Ifrane "Garden City"

Ifrane was planned according to the “garden city” model of urban design, fashionable in Western Europe between the two world wars.^[6] The concept of the garden city was originally developed in Britain as a model of social reform to solve the problems of 19th century industrial cities. By the 1920s however it had lost its social purpose to become an urban design type. Garden cities required low density housing consisting of fully detached or semi-detached single family homes surrounded by gardens.

In order to break with industrial-era grid plans, garden cities were always laid out with curving tree-lined streets. In fact, most garden cities were affluent suburbs, not true cities in their own right. They catered to the tastes of the upper middle classes who could afford to own a private automobile and property in the suburbs. They gave the illusion of county life, with village-type architecture, curvy streets and lots of trees, to people who in reality worked in big cities. Ifrane’s initial garden city plan was designed in 1928 in Rabat by the Services Techniques of the Bureau de Contrôle des Municipalités, a division of the Direction des Affairs Politiques.

The 1928 plan - for the neighborhood known as Hay Riad today - had typical garden city features: curvy streets named for flora (Rue des lilas, Rue des tilleuls,etc.), and chalet-style houses. Houses could occupy only 40% of plots; the rest had to be planted as a garden. Moreover,large parts of the center of the town consisted of public gardens. Some of the original architecture can still be seen, especially in the neighborhood around the town hall and the Perce Neige Hotel. The summer homes built by the colons were designed by many of the same architects who built the European parts of Casablanca and Rabat. Whereas the European architecture in these big cities was innovative and intentionally modern, Ifrane’s houses were built in traditional European styles and resembled those in the suburbs of contemporaneous French cities.

Ifranes’s first public buildings were a post office and a Catholic church. The church, consecrated in 1939, was designed by Paul Tournon (1881–1964), a recipient of the prestigious Prix de Rome who had also designed the Sacré Coeur Church in Casablanca. The resort function of the new town was consolidated with the building of a number of hotels. Ifrane’s first flagship hotel was the Balima, which was demolished in the 1980s. The other main hotel was the Grand Hôtel, which has recently been refurbished. A Royal Palace was also built for Sultan Muhammad b.Yûsuf.

Ifrane is thus an “imperial” city in that it houses a palace and benefits from royal patronage.One final institution of Ifrane’s early years worthy of mention is the penitentiary which no longer exists, and the site, across from the Police Academy and the new police Commissariat, has been redeveloped as a summer camp for the Ministry of Justice. The penitentiary served as a Prisoner of War camp during WWII. The popular story of the origin of Ifrane’s lion sculpture involves an Italian inmate of this prison sculpting the lion out of an outcrop of limestone, however this is not true as the lion dates from at least 1936 thus predating WWII.^[7]

The garden city hill station high in the Middle Atlas was always going to be an illusion of suburban middle class France. The colonial reality of the place was manifest in two ways. First of all the inhabitants of Zaouiat Sidi Abdeslam, the original owners of the land on which the town was built, were never properly compensated for their loss. Secondly, the initial town plan was incomplete. Provisions were made for the housing and infrastructure of colon home-owners, but not for the Moroccan maids, gardeners or guards who worked for them. Finding no housing in the official allotments, these people had to build their own houses some distance away, across a ravine north of the town. As elsewhere in Morocco at the time, a shantytown thus grew up next to the colonial town. This is the origin of Timdiqin (officially called Hay Atlas).