“Ils ne savent pas que les maisons font la ville, mais que les citoyens font la cité.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social)

His beloved hometown of Tangier has been changing rapidly before his eyes, rapidly becoming a different city, and Hicham Gardaf has been trying to make sense of it, as well as trying to find a new home for himself in the everchanging context of the city: where does he belong in the new scheme of things? Where can one find shelter? His photographs register, document, and report the changes he has perceived in the once familiar urban landscape, and they suggest consequent changes in the redefined social landscape. Gardaf revisits his memory of old places and discovers new ones; while he does not judge, he certainly expresses his many emotions: a sense of oddness, some perplexity, discreet admiration, open fascination...

Put together, Gardaf’s photographs of his changing Tangier provide the viewer with a multi-layered narrative, subtly pointing to different socioeconomic and institutional processes, hinting at distinct actors and stakeholders, alluding to old and new sociopolitical conflicts and disputes, as well as revealing the specific physical, social, architectural, and constructive expressions of the broader process Henri Lefebvre has called social production of urban space. One can imagine the underlying processes of rural-urban migration, the urgent search for economic opportunities in the city, the dreams of individual fulfilment, the cultural and family tensions, the many legal obstacles and institutional hurdles... One can feel the lure of the city and sense the political power of space. Above all, his eloquent photographs tell the story of land and housing in Tangier: who has access to serviced land and how, who lives where and how, who benefits from – and who pays for - urban development and how. Viewed as a narrative of the local, Gardaf’s photographs raise the very global question of who has the right to the city in Tangier and elsewhere in the world – and where the urban poor seem destined to live in the contemporary city.

Tangier has followed the same imperative pattern of urban growth experienced in other Moroccan cities, elsewhere in Africa and in the broader world. As from 2008, the majority of the global population has lived in cities, big and small, and this structural process of urban change has obeyed increasingly higher growth rates. Urban development has taken place through varied processes of horizontal expansion, incorporation of agricultural and peri-urban areas, and widespread land subdivision, as well as through the growing verticalisation of consolidated settlements. Old urban centres have significantly changed, while new centres have formed; traditional municipal boundaries have been swallowed by still evolving metropolitanisation dynamics. New systems of cities have formed nationally, and international networks of cities have emerged. The social production of urban space has been promoted within the context of increasingly globalised land and property markets, and traditional actors – landowners, developers, promoters, builders – have been gradually joined by still obscure players such as hedge and investments funds and opaque offshore-based companies.

Whatever the national and local differences are, in Tangier and elsewhere all such processes have embraced, reproduced, and fomented a pattern of spatial fragmentation, environmental impact, economic inefficiency, and administrative irrationality. They have also essentially expressed a pattern of sociospatial segregation, as the unequal concentration of urban equipment, public infrastructure and services, and collective facilities has subjected the vast majority of the urban population to living under increasingly more precarious conditions. In particular, more and more people – and not only the urban poor - have had to bypass the legal system in order to have access to land and housing in cities. Informality is the rule, no longer the exception, it is the name of this game. The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold: political patronage, elitist urban planning, obsolete city management, individualistic legal systems, exclusionary property regimes... Resulting land and property prices have increased in an astonishing way, especially now that cities, as well as being the venue of post-industrial economic development, also are the very object of speculative global financial capitalism. This prohibitive situation has been aggravated further by the combination of powerful processes of wealth concentration, economic inequality, change in agricultural production, and social poverty – and by the intimidating prospects of fewer jobs and economic opportunities for the urban poor, exactly when nation-states internationally have increasingly withdrawn their few existing social welfare nets. A city is always the sociospatial expression of a given sociopolitical pact – and everywhere this pact has been intrinsically exclusionary of more and more people.

Intuitively and with great sensitivity, Hicham Gardaf’s photographs present this new urban order to the viewer: a city in which, given the lack of an inclusive and democratic urban land governance framework, an astonishing stock of vacant serviced urban land plots and under-utilised built properties live together with a staggering number of precarious informal settlements and illegal constructions. While the housing deficit is enormous and public housing policies are few and far between, the concentrated land structure perpetuates a deeply unfair city in which the rule has become the socialisation of the costs and the privatisation of the benefits. Substantial mansions in well-serviced legal neighbourhoods co-exist with spontaneous or orchestrated processes of informal land occupation and improvised housing construction. Modern, solid structures are build next to rudimentary, precarious ones. For the poorest of the poor, those who cannot even afford to buy land or housing units in illegal land subdivisions, the sole housing possibility left is the occupation of landfills, bottom of valleys, hilltops, risky areas and/or public land.

But, Gardaf looks at his changing city in a most loving manner. He wants to understand how people build, how they live, and, while being surprised by unusual solutions, he is also fascinated by intriguing formal compositions, precarious geometries, suggestive aesthetic arrangements, and creative use of materials. He understands that cities, and especially those emerging from self-building processes, are vibrant collective creations, at once the expression of socioeconomic power and of the resilience of human spirit. To this viewer, Gardaf’s narrative of his changing city, while potently critical of ongoing exclusionary processes, also dreams of possible changes, changes that promise an inclusive, more just city for all. After all, citizens, not houses, make a city, and by highlighting the force of human endeavour his photographs remind us that ultimately it is the citizens of Tangier who will define the terms of their social contract.