Gentrification and European Entrepreneurship in Marrakesh

Abstract

For a great part of the nearly 10 million of Western foreign tourists that every year go to Morocco, the medina of Marrakech is the most important stage of their trip offering the possibility to live for some days in an atmosphere that answers to the stereotypes of the “Orientalism”. In fact during the French Protectorate, Marrakech turned into a symbol of the “Islamic World” and its medina began to be considered the stage and the background of the tourist activities and a tourist strategy which was based on an image of Marrakech corresponding to the canons and stereotypes of such “Orientalism”. Thus, the medina was transformed into a sort of backcloth for the lives of the Europeans residing in the so-called European or new city and, shortly thereafter, for the tourists’ holidays. The end of the French Protectorate witnessed a new deep structural and functional upheaval in the urban setting that later on led to the development of a particular kind of the tourist structures, called riads, with a particular evocative power of attraction on the tourists. As a consequence, more and more frequently traditional houses of the historical centre have been restored and renovated into hotel facilities, and nowadays, the medina is an interesting study case of the processes of gentrification. The aim of this chapter is to build a model that can offer a new perspective and possible future scenarios of the urban and social dynamic of the medina. This objective has been achieved by means of statistical data, integrated by field observations conducted from the spring of 2014 to the winter of 2015 within the European Union Seventh Framework Programme Marie Curie project MEDCHANGe. From the studies emerged that in a recent couple of decades, the growth in the number of the tourist housing in the riads has led to a gentrification of the medina that is related to the “migration” of many individuals from Western countries, mainly European, who own the riads.