WALTER BIBIKOW/SIME/GMAIMAGES
DJEMAA EL-FNAA, MARRAKECH: ENGAGING WITH COMPLEXITY AND DIVERSITY
NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I DECIDED TO GO BACK TO AFRICA, where, due to my father’s profession, I had spent my formative years crisscrossing the continent. By fourteen, I had lived in nearly every region. I wanted to return and explore it not through the lens of my parents or through any kind of formal experience like tourism, but as an adult and a practitioner with my own set of experiences and negotiations with its people. Over the course of a decade, I traveled to nearly every country on the continent, photographing the rich and regionally specific diversity that I found there. From the mosque of Djenné to the rock churches of Lalibela, I was repeatedly confronted with breathtaking and emotionally resonant designs. One of the most indelible experiences was my first visit to Djemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakech, which illustrates its significance more immediately and viscerally than any other city square I’ve encountered. Few places on earth offer such a holistic sensory experience, where the scent of mint tea joins the competing sounds of mopeds and the rhythmic drumming of local musicians against a colorful palette of umbrellas from the nearby bazaar.
Located at the entrance to the old medina town, Djemaa el-Fnaa is the bustling heart of the city, an artistic, commercial, and religious hub where tourists and locals alike engage with the rich and dynamic heritage of Marrakech’s distinctive culture. Upon my first visit a decade ago, I was immediately struck by the seamless dance of activity across the span of a day: local merchants selling fresh orange juice arrive at dawn, followed by garden merchants, lamp sellers, and musicians who arrive progressively throughout the day. By the afternoon, henna painters, medics, fortune-tellers, snake charmers, musicians, and storytellers enliven the square, attracting throngs of locals and tourists. The bustle of the square is punctuated by frequent calls to prayer from nearby mosques. The transition from day to night is particularly dramatic, with daytime merchants packing up and filing out in under an hour, replaced by rows of gas-lit food vendors whose charcoal-roasted kebabs or spicy harira soup send fragrant plumes of smoke into the air. Entertainers, from dancers to musicians to acrobats, lead the square to reach its busiest after dark, transforming the space into a thriving temporary village, which in turn is fully reinvented the following day.
Inherent in the square’s character is a narrative about Marrakech’s history within the unique context of North African urbanism. One of the goals of my travels has been to dispel Western myths surrounding Africa, those stereotypes that tend to oversimplify the continent into singular master narratives that obscure the vast diversity of its histories and identities. The Africa I grew up with has an incredible lineage of urban design, running the gamut from near-rural villages to bustling cosmopolitan cities. Yet when I began to practice architecture, I came to discover these images are largely absent from the global architectural conversation, and the continent is misunderstood by Western practitioners. Through my work, I have focused on the relationship between modernity and indigenous culture, emphasizing the importance of geography rather than political boundaries to the DNA of African cities.
Djemaa el-Fnaa speaks to the unique character of the Maghreb region of North Africa. Due to the Mediterranean coastline, the urban character of this region is quite different from the others. These are complex cities with layers of history, both distant and recent, with a more complete architectural record of their history than most African cities. The built environments of these cities give you a palpable sense of their vast trajectory through different kingdoms and different times. Cities in this region contain some of the few examples on the continent of indigenous architecture that have survived the tide of modernity. These preserved buildings provide great insight into how, prior to our current culture of globalization, groups used local materials and original designs to respond to the specificities of their climate and geography.
In Marrakech, this indigenous lineage is most visible in the medina, whose earliest buildings date back to the Middle Ages and represent the oldest part of the city. They provide an infrastructure for the daily life of the city, where rich and poor occupy similar houses in different quarters. Due to their historic role as centers of trade, they also offer a sense of protection, like citadels. The domestic architecture of the medina, rarely higher than three stories, turns away from the streetscape and instead orients itself around private courtyards and terraces hidden from public view. In response, the streetscape creates an experience of increasing interiority as you move farther into residential areas, with networks of narrow winding passages. This was an intentional attempt to ensure a sharp division between the private, domestic life and public, communal life. Early Islamic urbanism relied heavily on this highly segregated balance. Even as subsequent French colonization redefined the shape and structure of the city, the medina was left largely untouched and its unique logic was allowed to prevail.
Djemaa el-Fnaa is thus the complementary condition: a bustling mixed-use public space designed to bring commercial and religious function into close proximity and to serve as the nucleus of community life. This is behind the square’s rich lineage of artistic expression, which can be traced back to the eleventh century, and which continues to be visible in Djemaa el-Fnaa’s storytelling tradition. These orators have been greatly drowned out by the din of modernity, but they still loom large over the character of the square. They are living libraries, keepers of local knowledge and artists in their own right, who still represent the beating heart of Djemaa el-Fnaa for locals and tourists alike. Djemaa el-Fnaa is perhaps the most prominent of this type of North African urban city square, which is unique on the continent. In most other regions, colonial powers deliberately avoided large gathering spaces to dissuade locals from assembling and protesting.
LISA LIMER
What particularly engages me about the square is how the multifunctional character allows the complexities and nuances of the urban environment to unfold. In my practice, the driving philosophy is that of responsiveness: the idea that architecture should emerge from the needs of the communities it serves. My goal is to create designs that can offer individuals a sense of ownership over their environment, that encourage people to use their surroundings, and that reduce barriers to access.
To create architecture of this nature, one must first analyze and understand how people use space according to distinctly local patterns of the everyday. Djemaa el-Fnaa is an incredible learning opportunity in this sense. The square’s identity emerges not from the architecture that surrounds it but from the individuals who occupy it, from the merchants wheeling in carts, from the flood of tourists, from performing artists who bring the heritage of their craft into the present. This is not to disregard the importance of the surroundings. In fact, it was the proposal of a glass tower block that eventually resulted in the square becoming a protected UNESCO Site of Intangible Heritage. Rather, it is to view the square as a representation of what Rahul Mehrotra calls the kinetic city: a vision of the city that is rooted not in static symbols but in the constant motion of its inhabitants, in their cultural practices and daily habits that flood various spaces and give them their character.
Djemaa el-Fnaa is the kind of heterogeneous space that comfortably houses a plurality of perspectives; it is a place where democratic thought is fundamentally possible, where diverse groups are forced to interact and engage. This is ultimately one of the core promises of the city square, and certainly one of roles that has seen huge attention in North Africa following the vital role that Tahrir Square played in the Arab Spring. During this period, the capacity of such spaces to become fully public, to facilitate idea sharing and community activism, was powerfully made visible. The recognition of this was almost certainly behind the 2011 bombing in Djemaa el-Fnaa, which seemed to be an attempt to dissuade similar upsprings of democratic action in Marrakech. The attack highlighted how crucial the square is to Marrakech’s character and its discursive life: a figure of rich history whose vibrancy has come to symbolize the city as a whole.
As Djemaa el-Fnaa demonstrates, spaces that at first may appear to reflect a simple condition are much more complex when the actions of individuals and groups are factored in. These unique patterns of movement through space can and should guide the architecture we build to serve them. For space only becomes truly public when people recognize it and utilize it as such. Great public space cannot be built as much as curated; it is architecture’s responsibility to craft space in response to specific needs and unique practices. As Djemaa el-Fnaa shows, it is not the space itself that is meaningful; it is the way space facilitates diversity, interaction, and new negotiations that makes it meaningful.
FRANCESCO LAGNESE
courtesy Elyse Connolly Inc.