The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown

A Critical History of the Bidonville

Sheila Crane

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822992417

Architects, politicians, and planners have repeatedly framed shantytowns or slums as aberrant, unplanned developments that stand apart from the city proper, rather than integral components of the urban landscape with their own layered histories and often unrealized potentials. Describing a site as a bidonville––the francophone equivalent of the shantytown––positioned it as a foil to and catalyst for new architectural projects, anticipating and authorizing its targeting, control, and dispossession. In this richly illustrated study, Sheila Crane charts the emergence of the bidonville, a term first consolidated in Casablanca following the establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912 that was subsequently used to categorize and systematically target urban areas across Morocco, Algeria, and beyond—processes that continue to shape planning and urban landscapes today. Tracing significant episodes that extend into the post-independence period, Crane reveals how the bidonville became a potent artifact of the colonial city and a formative site for anticolonial thinking and action. Far from self-contained enclosures, sites deemed bidonvilles were shaped by dynamic human and non-human entanglements central to this book.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Beyond the Shadow City
• 1. Points of Orientation: Itinerant Territorialities and the Racial Logics of Cantonnement
• 2. Building Ecologies: The Material Mobilities of Quarries (Karian), Containers (Bidon), and Dwarf Palm (Dūm)
• 3. Speculative Urbanisms: Leveraging Land and Property in Casablanca and Rabat
• 4. Topographies of Presence in the Pluvial City: Excavating Algiers from Mahieddine
• 5. Calculation and Crisis: The Third World in the City
• 6. Cités at War: Targeting the Bidonville in the State of Emergency
• 7. Experimental Infrastructures: Between Autogestion and Auto-construction
• Conclusion: Present Remains and Future-Past Potentials
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover Page