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Strava, Cristiana: Critical Appropriations of Modernity: Michel Écochard’s 8 by 8 Meter Housing Grid, Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca, in Troelenberg, Eva-Maria, Schankweiler, Kerstin and Messner, Anna Sophia (Eds.): Reading Objects in the Contact Zone, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2021 (Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality, Volume 9), p. . https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.766.c10407

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https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.766
ISBN 978-3-96822-049-9 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-050-5 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-3-96822-051-2 (Softcover)

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06/10/2021

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Authors

Cristiana Strava

Critical Appropriations of Modernity

Michel Écochard’s 8 by 8 Meter Housing Grid, Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca

Abstract Using an object ethnography approach, in this chapter I focus on an emblematic colonial planning and housing instrument designed by the head of the urban planning service in 1950s Morocco. Combin­ing attention to historical and transnational dimensions with the ethos of ethnographic work, I unravel the conditions behind the grid’s design, materialization, transnational circulation, and later appropriation and rich transformation in the hands of its eventual inhabitants. As such, my inten­tion is to explore and illuminate the contributions of multiple actors and to shed light on the complicated entanglements between emblematic colo­nial materialities and the postcolonial lives grafted onto them.

Keywords Appropriation, Margins, Morocco, Modernism, Object Eth­nography