The Urban Governance Crisis: When Housing Cooperatives Make the City—The Case of Khenifra in Morocco

Abstract

The abuse in public land assets with no particular effort to renew it, and the implementation of Law 25/90 1 have led to a dizzying rise in land values that continue to affect urban land on a sustainable level. The following situation is combined with the scarcity or even absence of varied social housing 2 , which affected directly the conditions of access to land assets in the city of Khenifra and Morocco in general. Today, housing costs are rising faster than household income levels. This situation has resulted in the development of a group of housing cooperatives that play a dual role of collecting and encouraging savings, carrying out subdivisions and infrastructure construction meanwhile. The birth of this self-help housing type in Khenifra dates back to 1993, when a first housing cooperative called Al Arz , initiated by a group of teachers, laid the foundations for a practice that would later become a sustainable phenomenon that impeded the city’s urban planni ng and governance.