Abstract
In Morocco, a country deeply affected by metropolisation, agricultural areas located on the outskirts of large cities are undergoing rapid economic, social and landscape transformations. These changes are particularly critical for a country where agriculture and, more generally, “rurality” remain of vital importance. At the intersection of the rural and the urban, the peripheries are caught between a neoliberal approach, which in the name of accumulation reinforces the draining of the countryside and urban sprawl, and an authoritarian approach aimed at preserving the social and political order, which involves keeping an eye on the rural community that has traditionally supported the regime. To explore these contradictions, we focus on the Rabat-Salé-Témara conurbation. The first part focuses on the power relations between the main spatial planning actors, in order to analyse the contradictions affecting the construction of peripheral spaces. The second part exposes the consequences of these power relations through the models of the new city (Tamesna) and the large-scale projects (Bouregreg). The last part analyses the challenges of the reconfiguration of state policies in the face of the mutations produced by urban expansion, by investigating two rural communes in the second-ring suburbs: Shoul and Sidi-Yahya-des-Zaërs (ZYS).