chapter 10 Colonial and Post-Colonial Casablanca Liat Kozma Introduction Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco and its largest port. Before the 1912 French occupation of Morocco, Casablanca had been a town of 20,000. In the 1910s, the city started attracting migrants because of French colonial policies and the city’s subsequent growing importance for Morocco’s economy. French urban policies in Casablanca, the construction of its new port and its designa- tion as a commercial and administrative centre attracted both European and rural migrants to the city, which transformed its demographic composition. By 1936, it was a city of over 250,000 inhabitants; by 1951, it was a metropolis of 700,000 people. Part of its growth was a result of European immigration; as the capital of French-occupied Morocco, the city attracted European admin- istrators, businessmen, and settlers. The larger share of immigrants, however, came from the Moroccan countryside. Both Europeans and Jews left Morocco shortly after it achieved independence in 1956. The city, however, continued to grow and now has a population of more than 3.5 million.1 Casablanca is an interesting case study of regulated prostitution. Like other French-colonized cities, it instituted regulated prostitution. In addition, how- ever, for about three decades, from 1922 to 1953, state-regulated prostitution was carried out in a walled-off brothel district called Bousbir, which is located a few kilometres to the southeast of the city. In this “urbanist and hygienic utopia”2 regular police and medical inspections were used to ostensibly pro- tect women from exploitation and their clients from venereal diseases. French administrators in Hanoi, Tunis, and Beirut saw it as a model for emulation, in part or in full. Medical doctors and abolitionists in the metropole debated the pros and cons of regulation based on what they heard about Bousbir.3 1 André Adam, Casablanca: Essai sur la transformation de la société marocaine au contact de l’Occident, 2 vols, (Paris, 1972), ii, p. 149. 2 Christelle Taraud, “Urbanisme, hygiénisme et prostitution à Casablanca dans les années 1920”, French Colonial History, 7 (2006), pp. 97–108. 3 Julia Christine Scriven Miller, “The Romance of Regulation: The Movement against State- Regulated Prostitution in France, 1871–1946” (Unpublished Ph.D., New York University, 2000), pp. 387–388. © Liat Kozma, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346253_011 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Liat Kozma - 9789004346253 Downloaded from Brill.com04/12/2023 03:53:16PM via free access