Article

"Displaced but happy? Making sense of shantytown dwellers’ divergent views and experiences of resettlement in Casablanca"

The article published in the Journal City as "online first" deals with the different views and experiences of shanty town dwellers regarding resettlement in Casablanca.

Keywords

displacement/ adequate housing/ affordable housing/ residential trajectories/ displaceability informal settlement

Author

• Raffael Beier

Abstract

While researchers have observed a global rise in displacement, many countries in the Global South have set up large-scale housing programmes, aiming to ensure access for all to ‘affordable’ and ‘adequate’ housing. For residents of Casablanca’s shantytowns, this has created a paradoxical situation—enhanced displacement threats and hopes to be soon moving into a higher-quality home. The situation challenges common conceptualisations of displacement seeing it as a merely negative, forced moving. Therefore, this paper opens up the debate on how to account for heterogeneous or even contradictory experiences of displacement. Through the example of shantytown resettlement in Casablanca, it calls for more people-centred empirical research that explicitly acknowledges internal neighbourhood diversity and difference. Promising approaches may focus on displaceability, the analysis of people’s residential trajectories, and heterogeneity within post-displacement perspectives.

Here you may find the full article in the Journal City.

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