urban landscapes have been shaped by histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, migration, militarization, conflict, and ongoing anticolonial struggles, as well as by everyday and often ephemeral practices of inhabitation, spatial appropriation, and urban reinvention. Her essays have appeared in City and Society (2017), Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art (2018), Architectural Histories (for which she received the 2018–19 Best Article Award), French Studies (2024), and A Companion of French Art (forthcoming 2025). Her ongoing work rethinking urban histories across the Maghrib has been supported by the Clark Art Institute; the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University; and Dumbarton Oaks.