On 28 February 1960, Agadir was home to 45,000 residents. The next day, 29 February, this city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco was shaken to its core. A 5.7 magnitude earthquake, followed by a second shock and a widespread fire, decimated Agadir. In just minutes, 15,000 residents perished, 25,000 were injured, and most of the survivors lost their homes. The city was almost entirely razed, including the sixteenth-century casbah and the French colonial ville nouvelle. Soon after the tragedy, King Mohammed V announced a comprehensive reconstruction campaign involving both Moroccan and international architects and planners. Agadir earned unprecedented attention as its reconstruction crystallized the ambition of the new Moroccan nation, which had recently gained its independence from the French colonial empire.
Tom Avermaete and Maxime Zaugg’s edited volume Agadir: Building the Modern Afropolis narrates this reconstruction process. Architectural modernism consistently engaged with the idea of the tabula rasa,...
University of California Press