The liminal city of Tangier: first steps

1st July, 2024

Ginevra Montefusco

The city of Tangier, long perceived as peripheral by the central government, is acquiring a strategic role for the kingdom of Morocco. Structural investments in Tangier involve several key sectors of Morocco's growing economy, namely logistics, tourism, fish industry. From being an exotic and cursed city, ('Tanger, Danger', as the popular saying goes), Tangier is redefining itself internally and externally as a Mediterranean city and liminal place: gateway to Europe, centre of development and growth. These ongoing transformations are very interesting to read through the lens of food, due to its power to unlock the sense of place, the processes of identity construction, as well as community fragmentation and deconstruction. Reading urban food systems and the movements that shape them opens up interesting spaces to discuss food injustice intersected with spatial injustice, as well as grassroots possibilities of food sovereignty and resistance.

Fieldwork in the Tangier metropolitan area and Tangier-Tetouan province took place between April 25 to May 13, 2024. The places visited were chosen to trace the relationships between food producers and cities, connecting rural, coastal, and peri-urban areas to urban food nodes. This mapping of flows involved the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, with a focus on the province of Larache and the city of Fnidq, considered as two areas of influence in the construction of Tangier's foodscape, and nodal spaces of fisheries and agriculture policies at the state and regional levels. In fact, this pre-field aimed to observe the trans-scalar phenomena that shape the everyday dimensions of the urban food experience, starting from some of the food places of the Tangier. These places, such as markets, ports, and neighborhoods, are understood as relational, formed by global and local processes, regionally interconnected, and inhabited by complex subjectivities and communities.

The question that guided this first phase of the research, then, was: what processes from the global to the local impact Tangier's food systems, and how do these internal and external pressures influence the city's traditional foodways?

In order to answer this question, fieldwork aims to build relationships with local actors involved in urban and food discourse, such as cooperatives, networks. These include local activists claiming food sovereignty with a decolonial approach, such as the Siyada network, and independent researchers dealing with Tangier's urban space, spatial injustice, and the relationship between space and culture, such as ThinkTanger.

What has emerged from this phase of introduction to the field concerns global and national processes, also unfolded throughout the research in Sidi Bounouar, but from the specific perspective of the city, hatching the intersections between spatial and food forms of injustice.

External pressures on local food systems touch on the climate crisis, particularly with regard to marine and coastal ecosystem deterioration, free trade agreements with the European Union and Japan geared toward industrial fishing. On the other hand, internal pressures on foodways such as the bureaucratization of artisanal fishing (or more generally, formalization of typically informal production and trade practices), the urbanization of rural areas, urban regeneration as a governing device for key locations for tourism and foreign investment.

Contextualizing these pressures on the ground, three key and symbolic places were identified to narrate the ongoing processes starting from the daily experience of urban food, namely the waterfront, M’sallah market, and the TangerMed Free Zone.