This piece was translated from an original French article which you can read here
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
— The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How do you bring meaning to a new urban hub? What does it take to turn a modern city centre into a cultural destination? In developing Casa Anfa, the Agence Urbaine de Développement d’Anfa (AUDA) responds with cultural anchoring: the valorisation of the site’s historical heritage on the one hand, and the contemporary cultural energy of Anfa Park on the other.
When given the chance to repurpose an aerodrome, starchitects might focus on the opportunity presented by an empty space to fill. Local stakeholders, on the other hand, perceive something else: the imprints of a history that can serve as a springboard for modern use rooted in the past. Contemporary urbanism favours a blank slate approach. AUDA takes a different view, grasping the full measure of the heritage value of the site and choosing, for Casa Anfa, the logic of the palimpsest.
It begins with the discovery and construction of a founding myth, which itself starts with a runway: a line oriented 03/21, still drawing in the imagination long after it stopped drawing in planes. Before becoming the axis of a future urban hub, this runway was a seam between earth and sky, stitched under the command of prevailing winds. The site – one of the very first aerodromes of the twentieth century – was first known as Camp Cazes, then as Anfa Aerodrome. It lived through the early days of aviation and its frail aircraft, carrying the promise of departure and the thrill of landing. It saw the Aéropostale and its legendary heroes, Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry, take off for Toulouse and Saint-Louis, and return.
After the scent of mail came the weight of munitions and the solemnity of negotiations between states, with the airfield partitioned – French on one side, American on the other – following the Allied landings of 1942. It witnessed Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle and the young Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef walk its grounds during the Anfa Conference. Later, it welcomed Johan Cruyff on an evening of sporting friendship between Casablanca’s Wydad and FC Barcelona. In time, the transport of letters, freight, and men gave way to a last form of transmission: the training of Royal Air Maroc (RAM) airline pilots.
But once this history is rediscovered, how do you transform the mono-functional infrastructure of an aerodrome into a complex urban ecosystem? How do you move from taxiways to public square, from hangar to cultural facility, from air traffic control to urban governance? Casa Anfa’s answer is the deliberate coexistence of temporalities. When the new urban vision took shape in 2006, it did not erase this heritage; it converted it. The ongoing construction signals the present; the rehabilitated buildings keep the past close. The architectural modernity planned across 350 hectares (100 of which are given over to green space) is new embroidery on old fabric – careful stitching that, like a fine piece of mending, deliberately shows the original weave. They could have flattened, forgotten. Instead, they chose to capture and tame – in the spirit of the Little Prince with the fox. The etymology reveals the method: apprivoiser – to make something proper to the home, to the domus.
At a time when Casablanca is poised to welcome a cruise port and seeking to establish itself as a tourist destination, AUDA’s intuition is to treat the memory of Casa Anfa as a resource rather than enshrining it in a reliquary. The site’s history is not held at arm’s length as “heritage”, but rather internalised without being instrumentalised. It becomes the quiet fuel of an urban identity that refuses folklorisation. What was once an aerodrome becomes a business, residential and leisure district that claims the airport as one of its founding narratives.
Walking through the completed first phase alongside the spaces still under construction or awaiting transformation, the words that come to mind are those of dreams, escapade, stopover, travel – striking in a city more commonly associated with the chaos of a perpetually moving metropolis, the dark urban sprawl depicted in the Moroccan film Casanegra, a contemporary counterpoint to the American black-and-white classic.
The contrast between old and new surprises because it carries a creative dynamic akin to what one might feel in other great cities such as London or Berlin, which have endured fires or bombardment. At each end of the former runway, the numbers 03 and 21 have been preserved, while an educational trail runs along the park’s central axis, turning the history of aviation, its routes and distances into an open-air narrative. Other traces surface here and there. Airframes that marked Morocco’s history are stationed near the historic RAM headquarters, while the imposing steel structures of the former maintenance and repair hangars await their conversion into a startup accelerator campus with a food hall.
A little further on, the old terminal building has been transformed into a photography museum dedicated to telling the story of the site: a history of the future. The control and weather towers – technical silhouettes become totems – stand in dialogue with the much taller, sleeker towers of Casablanca Finance City (CFC). The verticality of the new towers, such as the moucharabieh-clad CIMR headquarters, underscores the horizontality of the park and frames a creative, entrepreneurial Moroccan future rooted in a narrative that is fully claimed and valued.
The announced cultural district (20 dedicated hectares) must be seen as an archipelago. The temptation to concentrate – creating a museum quarter or a performing arts quarter – would short-circuit the fabric of everyday proximity. Better to imagine a series of poles within walking distance, linked by promenades that are themselves elements of urbanism, and by vantage points that turn the park into a long belvedere. The old terminal will undoubtedly become one such beacon; a rehabilitated hangar, another; a military barrack reborn from its ashes, a third. Between these poles will live the everyday places: cafés, artisan workshops, small open-air stages, courtyards, walkways, benches. A city succeeds when the exceptional does not crush the ordinary – when the ordinary is enticing enough to make you linger.
The transformations underway in subsequent phases move in this direction. Large arcades reminiscent of Paris’s Station F are being renovated to host contemporary art biennials, while a slender building with horizontal lines is set to house an artist residency. The former command post, with its majestic entrance and imposing colonnade, also awaits a new life. Midway along the site, a patchwork of small chalets emerges unexpectedly alongside an orientalist building worthy of One Thousand and One Nights, destined for dining. This is what narrative coherence earns you. Casa Anfa is not merely a masterplan: it is a story full of digressions, both told and inhabited — and as the Little Prince would have it, “truly useful since it is beautiful.”
The beating heart of this new urban hub is Anfa Park itself, connecting all these emerging places across its 50 hectares. The 20 hectares already open – out of a planned 100 hectares of green space, for a projected population of 100,000 residents and 100,000 workers – currently serve as an in-situ lab. AUDA, which is designed to step back once the transformation is complete, uses the finished first phase of the park as a cultural mini-lab . Uses, circulation patterns, staging, and programming are all tested here. In an experimental spirit, AUDA takes risks, accepting the possibility of failure, and the need for adjusting and correcting. If a concept store for young designers failed to find its public; park-wide free Wi-Fi generated more footfall and dwell time than many a costly amenity.
It is worth underscoring how the park already produces common ground. Free access, intuitive pathways, playgrounds and outdoor fitness equipment, a skatepark, pétanque courts, and a mesh of both ordinary and exceptional events are all designed to foster habit, irregularity and surprise in equal measure. The social and generational diversity, reinforced by walkable access from neighbouring districts – including a large part of Hay Hassani – is not a mantra, but an observation. Urbanity is born of a precise kind of friction: neither forced proximity nor facile communitarianism. In this human ecology, cultural practices serve as gateways, not bastions.
Cultural programming has been deployed intelligently to serve this ethos. Sometimes quotes are used as slogans, but at Anfa Park, the reference to Saint-Exupéry goes beyond the anecdotal coincidence of the Aéropostale. It lends the site an intuitive pedagogy: “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The phrase, so often cited it seems worn, recovers its freshness here: it becomes strategy.
Literature anchors much of the programming, notably through the Anfa Park Book Club, which provides free access to books and hosts literary encounters and events. At regular intervals, dozens of people gather around the Book Club kiosk for offline reading sessions, during which participants set aside their phones and simply read. In the same spirit, the Salon International du Livre Enfant et Jeunesse (SILEJ), now hosted in the park for three consecutive years, is a way of inscribing literary heritage into long-term practice. The latest edition, organised in partnership with the Fondation Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, attracted more than 80,000 visitors in a single week. To read in a former airport is to reconfigure the very idea of “destination.” The book, like the airplane before it, transports across space and time.
Casa Anfa extends this rooted sense of duration to its more demanding cultural practices. The programming favours festivals over regular concerts – intense bursts rather than steady rhythm. But the festivals tend to return each year, proof that a park can absorb collective fervour without surrendering its identity. Anfa Park’s flagship events, the international music festivals Jazzablanca and Timeless, find here a site that offers a parenthesis literally “out of time” – as does Cinéma sous les étoiles (Cinema under the Stars), which twice a year creates a moment of escape and contemplation between earth and sky.
Artist residencies, for their part, introduce another rhythm. They make slow process and deliberate labour visible. And so, the laboratory continues to adjust its mix, conscious that the quality of a place is measured by the impact events leave behind. “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” The lesson of The Little Prince illuminates the intangible investments of an urban project: what the city gives without expectation comes back as loyalty.
Beyond seeking economic returns, AUDA pursues initiatives in service of diversity and solidarity such as inclusive solidarity walks, or supporting local cultural actors, particularly through the association Éducation Artistique et Culturelle-L’Boulvart. For over 15 years, the agency has been a partner and sponsor of the festival L’Boulevard, the flagship event of this pioneering association, which helped shape Morocco’s urban and musical scene in the 1990s. This kind of sustained commitment carries political weight and enables the soft reappropriation of spaces by audiences who would otherwise not have come or would not have stayed. The satisfaction survey showing predominantly pedestrian use is not merely a statistic: it is a symbol of recovered proximity – of a city becoming walkable.
However, this work cannot be fully realised without deeper attention to accessibility in all its forms – communicational, physical, socio-economic and artistic. As the project takes shape, challenges are emerging. The first concerns communication. For the narrative of the place to circulate more widely, AUDA would benefit from sharing more regularly and more broadly not only the progress of its construction sites, but the milestones reached on its cultural engineering projects. Likewise, certain existing amenities – such as free Wi-Fi at Anfa Park, which for many young visitors functions as a genuine catalyst of belonging – would gain from being more widely known. A second challenge relates to comfort. On-site surveys highlight the need for more shaded areas in Anfa Park, essential to the relaxation, wandering and reading that AUDA considers central to the experience it seeks to foster.
Accessibility also runs through pricing, which can create a barrier – sometimes invisible but very real – to residents of surrounding neighbourhoods. Beyond the cost of on-site dining, this perceived barrier is largely driven by ticketing for the two flagship festivals: Timeless and Jazzablanca. A strengthened programme of associative and solidarity-based initiatives, free or partially free, is needed as a powerful lever. In this spirit, Jazzablanca has included a free programme at Place des Nations Unies since 2013. Similarly, Casamémoire, L’EAC-Boulvart and other locally anchored cultural actors in the neighbouring districts offer examples of good practice. And in curatorial terms, diversifying the artistic and cultural offer would broaden the range of audiences, drawing more local residents. This is essential if Casa Anfa is to become a porous and welcoming place. Lowering the entry barrier, whether perceived or real, is the key to AUDA achieving and sustaining its status as an inclusive and equitable urban hub. By working to democratise access to culture, the cultural energy will only grow stronger — and with it, greater tourist appeal.
Many of AUDA’s initiatives already operate within this logic, even though it is a private company. The vast majority of Anfa Park’s programming is free, and where there is a charge, participation costs are modest. Cinema Under the Stars is free; access to SILEJ costs a symbolic five dirhams ($0.50); and Jazzablanca is followed for a full month by the free festival Anfa Park En Fête. But democratising access to culture over the long term cannot rest on AUDA alone. It will require a stronger commitment from public authorities at both local and national levels, and greater powers and resources for the relevant ministries.
For now, thanks to AUDA’s treatment of the first phase as a laboratory of cultural experimentation, the future district will inherit an iterative intelligence accumulated through use. That is rare, and it is precious. If Casa Anfa holds to patient trial and error as its compass, the result will transcend redevelopment. It will invent a distinctly Moroccan way of conjugating heritage and modernity. And, as in the stories we love, what was once an airport will become again what every place should be: a departure and an arrival, an adventure and a home, a loom from which to weave commons from the fragments of a century. That is the true measure of a district that, by capturing its past, captures the imagination of its residents and neighbours – who adopt it in turn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amina Boubia is a political scientist specialising in culture and the MENA region, and Academic Director of the Communication & Media department at the International University of Rabat (UIR).
Her doctoral thesis examined the dynamics underlying the rapid development of music festivals in Morocco. Her academic publications include “‘Artivism’ in the Arab World: A Major Driving Force Towards Democracy” (IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook). Her most recent article is “South is the New Cool: Centering Cultural Studies through Anchoring at Rabat International University: A Case Study from the Burgeoning Public-Private Academic Sphere in Morocco” (Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication).
Before joining UIR, Amina worked in philanthropy and arts development in London. She also wrote extensively as a columnist and correspondent for Moroccan news and culture magazines (Le Journal Hebdomadaire, Dîn wa Dunia).
ABOUT GCDN BRIEFS
GCDN Briefs is a series of articles highlighting insights from members of the Global Cultural Districts Network (GCDN) and associated experts on themes and issues that are relevant to the day-to-day lives of cultural districts. Intended to present the state of play and propose actionable recommendations, these articles complement the annual GCDN research projects and enhance the dissemination of ideas and best practices within the network and beyond.