Cultural Heritage Conserved by Urban Space

Jemaa El-Fna Square in Marrakesh, is an urban space relevant to Moroccans who wish to preserve the cultural heritage of the Maghreb Region of Africa. This cultural heritage is preserved by gathering, performing, lecturing, bartering or trading, normally in an established meeting place, recognised in the form of a building or urban space, with cultural and traditional value to those involved in the exchange. For Moroccans, Jemaa El-Fna Square has been that established place for the past 12 centuries.

The square was included in UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2008, defined as “the totality of tradition-based creations of a cultural community expressed by a group or individuals and recognised as reflecting the expectations of a community in so far as they reflect its cultural and social identity.” It stands as the place where the Maghreb’s cultural legacy is preserved through the performance of various dance rituals, oral and music recitals, commercial exchange of traditional hand-crafted goods and items brought by Berber, Gnaoua and other African cultures spanning the territory from Agadir to Tripoli. It is part of the unique properties of what makes this square so special.

The square is nearly 34,000 m2 of hard, unshaded paving surrounded by two- to three-storey buildings with no major civic building or monument as part of its enclosure. It is nearly three times the size of Piazza Navona and twice the size of Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, bound mostly by low-lying buildings devoid of the architectural prominence typical of most major city squares. Its physical traits break convention in contention, formalism, monumentality and order. In the harsh dry climate of Saharan Africa, it offers virtually no protection from the heat and sun. Yet, despite all these unconventional traits, it is at the heart of Moroccan life and its identity. To speak of Jemaa El-Fna is to talk about Morocco’s cultural heritage and the region’s complex African history.

Founded circa 1062, Marrakech has been the cultural and trade capital of the Maghreb for the past 12 centuries and Jemaa El-Fna Square has been the walled city’s main stage for its regional civic, religious, cultural and commercial life.

It began as a large open space for temporary and weekly markets bound by the major souk streets of the city and the palace of emir Ali ibn Yusuf, where the Koutoubia Mosque would be eventually placed. The rest of the square was bound by a series of additional mosques, hospital, palaces, parade grounds and gardens, which all flourished and faded with the fortunes of the city. The square was stage to the grand public audiences of the original palace as well as public executions, the reason why the name of the square is thought to have meant Assembly of the Dead. Its name ‘jamaa al-fna’, is also thought to mean the Place of the Ruined Mosque, referring to the unfinished Friday Mosque commissioned in the 17th century by the Saadian Sultan Ahad-al-Mansur, where Souk Jedid is located today. Considering the square contributes to preserving the cultural life of Morocco, it is a great irony that the square is named after devastation and death.

Today, privately owned two- to three-storey hotels, cafes, restaurants and private buildings surround the square, bound to the north by the smaller Bab Fteuh Square, Souk Qessabina at the heart of the Medina and to the South by Place Foucauld, the grand Mohammed V Avenue and Koutoubia Mosque. Having been used for a variety of modern purposes, including a bus station until the year 2000 when the city closed the square to traffic, it currently bridges the old city of Medina with the grand avenues of the new city. Jemaa El-Fna Square is the meeting point as well as the crossing road of all Medina city life in Marrakech.

A day in the life of the square

The daily life cycle of Jemaa El-Fna Square has not changed much since the 11th century, a concentration of unique Moroccan cultural traditions performed through musical, religious and artistic expression engrained in the civic and commercial life of the city. Since the 11th century, it is a meeting point for the local and regional population seeking commercial trades, services and commodities such as dental care, traditional medicine, fruit, water-carrying, traditional food, spices, clothing, silverware and pottery, engrained with the exchange of cultural heritage in the form of performances by storytellers, poets, snake-charmers, Berber musicians (mazighen), Gnaoua dancers and senthir (hajouj) players. The oral expressions are continually renewed by bards (imayazen), who travel through Berber territories. They continue to combine speech and gesture to teach, entertain and charm their audience. Adapting their art to contemporary contexts, they now improvise on the outline of an ancient text, making their recital accessible to a wider audience.

The daily cycle starts at sunrise, when the square wakes up as a vast, open, lightly-wetted concrete tiled expanse washed the previous evening. 

Soon after sunrise, the flower and orange juice merchants arrive to set up their stands on the northwest side of the square; they open up their bike- and donkey-towed mobile kiosks, meticulously placing their fruit and flowers in decorative designs, using a combination of colours and patterns to attract customers. 

The cafes from the buildings surrounding the square open their doors soon after sunrise for morning coffee. Café de France is the most famous of all, the meeting point for Marrakesh’s prominent social, political and cultural elite.

Around mid-morning, the Medina’s daily trade life wakes up and its shops start filling up with locals and foreigners. In the square, Souk Jedid to the north opens its shops and merchants begin hustling and chanting sales pitches. From mid-morning to mid-afternoon the square begins to fill gradually with peddlers and merchants selling souvenirs, trinkets as well as finely crafted items from the nearby Berber villages. Performers and musicians begin to add a rhythm to the increasing bustle of the square.

As the afternoon progresses, transit increases exponentially to thousands of pedestrians, cyclers, motorbikes, horse-drawn carriages and tuk-tuks. It is a wonder to see the intense interaction in the large open square exposed to the hot desert weather of mid-afternoon, which can reach temperatures of up to 38 ̊C (100 ̊F). Winter or summer, dry or damp, the square’s transit keeps busy all year.

At sundown, the square starts to cool off. Just south of Souk Jedid, the food stalls emerge in an intricate construction of temporary steel post tents dressed in benches, burners, fryers, lights, appetisers, menu posters and food displays. 

With an average size of 16 square metres, these stalls are large enough to house 20 patrons, two cooks and two server/promoters serving local Moroccan meals at a third of the price of surrounding cafés and restaurants. At dusk, the square’s activities are on full display. Every single square foot is crowded with local merchants, artists, peddlers, beggars and local and foreign visitors. The cafés and restaurant balconies are filled with patrons admiring the view from above. The Koutoubia Mosque minaret tower to the south is lit like a lighthouse in a dark sea; the crowd bustling below seems to have no boundary. The square is loudest at this time, filled with drumbeats, horns, cheering and chants.

In the late evening, life in the square begins to fade coming to a complete stop around midnight. By then, only the sweepers, trash collectors and washers are heard, cleaning and hosing off the square, leaving a damp, cool pavement free of debris, ready to repeat the routine the next day. It’s hard to imagine that this seemingly chaotic life cycle is repeated with the same intensity every single day of the year.

The medina, the Riads and the Souks supporting the city life of Jemaa El-Fna Square 
The urban fabric of the Medina (old city) is intricately connected to traditional Moroccan life. Its narrow and enclosed meandering streets are a sharp contrast from Jemaa El-Fna Square’s vast expanse. They are on average three metres wide, measuring as narrow as 60 cms and in rare instances, as wide as five metres from wall to wall. When compared to European cities, walking inside the Medina of Marrakech feels like traversing a constant system of alleys that never seem to end. The streets are lined with long, continuous one- to two-storey, sienna-coloured walls, interrupted by typical three-metre wide shops and modest-to-grand entry doorways to Riads, the traditional Moroccan townhouse (from the Arab word ‘ryad’, meaning garden).

These riads are built around an inner courtyard garden with lush plants in four planting beds and a central fountain. No windows face the streets, save some on the second floor. In many cases, doorway entrances located in short, narrow two-metre wide alley-like streets can give way to large multi-courtyard riads. In wider more public streets, shops one-room-deep averaging three metres by three metres will line the outside wall of the riads. The seemingly chaotic design of these meandering streets hides the fact that there is a clear street design responding to sun exposure and orientation.

Most streets in the Medina eventually thread into the most traditional souks of Marrakech. 

These Arab markets, traditionally open-air, typically supply locals with their essential daily necessities. Most souks in the Arab world would have travelling merchants passing through them once a week or once a month. In the case of Marrakech, it’s strategic location as a trade route for the Maghreb meant souks near the Jemaa El-Fna Square served regional and local traders on a daily basis. The souks are normally grouped by trades or commodities sold, with the more valuable goods in the centre and items of lesser value towards the edges. Souk Semmarine, for example, is located on one of the widest north-south streets of the Medina that connects to Jemaa El-Fna Square, selling highly coveted quality fabrics and textiles, antiques, carpets and jewellery. The wide covered gallery forks to the right into the Spice Souks and to the left into the copper, silver and brass shops of Souk el Attarine. Smaller alley-like streets connect to the souks for leatherwork, clothing and even bijouterie. The complex system of shops has impressively maintained their form and dynamics since the 11th century.

A unique and repeatable modern-day urban solution

Can this square be repeated in modern day cities or is this a fairly unique urban condition in the history of the Maghreb? Where could this model be most effective?

The ordered and chaotic contrast of the urban fabric of the Medina can be seen compared to the dense built environment of favelas like Complexo do Alemao in Rio de Janeiro or the shantytowns like Dharavi in Mumbai, where you find that spatial priority is given to housing. The public spaces in these communities normally develop informally out of left-over places, organic and markedly small in scale, comparable to the open spaces inside the Medina of Marrakech. The public streets, staircases and rooftop terraces are adopted in modern informal housing as social spaces where the communities gather, perform, lecture barter or trade. But these small pockets are not large enough to carry the cultural and social weight of these dense urban settlements.

Very few of these spaces provide room for large public gatherings, educational, athletic or other community activities. 

Creating large organic open urban spaces located in dense informal housing city settlements would have a long-term effect on a city’s cultural heritage similar to Jemaa El-Fna Square.

In the modern-day preservation of cultural heritage, community residents must be provided with spaces fit for a vast array of benefits associated with citizens’ rights. They must have a stage for mobilising a community on equal grounds, prompting open discourse and education and sharing of knowledge and skills. Also for outdoor markets, to help local vendors, craftsmen and entrepreneurs flourish. They must have a stage for large scale cultural events like carnivals and festivals. As well as a stage for preserving the community’s cultural heritage. That is why they require large open squares appropriately scaled for the entire community, which can very well exist devoid of any significant architectural formality; an urban space much like Jemaa El-Fna Square.