New Densities behind Closed Doors: Shared Flats As the Last Resort of Morocco’s Urban Working-Class

Since the beginning of colonial oppression and city planning in Morocco, rooms (chambres) and flats (étages) for rent with shared facilities (sometimes kitchen, always bathrooms) have been central components of the available housing options for working-class population in urban Morocco, in particular Casablanca. They have appeared ‘out of necessity’ in response to a lack of housing rather than representing deliberate choices. However, compared to other classic forms of informalised housing of the urban majority, prominently including shantytowns (bidonvilles, karyan) and informal settlements (habitat non-réglementaire), shared rental accommodation has hardly been central to both academic and political attention. Yet, in recent years, enhanced political commitment to demolish bidonvilles in combination with undesired and/or unaffordable resettlement options have increased the demand for shared housing. In the pericentral neighbourhoods within Morocco’s larger metropolises, rooms for rent have remained the last available resort for working-class population. Consequently, densities as well as precarity seem to have enhanced behind closed doors, where different concerns and conflicts of a co-habitation ‘out of necessity’ (privacy issues, hygiene, insecurity, instability, pressures to pay rent) remain hidden to the outside view. Building on long-term local research experience and qualitative interviews with residents about their housing biographies, we shed light on shared housing as a last, yet threatened and precarious affordable housing option in the former centres of working-class residency within Casablanca as well as Rabat-Salé.