Informalities as Resistance: Challenging the Formal Housing Paradigm

The central hypothesis of the thesis is that housing informalities in Morocco, and more specifically, "unauthorized modifications," represent a materialization of needs and a form of resistance towards rigid formal regulations. The research work begins with a Systematic Literature Review of housing informalities (HI) to understand the academic discourse and its multiple facets. The results of the review then make it possible to establish that there is a significant gap around the understanding of "unauthorized modifications" as a subcategory of HIs. Consequently, we developed a mixed methodology with a technical (urban-architectural) and socio-cultural dimension allowing us to understand the dynamics of the latter. To validate the central hypothesis, we test three sub-hypotheses at the level of three case studies with three different socioeconomic settings (affordable, middle-class, and affluent neighborhoods) in the urban commune of Harhoura, Rabat. These hypotheses are as follows. First, there are HIs specific to each of the three socioeconomic settings. Second, there are HIs shared between the three socioeconomic settings. Third, HIs are an expression of a housing culture rather than a concern for non-compliance with formal regulations. The research uses a mixed methodology, technical descriptive-normative and sociocultural. The technical descriptive-normative part is presented as a scientific analysis of the urban facades of the neighborhood case studies, based on a morphological grid as a reference for normative comparison between the authorized and the existing, thus making it possible to understand the "how" of the HI phenomenon. In addition, the socio-cultural part allows us to understand the "why" of the latter through the exploration of the results of the descriptive-normative technical analysis and formal regulations of housing via focus groups with HIs practitioners. The validation of the three sub-hypotheses carried out at the level of the three case studies confirms the central hypothesis and demonstrates that the resistance in question is a resistance to formal standards, which are not aligned with community standards.