Introduction

During the first weeks of 2021, in the midst of a pandemic winter with closed borders, curfews, and restricted public transport in Morocco’s capital region Rabat/Salé, bulldozers destroyed hundreds of self-built homes in Salé’s centrally located bidonville (shantytown) Sehb El-Caid. As part of the national Villes Sans Bidonville programme (VSBP, Cities Without Slums) (Beier, 2019; Bogaert, 2018), each household was offered half a subsidised plot for self-building in the quickly growing suburban town Bouknadel, roughly a dozen kilometres away, outside Salé. However, no house had been built so far, and many never will. A large number of the population of Sehb El-Caid is unable to afford the construction of their own resettlement house. The violent eviction literally threw them on the streets, desperately searching for a place to stay – as an immediate relief and for their future lives.

My interest in the forced eviction of Sehb El-Caid is threefold. First, it serves as another example for a recent authoritarian turn of Morocco’s resettlement policies (El Kahlaoui, 2023; Portelli & Lees, 2018), suggesting an urgent need to question claims that “brutal evictions … are not the ordinary modus operandi” (Navez-Bouchanine, 2012, p. 174) and to revisit assertions about inclusive resettlement schemes (Arandel & Wetterberg, 2013; Le Tellier, 2009; Toutain, 2016).

Second, the eviction poses the question of what happens afterwards. Where would people go and what kind of alternative housing strategies do they employ if informal settlements and state-subsidised housing – the world’s most classic forms of affordable housing (Potts, 2020) – are either being demolished or inaccessible? A good body of scholarship has focused on the affordability gap in housing and resettlement projects as well as political strategies and failures to bridge it (Bredenoord et al., 2014; Buckley et al., 2016; Payne, 2022), but little is known about people’s strategies to cope with unaffordability. Similarly, one may observe a growing interest in post-displacement perspectives, yet mostly referring to actually resettled people (Beier et al., 2022; Wang, 2022; Williams et al., 2022; Zaki, 2007). Much less is known on post-eviction lived experiences of people deprived of adequate resettlement options. Their differentiated experiences tend to depend on individuals’ social and economic capital, yet often marked by uncertainty and more peripheral housing futures (Anghel & Alexandrescu, 2023; Leitner et al., 2022; Watt, 2018).

Third, the paper adds insights into a related, severely under-researched phenomenon, characterising many housing and resettlement programmes: the resale of plots or flats by so-called ‘beneficiaries’. Most research has conceived such resales as gentrification (or downward-raiding), whereby people sell their new dwellings to higher-income groups because they cannot afford inhabitation (Garmany & Burdick, 2021; Lemanski, 2014; Williams et al., 2022).Footnote 1 Typically, scholars then assume a return of resellers to informal settlements (Debnath et al., 2019; Lemanski, 2014), but what if such settlements are largely demolished as in the case of Morocco?Footnote 2 To respond to this question, it is crucial to grasp the lived experiences of resellers themselves, yet for methodological reasons most research on resales has either relied on resettled dwellers potentially considering to sell or third parties (e.g. former neighbours, buyers of resettlement flats, etc.) (Debnath et al., 2019; Lemanski, 2014; Garmany & Burdick, 2021; Restrepo Cadavid, 2010). In her analysis of lived experiences of state housing in Gauteng, South Africa, Charlton (2018) has positioned resellers at the lower end of a spectrum, describing it as a comparatively rare form of distancing compared to other forms of (distant) attachment to state housing. Beier (2023a) considered reselling as part of people’s constrained yet carefully considered reconfigurations of standardised housing policy.

In the Moroccan context, the resale of plots is widely referred to as glissement. In the late 1990s, high rates of glissement in resettlement projects inspired thorough reflections of past policies, which led to the (short-term) adoption of participatory elements as well as improved financial assistance (Le Tellier & Guérin, 2009; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003; Toutain, 2016). At the same time, those who sell have found themselves confronted with a stigmatising discourse (for similar discourses in India and South Africa, see Anand & Rademacher, 2011; Beier, 2023a), portraying them as spongers who would move back to bidonvilles with the sole ambition to profit from public housing projects again (Zaki, 2005, p. 65). Yet also in Morocco, almost no research exists that has focused on housing pathways and strategies of ‘resellers’ (Navez-Bouchanine & Dansereau, 2002, pp. 48–49). With rising rates of glissement due to more authoritarian bidonville clearances and unaffordable resettlement, the paper’s aim is to close such long-term research gap and, hence, to follow those who left in order to understand where they move why.

Thus, the central objective of this paper is not that much to revisit a shift in resettlement policies nor to analyse the politico-institutional reasons behind such shift towards more authoritarianism. Instead, the paper takes the shift as a starting point – a given fact – that causes severe new pressure and uncertainty especially for those bidonville residents belonging to the lowest income group. Engaging with the phenomenon of glissement from the perspectives of those affected, I ask how people cope with eviction and unaffordable resettlement housing. What kind of alternative affordable housing options emerge with what kind of consequences for people’s struggle for a decent home?

The paper builds on long-term engagement with Moroccan resettlement policies and 26 narrative-biographic interviews with former residents of Sehb El-Caid, who either sold or were currently selling their resettlement plot in Bouknadel. The interviews took place in September 2021, about half a year after the demolition of the last homes of Sehb El-Caid. They had an average duration of 70 min and were all conducted in Darija, the local Arabic dialect, by both the author and a research assistant whose family has been an established part of the resettled community for decades. His family helped to contact a large number of residents of Sehb El-Caid, thus enabled us to access an ‘unconsciously hidden population group’ (Beier, 2023b) that now lives at dispersed locations, ranging from the close environment of the former bidonville to Sidi Taibi, a peri-urban area some twenty kilometres away. Thanks to their support, we could start insider-driven snowball sampling (Beier, 2023b), which proved to be more effective than calling people, who had written their telephone numbers on ‘for sale’ signs on their plot. To reduce potential selection bias, we further applied respondent-driven sampling. Additionally, we contacted people working in shops close to former Sehb El-Caid to give us further leads based on their local customer base. All interviews were transcribed, then translated, and analysed using a common qualitative analysis software. The analysis was inspired by Clapham’s (2005) housing pathway approach to grasp people’s meanings they attach to their current, past, and future housing. I argue that such reconstructive, biographic analysis is crucial to understand people’s reasoning and decision-making with regards to housing, displacement, and resettlement.

The paper continues with a brief recapitulation of informal settlement policies and how, in practice, many governments have turned away from inclusive upgrading strategies – with Morocco’s VSBP as an emblematic case study. Thereafter, the third section illustrates the affordability gap in resettlement, outlining a large research gap on glissement as a potential consequence of unaffordable and sometimes undesired resettlement. The fourth section builds on the empirical results, ordering them chronologically from experiences of eviction to strategies and rationalities of reselling and, finally, future housing uncertainties. The last section concludes the findings.

Turning Away from Inclusive Informal Settlement Upgrading

With the turn of the millennium, the United Nations made what they called the ‘Challenge of Slums’ (United Nations Human Settlements Programme [UN-Habitat], 2003) a renewed development priority, catching much research and even more policy attention in the years to follow. Although international policy documents have pled for community-based upgrading programmes that seek in situ ‘solutions’ (UN-Habitat, 2003; World Bank & UN-Habitat, 2000), one rather observes an upsurge of large-scale standardised housing programmes (Buckley et al., 2016; Croese et al., 2016) – often related to global inter-urban competition and the problematic slogan ‘Cities Without Slums’, which formed part of the initial wording of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) (Huchzermeyer, 2011). Such supply-side interventions typically require the resettlement of low-income populations groups to urban peripheries (Beier et al., 2022; Williams et al., 2022). As Coelho (2016, p. 113) argues convincingly, they build on “a slum-centric understanding of urban poverty by framing it as a function of housing and services, [ignoring] wider structural and distributional dimensions of urban poverty.” Thus, an important difference to upgrading policies is a shift of priorities: Whereas upgrading aims at improving living conditions in locally embedded ways, without compromising dwellers’ practises of earning a living, resettlement programmes shift focus to the physical eradication of ‘poor housing’ (Huchzermeyer, 2011; Coelho, 2016). Instead, livelihoods are less of a concern. ‘Better shelter’ is assumed to automatically add value to existing urban livelihoods, disregarding any potential shortcomings of planned relocation (Koenig, 2018).

Justified as a political commitment to the MDGs, Morocco’s national programme Villes Sans Bidonville – a literal reference to ‘Cities Without Slums’ – stands exemplarily for the trend toward large-scale housing and resettlement programmes. It targets the clearance of all bidonvilles (shantytowns) in Morocco. Notwithstanding some few prominent exceptions of upgrading up until 2007, VSBP relocates bidonville dwellers to peripheral apartment housing. Sometimes, households are requested to buy a subsidised flat (relogement), more often they receive a subsidised plot for self-building (recasement). Even though ‘inclusive upgrading’ has never been the programme’s dominant modus operandi, in 2010, VSBP received the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour award “for delivering one of the world’s most successful and comprehensive slum reduction and improvement programmes […] – widely considered the best of its kind in Africa” (Cities Alliance, 2010).

Inaugurated in 2004, VSBP succeeded a short period of reflection under the progressive gouvernement d’alternance, which sought to revise past recasement policies that treated the target group in a top-down manner as mere extras (Navez-Bouchanine, 2003, pp. 64–65). Given high rates of vacant or resold resettlement plots, that time, such policies were considered to have limited impact on the overall goal to reduce the number of bidonville dwellers. Consequently, policy reformers advocated for more inclusivity in housing policies, culminating in the introduction of participatory tools (accompagnement social) that should foster the integration of community members and neighbourhood associations into the decision-making process, raise transparency, and accompany all dwellers through the entire resettlement process (Le Tellier, 2009; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003; Toutain, 2011). At the same time, the Programme National d’Action pour la Résorption de l’Habitat Insalubre (PARHI, National Action Programme for the Elimination of Insalubrious Housing), the direct predecessor of VSBP, committed itself to the preference for in-situ rehabilitation (Le Tellier, 2009, p. 197).

With the adoption of the VSBP in 2004, the latter focus on in-situ upgrading disappeared quickly. One year before, Islamist suicide attacks of a dozen of bidonville dwellers in Casablanca’s city centre further enhanced the negative reputation of bidonvilles as potential threats to national security and eventually triggered the VSBP (Bogaert, 2011). Together with the state’s intention to reclaim central urban land, security concerns are named as possible reasons why, once again, recasement became the new norm (Zaki, 2013). Nevertheless, VSBP formed part of a new socio-political agenda of King Mohammed VI, who came into power in 1999 and promoted a more open Morocco, committed to international principles of good governance, human rights and calls for more integrated housing policies by international donor organisations (Arandel & Wetterberg, 2013, pp. 142–143; Zaki, 2006). As such, accompagnement social as well as new microcredit schemes became part of any VSBP project. Reflecting on the early years of VSBP, Navez-Bouchanine (2012, p. 174) speaks of “a context of political display for more transparency … and more consideration of social aspects, including its participatory dimension” – yet, acknowledging severe challenges for a comprehensive implementation of inclusive resettlement. Others were more sceptical, arguing that the sole purpose of accompagnement social was to “make residents accept that they have to leave the bidonville, demolish their shack, and also contribute financially to relocation and their new dwelling” (Le Tellier, 2009, p. 200; see also Toutain, 2011; Zaki, 2013).

Despite such critique, most scholarship acknowledged a certain policy change away from authoritarian top-down resettlement, claiming that forced evictions (notwithstanding occasional evidence) belong to the past; a mode of policy used mostly during the protectorate and the “Years of Lead” under Hassan II (Navez-Bouchanine, 2012, pp. 168–174; Zaki, 2005, pp. 88–89). Notwithstanding, Zaki (2007) rightfully notes that the informal tenure situation of bidonvilles offered authorities the possibility to reinforce a threat of eviction at any time in order to add authority to resettlement operations and make people move.

However, more recent resettlement projects in Casablanca and Rabat-Salé give much reason to assume that forced evictions have not disappeared as a dominant mode of policy intervention. Recent resettlements show little sensitivity to residents’ specific challenges and demands – in particular when it comes to smaller or medium-sized bidonville communities. This is not to say that people are evicted without alternatives, yet these alternatives are increasingly inaccessible, which means that – de facto – resettlement has turned into forced eviction, with participatory elements fully reduced to means of persuasion and manipulation. Before going further into detail concerning the case study of Sehb El-Caid, documented examples of such return of authoritarian policies include among others the eviction of bidonville Douar Wasti in Casablanca (Portelli & Lees, 2018) and Douar Ouled Dlim, a community on tribal land in Rabat (El Kahlaoui, 2023).

The Affordability Gap and Glissement in Resettlement

If instead of upgrading large-scale housing programmes with resettlement is the preferred mode of housing policy interventions of many African, Latin American and Asian governments, affordability of new housing is crucial. Many housing programmes that have been set up in the context of “Cities Without Slums” indeed face the problem to bridge the affordability gap – between the minimum costs to produce decent housing and the maximum low-income dwellers are able to afford (Berner, 2016; Buckley et al., 2016). Public subsidies as well as conditional land use restrictions and state-guaranteed loans to low-income dwellers have been among the typical government responses. Yet, the affordability gap seems rather persisting if not widening, which, as Potts (2020) argues convincingly, is mainly the result of a demand side continuously affected by insecure, irregular, and insufficient income as a result of precarious work. On the supply side, others have argued that lower buildings standards, higher densities as well as alternative and collective property rights could positively influence affordability (Mitlin & Bartlett, 2020; Payne, 2022; Turok, 2016).

To tackle the affordability gap, the Moroccan state has provided public land for the construction of new towns and settlements, in which apartments and plots are attributed to VSBP target groups at a subsidised price. In addition, the VSBP included a new, state-championed microcredit scheme called FOGARIM (Le Tellier, 2009; World Bank, 2006), which – besides the introduction of accompagnement social – can be seen as another response to failures of previous resettlement schemes. Previous schemes were largely unaffordable, resulting in a high rate of non-occupation of resettlement housing by so-called beneficiaries (glissement) (Toutain & Rachmuhl, 2014, p. 29). However, many resettled residents are still unable to access FOGARIM support due to irregular and insecure sources of income. In response, authorities in Casablanca tolerated in some projects a third-party scheme, where people would ask a tiers associé (third party) to build the requested G + 3 house for them. The third party pays for the plot, the construction, and people’s temporary accommodation during construction. In exchange, the third party becomes the owner of the two lower floors, while the two resettled households move into the two upper floors. Scholars noted that the third-party scheme has effectively improved affordability of resettlement housing and reduced the number of glissements (Toutain, 2013, 2016; Zaki, 2013), notwithstanding serious risks (e.g. prolonged, uncompleted or botched-up construction) related to its market-driven volatility and a lack of regulation (Beier, 2021).

Whereas consultants have promoted the Moroccan example as a promising strategy that might be replicated in other African countries, Morocco’s more recent resettlement projects seem to turn away from the third-party scheme. In Bouknadel, the resettlement site for the residents of Sehb El-Caid, the state only allows for the construction of G + 2 buildings. Thus, if two households are attributed one plot together, the third-party scheme in such context does not work as third-party funding would not be profitable. It is also forbidden to turn the ground floor into a business site. Consequently, low-income households displaced from Sehb El-Caid face severe challenges to afford the construction of their own resettlement housing. Whereas some households with rather more regular employment may be able to access FOGARIM loans, others have hardly any other options than to resell their plot rights and to find accommodation elsewhere. As the law does not allow resales within the first five years after attribution, such resales happen informally and through a so-called promessse de vente (sale commitment) – at a lower price and with more risks.

Given the high rate of glissement as well as the lack of choice and participatory tools, the experience of displaced households of Sehb El-Caid may be understood as a return of housing policies from the 1980s – before any attempts at more inclusive and affordable resettlement schemes were considered. In the 1980s, people who sold their resettlements plots were assumed to re-settle in other or new bidonvilles, which made them prone to discriminatory discourses accusing them of fraud and profiteering (Zaki, 2005, p. 65). Today, possibilities to re-settle in bidonvilles are largely limited due to demolitions and restrictive control of local authorities. Thus, the question remains: What do people do if they cannot afford resettlement? Where do they move why? What are their future housing strategies?

Experiencing Unaffordability

Since the French protectorate, bidonvilles – the “illegitimate children of modernity” (Arrif, 2017) – have been the most affordable places to settle in Morocco’s cities. Unlike in other countries, landlordism in Morocco’s bidonvilles is uncommon. Deprived of formal land titles, most inhabitants are owner-occupiers who do not pay rent, service fees, or taxes.Footnote 3 As a study on Er-Rhamna in Casablanca showed, a large number of bidonville households previously lived in rental accommodation in the same city, perceiving the move into bidonvilles as a sort of relief from the stressful pressure to afford rent (Beier, 2019, 143f). RachidaFootnote 4 (MA24, f, 45), one of the interviewed residents, explains her decision to move to Sehb El-Caid, underlining the importance of ownership – whether informal or formal – for precariously employed people:

There are times when you don’t have work and you can’t pay the rent. It was better to buy something […]. If I worked, I earned 200 MAD [per day], but only if my hands were not hurting because of the rough wool […]. I thought I shouldn’t continue working like crazy to secure the rent, water and electricity […]. That’s why I came to Sehb El-Caid!

Reminding us of the crucial link between decent work and decent housing (Potts, 2020), the demolition of Sehb El-Caid in 2021 marked a moment of rupture that divided the heterogeneous community roughly into those who could afford the construction of the resettlement house and others who could not (or who preferred other solutions). While there is increasing agreement that resettlement may mark a “double-edged moment for the poor” (Bhan & Shivanand, 2013, p. 54), characterised by simultaneous experiences of violence and hope, loss and gain (cf. Beier, 2024; Beier et al., 2022; Hammar, 2017; Meth et al., 2023), it needs further acknowledgement of resettlement’s power to divide (cf. Doshi, 2013). Exemplary is the painful experience of Karima (MA20, f, 59):

I don’t have the means to build; we are poor. We’d have loved to live there. When I come [to Bouknadel], I am getting depressed. […] Each time I come to visit the place, I am doing nothing else than crying. […]. It’s hurting when I see that others have managed to build their houses unlike us. It makes me sick.

In the following three sub-sections, I am focusing exclusively on the experiences of former residents of Sehb El-Caid who did not move to the resettlement site. From own observations and interview statements, I estimate this to be the large majority of former residents (Fig. 1). For most of them, the primary reason was the impossibility to afford the construction of resettlement housing, like in the exemplary case of Karima. Given the lack of affordable alternatives, they considered themselves as being chased away by the state: “It’s called eviction, it’s not a benefit!” (MA05, m, 33). In a rough chronological order, the subsequent sub-sections start with the immediate aftermath of eviction and its divisive effects on the community (4.1) before I turn to the resale of plots as a way to cope with unaffordability (4.2) and as a first step towards building an (uncertain) future elsewhere (4.3).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Vacant plots “for sale” (للبيع) on the resettlement site in Bouknadel. Picture: private (07/2021)

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Social Division, Forced Eviction, and Housing Emergency

As mentioned above, an important critique of housing and resettlement programmes in the context of Cities Without Slums is their focus on the clearance of informal settlements (Huchzermeyer, 2011). The improvement of residents’ living conditions only comes second, supposedly achieved through the provision of “better” housing. Morocco’s Ministère de l’Habitat, de l’Urbanisme et de la Politique de la Ville (2012, p. 14) is clear about VSBP’s central objective: “Morocco has opted for a new approach which finds its fundaments in […] the UN Millennium Declaration. The program[me] aims at eradicating all shanties.” This primary concern with eradication is most obvious in projects with inaccessible or uncertain housing alternatives. Yahya (MA01, m, 28) affirms: “The most essential is that the shack [barraka] gets demolished. There is a deadline until it must all be cleared and you, fuck off! There is no choice! The state has decided, fuck off, go sleep on the streets, die, commit suicide, we don’t care!” Souad (MA21, w, 51) adds a notion of disappointment that builds on a historical understanding of state care linked to resettlement: “We have suffered a lot [in Sehb El-Caid]. We have lived through many things there, only that eventually they displace us. It’s like being struck by lightning.” Indeed, the eviction heavily impacted state-citizen relationships: “They broke our morale with violence. You feel like you are not a human being” (MA09, m, 35).

The bulldozers that cleared Sehb El-Caid while there were still many inhabitants living in their dwellings marked only the last step of a longer strategy of social division that should ease the clearance of the settlement. Is it important to briefly describe this process as it shows how (un)affordability may become a strategic tool of manipulation supporting a “carrot and stick approach” (Navez-Bouchanine, 2012). The first residents who chose to accept displacement were already looking forward to resettlement and rather certain that they could afford the house construction by means of own savings or access to credit schemes such as FOGARIM. At the same time, local authorities started to bribe influential and centrally emplaced community members. Zoubeir (MA11, m), a 30-year-old hair dresser, was part of the militant youth protesting for in situ solutions. Because of his YouTube videos, the qaïdFootnote 5 called him repeatedly, at first to convince him to work for the authorities and to gather information on some neighbours. Zoubeir ultimately refused the offer but amidst an increasingly tense atmosphere with repeated rumours about demolition, the qaïd became more direct:

He told me, ‘You must leave! There is no ‘you could work for me’ anymore!’ […] One day, he called me via phone and told me that I should demolish […] ‘You have the right to get a half plot!’ I told him that I wouldn’t demolish for a half plot. He told me, ‘It’s okay, sign, sign…! You will demolish immediately!’

For Zoubeir, being allocated an entire plot was crucial as only the resale of an entire plot enabled him to buy a basic house without title deed in one of the established low-income neighbourhoods (quartiers populaires) of Salé. In the absence of any further compensation, the resettlement modalities are of utmost importance for bidonville dwellers, which makes them a strategic governmental tool.Footnote 6 To ease the clearance and undermine protest through petty bargaining and pressure, authorities use information about each particular household in strategic ways. In the case of Abderrahmane (MA13, m, 45), who the qaïd feared as a potential source of protests, authorities knew that his unmarried brother was not eligible for resettlement, as his shack did not have an own door. Hence, they offered him to put his name on the papers, if Abderrahmane accepts to move. In another case, authorities knew that Sawssane (MA03, f, 34) was not counted as an eligible single household because her divorce was not yet finalised in formal terms. Hence, the qaïd told her: “I have one condition: If you want that I register you, you will demolish as one of the firsts. If you stay among the last ones, you will not benefit at all!” Sawssane demolished her shack the next day.

Over time, authorities became less willing to engage in deal making without further corruption. Local authorities were aware that if the first influential inhabitants demolish their homes, this would increase the pressure for the remaining households to leave as well: “The place I lived […] was the most dangerous one in Sehb El-Caid. [The authorities] knew that if I leave, all people would follow me. Nobody will stay there!” (MA04, Anas, m, 43). As the life in bidonville strongly builds on mutual help, neighbours play a significant role for people’s decision making: “The one neighbour had demolished his shack (barraka), the one on the other side as well, and I stayed alone in the middle. There were the cats, the rain … What should I do?” (Hassan, MA26, m). As such, weakened community ties together with repeated threats of a violent clearance facilitated the implementation of such forced eviction in January and February 2021. Since then, the site has remained vacant with no sign of an envisaged real estate project.

An immediate result of forced eviction without any ready and accessible alternative was a high number of households searching for a place to rent. Especially poorer households of Sehb El-Caid, who had hoped for more affordable resettlement options (in particular heavily subsidised apartments), were most affected by the forced eviction. The following interview excerpt (MA10), shows how the loss of affordable shelter has put poor people in a difficult condition as renters, from which many had initially escaped by settling in bidonvilles:

Zohra – “Who didn’t want to leave Sehb El-Caid? The poor who didn’t have anything! How many poor I know who did not even have the means to rent or even to get something to eat. The shack (barraka) covered them.

Fatima – Some have the means and could get away with their houses … They now have their houses and have retired there.

Zohra – [… Fatima] took out a loan for the barraka […]. She now pays for the rent, the [microcredit], water, and electricity, that’s too much! She couldn’t even find something to eat for her children. It’s difficult! Renting has become expensive these days … We take some money from here and there to pay rent! […] A barraka is better for the poor!”

Because of the high emergency demand, rents rose after the demolition of Sehb El-Caid, which made it even more difficult for poor households to find a place to stay. Being stigmatised as ‘slum dwellers’ further limited their options. They were literally going from one quartier populaireFootnote 7 to another to ask for places to rent. Whereas some even experienced direct hostility by landlords who did not want to rent out to people from bidonvilles (MA07, MA17), others describe their search for emergency housing as a sort of relegation and shared feelings of marginalisation. With their limited budgets many could only afford the most undesired places, far from Sehb El-Caid, sometimes dark and without mobile network (MA07, MA12). Yahya (MA01) had started his search in the neighbourhoods close to Sehb El-Caid, where he could not find anything affordable to rent, forcing him to search in less desired quartiers populaires like Oued Ed-Dahab:

I continued to search from quartier to quartier, from street to street, until I arrived in Oued Ed-Dahab, right at the entry. I couldn’t find anything until I arrived at the other side, close to the end of the quartier, where I found the least expensive room of all. I was obliged to take it even though the room is just a cage as they were about to demolish all my belongings.

Most displaced residents found a rental accommodation as an immediate relief, but some residents also pointed at people who became homeless or who rebuilt makeshift shacks on the same site – confronted with recurring demolitions (MAX1). Some had already acquired alternative accommodation during their time in Sehb El-Caid (MA02, MA09, MA25), others moved to family members on the country side (MA27a).

Co** with Unaffordability, Reselling the Plot

When we interviewed displaced former residents of Sehb El-Caid in September 2021, only three respondents had already secured new (informal) property, where they were planning to settle down (MA08, MA12, MA14). 17 out of 26 were living in rented accommodation. Most of them were renting informally in quartiers populaires like Hay Inbiat and Oued Ed-Dahab (Fig. 2), some slightly better-off households could afford more desired places like Bettana and Hay Salam, closer to Sehb El-Caid and the city centre. Besides unfavourable resettlement conditions (see Sect. 3), the rent burden made it even further difficult to access and afford resettlement housing, while at the same time the monthly hardships of paying rent increased pressure to find affordable long-term solutions.

[To sell the plot] is the only solution I’ve got because I’ve got nothing to build [the house]! It’s difficult! How much you need is a lot and then you have this worry with the rent that follows you, daily expenses follow you, my young boy who wants to study … (MA16, Abderrazzak, m, 41).

Notwithstanding some critical voices about the unfamiliar and peripheral location of the resettlement site, it is important to underline that many people, in principle, would have loved to move to the resettlement site. Yet, it is the unaffordable resettlement scheme that makes it impossible. Beside the rent burden, the politically promoted solution to bridge the affordability gap through credit does not work for many poor people with unstable income. “I have no income that could help me to build. My husband earns 2,000 MAD, I can’t pay the rent and take out a loan to pay for it; I have no money to build.” (Khadija, MA17, f, 49). Indeed, many respondents pointed at the crucial role of decent housing as a foundation for successful resettlement solutions: “If you work, you live. If you don’t work, […] it’s not possible, […] you don’t even have the money to pay for the [administrative charges for the] plot, how are you going to build?” (Moustapha, MA18, m, 54).

Fig. 2
figure 2

A typical street in the quartier populaire Hay Inbiat, one of the most common destinations for displaced residents from Sehb El-Caid. Author’s picture (09/2021)

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The example of Sehb El-Caid further shows that one-size-fits-all resettlement schemes disregard heterogeneity within informal settlements, treating the community as if they were all the same – with the poor being worse off. Several respondents would have loved to be able to choose between different options.

It wasn’t that we hadn’t wanted to or hadn’t agreed, but we wanted to move of our own free will and for them to get our opinion first. […]. In any case, they should have selected those who didn’t have the means [to build a house] and […] offer them flats or another solution. Now everything has been mixed up. Everyone had a right to [half a plot], and that included people who were well off and those who didn’t have enough money, and everyone had to look for a place to rent. That’s why some people suffered harm, especially those who were really poor and had nothing (Souad, MA21, f, 51).

Given the unaffordability of planned resettlement, reselling – even if undesired – for most respondents was the only option to have a chance to access alternative, non-rental housing. While several respondents mentioned that they would need more time outside rental accommodation to be able to save money and construct the house, the difficult living conditions in undesired and precarious rental housing pressures households even further to quickly sell the plot and seek alternative housing. Notwithstanding some respondents who felt better off in terms of safety and shelter, most respondents perceived a worsening of living conditions compared to their lives in Sehb El-Caid. This relates especially to new costs but also to an unfamiliar neighbourhood, the more distant location away from friends and family, and discomfort with shared facilities such as toilets.

I’m struggling […], I’m regretting that I left the shack (barraka) and moved here, […] there’s nothing but problems. One shared electricity metre for the entire house! I don’t use much water or electricity, but I pay [350 MAD] a month, you understand? […] The house with these people isn’t great, women smoke [joints] and my child is hearing indecent talks in the street… At least, it’s a house. […] If I’m at home, I lock the door, I don’t talk much to people, and I don’t want to stay there. I’d like to change! (Mehdi, MA05, m, 33)

It’s not that I just want to sell it, I want to sell it rather today than tomorrow, […] because now I just wander, my children wander. And how they grow up here… you hear indecent words. (Abderrahmane, MA13)

Even people who are not renting may suffer from worse living conditions, if they, for example, have to give up their independence and move back to their parents or in-laws (MA13, MA14, MA24, MA27a). Even if people do not suffer from bad living conditions, they are forced to find a solution, as the state may take back the plot in case the construction was not completed after a certain period. Thus, resettlement and precarious housing conditions may create a situation of uncertainty and restlessness, where staying is no option. In this sense, reselling the plot seemed like an exit strategy, even if it comes with further risks and uncertainties to find more permanent housing.

Uncertain Housing Futures

In absence of decent work with social security (e.g. paid sick leave and pensions), property – informal or not – is crucial for people’s own feeling of stability. For some respondents like Rachida (MA24), this was already the most important reason to settle in a bidonville. It was clear that she could not continue renting forever due to her physically strenuous industrial labour that was her sole source of income. Now, many were back at this situation. For all respondents, it was clear, that renting does not present a permanent solution.

The most important thing is that you don’t have to worry about the rent. As far as the location is concerned, I don’t have a problem. Like even if I go further away and I add half an hour, I’m comfortable. (Yassine, MA07, m, 40).

Thus, the resale was the first step to re-access more secure and permanent housing. However, similar to people’s constraints to find emergency housing directly after eviction, their options to purchase own property are limited. This is mainly because of the rather low price of hardly more than 300.000 MADFootnote 8 at which people may sell an entire plot in Bouknadel. This price lies below the market price. First, because most people could not yet pay the administrative charges, which is then subtracted from the purchasing price. Second, because people can only resell informally with a promesse de vente due to the fact that resales are legally prohibited during the first five years. The promesses de vente come with risks for the buyers, as they do not possess the full ownership rights until the end of the five-years-period.

It’s too expensive [to buy in Bettana, a central neighbourhood close to Sehb El-Caid]. […] If they had just givenFootnote 9 us plots, it would have been easier. […] You can’t just sell, because they don’t give you this property. If [the resale ban] didn’t exist, I would have bought in Bettana and wouldn’t worry. This resale ban scares [buyers]. They say I could change my mind at any time. (Anas, MA04).

Thus, the modest returns from resales limit alternative options and function as another divide between better-off and poor households. Especially people with unstable income, without savings and with only half a plot may only afford informal ownership of either an informal dwelling in one of the peripheral and peri-urban communities outside Salé or a basic flat (étage) in one of the city’s less central quartiers populaires like Hay Inbiat and Oued Ed-Dahab, where people may find étages for about 15,000 to 18,000 MAD.

AppartementsFootnote 10 are expensive, they cost 25 [million centimes] and more. […] That’s the reason that don’t let me take an appartement. Thus, I must take an étage in a house that is already built, just that it should not be in a quartier with tramps. […] I like Hay Salam, because it’s clean, [… but] it is too expensive […], maybe I am buying in Hay Inbiat. (Sawssane, MA03).

This is not to say that all displaced residents settling in above-mentioned quartiers populaires are ultimately unhappy with life at these places. Some appreciate the working-class character, including the low price level of local markets. However, the crucial point here is people’s limited power to make own choices – in particular poor households and households with extraordinary care responsibilities (e.g. disabled children). They may be forced to accept precarious shelter conditions or insecurity, and to live at distant locations such as Sidi Taibi (Fig. 3). Others with more stable employment and/or with an entire plot on the resettlement site were in a slightly more advantageous position to choose between more options – including flats in more desired neighbourhoods close to former Sehb El-Caid and with (prospects for) formal titles.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Demolitions of peri-urban housing in Sidi Taibi, more than 20 km away from the city centre of Salé. Author’s picture (09/2021)

Full size image

However, the example of Malika (MA14, f, 36), who sold her half plot at 140.000 MAD, shows the vulnerability of people’s own agency, demanding temporary setbacks and hardship (e.g. tough housing conditions) despite slightly better socio-economic positions (e.g. stable work). Before she could resell her half plot and buy own property at a desired place, she lived with her children in an uncomfortable and small rooftop room of her family house – split from her husband.

I spent the year with my family and finished the credit [for her dwelling in Sehb El-Caid]. I worked and my husband worked. We both worked so that we could barely pay off the money. When we had finished, he went to the bank again. The 14 [million centimes from selling the half plot] won’t help us to buy a flat. […] I’ve looked in El Oued and you’ll find 22 and more, like you won’t find at this price. We’ve found houses without water and electricity, and without cement at 18 million. It was tiresome! There are some inside El Oued, where there’s no sun and some with no windows at 14. I don’t want something like that. […] We found something at 20 and he took 6 [from the bank]. […] We bought it unregistered, just a paper, because if you want to register it, you need money and we were barely able to pay its price.

The last sentence from Malika’s statement above alludes to a reproduction of future uncertainties, because formal property with strong security of tenure were out of reach for most resettled residents. Thus, even those who could afford own property may be confronted with a recurring threat of eviction and displacement. Several respondents residing in different types of housing – ranging from habitat non-réglementaire in rather central and established quartiers populaires to more recent and peripheral informal settlements (e.g. Ben Aouiche) and periurban housing in former villages (e.g. Sidi Taibi, see Fig. 3) – shared specific fears of being evicted again. Such a potential second eviction is likely to hit people even harder, as they then may not have the right to receive any resettlement option (Beier & Chinig, forthcoming).

The reality is that you take half a plot and you go and sell it. […] This won’t buy you anything! What do you do? Going back to Ben Aouiche and take a shack again? […] If they will come again doing a census, you won’t even get another benefit [of a potential future resettlement], you’ll be lost! (Moustapha, MA18).

Likewise, the situation of respondents who could not exit rental accommodation soon (MA01, MA10, MA13, MA16) was insecure and uncertain as well. Yahya (MA01), who currently shared a flat with some friends, could only resell a quarter plot and saw no other option than emigration. Others were seeking to rent through a specific informal rental system (rhin), with landlords requiring a relatively high key money or provision (the so-called rhin) in return for very low monthly rents.

In addition to such uncertain housing futures, many respondents were suffering from a loss of community and belonging as a result of displacement to dispersed locations. Many men were still frequenting the same cafés on a daily basis, but for some transport was too expensive. Living in an unfamiliar environment may also impede people’s opportunities to find employment through social networks and limit their resilience against various shocks such as sickness and a sudden job loss. In Sehb El-Caid, community solidarity networks played an important role in that regard, but they do not function anymore if people live at dispersed locations. For example, Yahya (MA01) remarked that it was no longer possible to buy on credit at the local shops, because the owner would not trust you. When Yassine (MA07) saw the empty site of former Sehb El-Caid for the first time after demolition, he had tears in his eyes: “Even if we lived at a marginalised place, there was a spirit of fraternity, not even within families but also in-between neighbours […]. Everyone helped each other, […] that’s the atmosphere that we miss now.”

Conclusion

I lived in the shacks, which means with cockroaches and rats […]. You’d love to take something good, move and live at a nice and clean place. But now I live in Hay Inbiat, it’s not a good place. […] I live as being destroyed… I just think about getting the money for the rent, and for water and electricity! […] It’s our right! The right that the state has to give you [a house] has become a dream! What does it mean to dream of having a home? It’s become your ambition, your wish. My wish is […] to have a home, to live in peace, and not to leave your children in the street… Do you understand me? (Mehdi, MA05).

This powerful statement of Mehdi, a young unemployed, who had spent all his life in Sehb El-Caid, sums up low-income people’s perceptions of a recent setback of Morocco’s resettlement policies, as documented by this article about the displacement of one of Salé’s oldest and most central bidonvilles. Although Mehdi’s strong wording may not represent the entire heterogeneous spectrum of displaced residents’ opinions about resettlement, but it points out the most important conclusion of this paper: Morocco’s resettlement housing has become inaccessible and unaffordable for many bidonville dwellers! This is a clear departure from previous policy attempts at develo** more inclusive resettlement programmes (Le Tellier, 2009; Navez-Bouchanine, 2003, 2008; Toutain, 2016; Toutain & Rachmuhl, 2014). The case of Sehb El-Caid shows the power to divide of non-participatory and ill-designed housing and resettlement policies that primarily seek to clear bidonvilles instead of being concerned with an improvement of living conditions of low-income residents (cf. Leitner et al., 2022; Williams et al., 2022). Whereas some households with professional employment and/or household members abroad may be able to build resettlement house as envisaged by the state, those with low income and precarious work are merely evicted without adequate compensation. Thus, after a period with new participatory elements, occasional in-situ upgrading, and innovative financing schemes such as the third-party system (Navez-Bouchanine, 2003, 2012; Toutain, 2013; Zaki, 2013), Morocco’s resettlement policies seem to be back to the 1980s, when the unaffordability of top-down resettlement schemes produced high numbers of glissement.

Experiences of such glissement have been in the centre of this research. Whereas post-displacement studies typically focus on actually resettled people (Beier, 2019; Harroud, 2019; Wang, 2022; Williams et al., 2022; Zaki, 2007), the analysis of housing pathways of people off the sites – displaced from Sehb El-Caid and unable to afford resettlement housing – highlight the often overlooked lived consequences of exclusionary resettlement schemes. The results counter discriminatory discourses that – in Morocco and beyond – have portrayed people, who resell their resettlement properties as spongers who would return to bidonvilles in order to profit again from a benevolent state (cf. Zaki, 2005, 65f). In fact, people do not resell because they want to profit again, they resell out of necessity – unable to afford the proposed resettlement options. In line with existing scholarship on resales of state housing (Debnath et al., 2019; Lemanski, 2014; Restrepo Cadavid, 2010; Williams et al., 2022), many respondents in Salé would have loved to inhabit resettlement housing if they could, but feel pressured if not forced to resell. Others may choose more deliberately not to live at the resettlement site, because it is too far away from their workplace or their places of belonging. Although the case study may appear as a classic example of “downward-raiding” (Garmany & Burdick, 2021), the partial existence of non-economic reasons for reselling as well as the variety of post-displacement residential strategies may highlight the need to acknowledge individual agency in addition to notions of force (Beier, 2023a; Charlton, 2018). In that sense, biographic analysis may help to make sense of the enquired complexity especially concerning the directions of post-eviction residential mobility. However, the results challenge Clapham’s (2005) assumed linearity of housing pathways. Rather, marginalised people’s variegated considerations of future (im)possibilities (Sect. 4.3) require the parallel existence of multiple housing strategies to be able to cope with (unforeseen) challenges.

Indeed, the results show that the largely unaffordable resettlement scheme has divided the community of Sehb El-Caid and affected them in different ways, confirming existing scholarship that observed disproportional adverse effects on the lowest income groups (Leitner et al., 2022). Whereas some households, who could negotiate better resettlement conditions or rely on more regular employment accessed alternative (informal) homeownership, the majority of respondents were put further at risk. The consequences of displacement affected their capacity to achieve their most important housing objective, namely to secure stable residential futures. One may distinguish three different reasons: First, because demolitions of bidonvilles destroyed a large number of affordable housing and made a return to previous forms of living impossible. Second, because new costs of often low-quality rental accommodation further reduced people’s possibility to make long-term plans, save money, and demand credit. Third, because low prices for plots at the resettlement site limited people’s ability to afford decent and tenure secure alternatives. As a result of all three reasons and in contrast to scholarship supposing a return of resellers to their previous or similar informal settlements (Debnath et al., 2019; Lemanski, 2014), many of the enquired post-eviction lived experiences of housing appear to be more precarious, uncertain, and insecure than before. In addition, some poorer households are likely to be trapped in a vicious cycle of short-termed housing options and recurring displacement (cf. Adscheid, 2024; Beier & Chinig, forthcoming; Watt, 2018). Most effectively, such a situation could have been avoided by upgrading policies that do not displace people from their places of living. However, also resettlement could have been better designed, with options to choose between different types of alternative housing (ready apartments vs. plots for auto-construction) and more inclusive regulations that allow for third-party funding and formal resales.