“Fast urban model-making”: constructing Moroccan urban expertise through Zenata Eco-City

ABSTRACT This paper explores Morocco’s ambitions to become a city-building “expert” in Africa through Zenata Eco-City, a project being built near Casablanca as part of Morocco’s national new city-building strategy. Despite being in early stages of construction, Zenata’s builders enthusiastically promote the future city as an urban model for Africa and have begun to export it long before the project’s completion. Building on urban policy mobilities literature and research on emergent new city models, we examine Zenata as an example of “fast model-making”, and analyze how authority is constructed for a model based on ideas rather than on a completed city. We explore the process of policy research and “learning” used to create and legitimize the model and investigate how promotional strategies to export it produce narratives about the city’s success and the expertise of its developers. We raise concerns about Zenata’s fast model and the circulation of expertise without content.