Colonial planners preserved old city quarters as deliberate visual contrast.

Evidence

At first sight the older, indigenous quarters of the city appeared to be excluded from the new colonial order. When Lyautey’s guests are shown the main street of Casablanca it seems to them unbalanced, with low, irregular houses on one side and tall buildings on the other. ‘Precisely!’ replies Lyautey. ‘On the left you have the façade of the native town … On the right, the façade of the European town, large properties in the French style.’ In Cairo during the colonial period, French experts discussing the esthétique of the modern quarters insisted on a similar exclusion of the older part of the city. There could be no reorganisation of the older part, and if anything were to be rebuilt there, they said, ‘it must be Oriental’. The Arab town, it was explained, must be preserved to show to future generations what the former city of the Caliphs was like, before there was built alongside it an important cosmopolitan colony completely separate from the native quarter . — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 508

Categorization

• CANDY: Lyautey’s tour-guide one-liner about the two façades of Casablanca is a crisp, quoteable colonial irony.