The Honeycomb

For our story we will stay in this specific building in Casablanca, the Nid d’Abeille (Honeycomb) building on the bottom left which is located in the neighborhood of Hay Mohammadi on the outskirts of Casablanca, designed and built during the French colonial period. Nid d’Abeille, the honeycomb, was designed under the influence of modernist architecture, with the idea that through architecture and modernist housing the local inhabitants could be educated into being modern citizens . This approach of modernization can be found in every colonial administration; not only the French pursued modernization. The project Carrières Centrales in Casablanca aimed at creating utopian habitats through a modernist grid system, see fig 1., for the working class residents of the city.

This approach of educating colonial subjects into becoming modern citizens can also be found in the reconstruction of villages in Egypt or the Kabyle village housing in French Algeria. Timothy Mitchell: Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 44-54. Colonial (model) housing is also connected to how colonial administrations asserted control over colonial populations through the ordering and reordering of public space.

In the next step we will switch to an image of the building from 2014 to demonstrate that the inhabitants have adapted this modernistic building and its surroundings to suit their needs…