'Down to Earth'

The current research project I am developing as part of the G3S PhD start-up grant looks at the reconstruction efforts of the 2023 Haouz earthquake in Morocco, exploring the tension between adequate housing strategies and the lived realities of local Amazigh communities, particularly how questions of materiality, tradition, and state-led planning strategies intersect in the making of post-disaster architecture. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, which considers building materials as both products and producers of urban space, this research engages with rural vernacular configurations of space not as residues of the past, but as carriers of future potential - what we could refer to here as ‘rural futurisms’ or ‘paleo-innovation’ (Naji,2019). These configurations, being either planned of improvised over time, hold interesting forms of ecological intelligence, vernacular adaptability and collective spatial ethics at a time where ‘smart cityness’ in Africa has become the dominant frame driving speculative visions of urban development - visions that often time fall short of responding to the reality of our cities as opposite to the people who dwell in them.