Rim Mrani

Housing informality in Morocco has taken root within Rabat’s formal neighborhoods, quietly reshaping façades, extending plot lines, and redrawing the texture of entire blocks. This ongoing transformation runs up against the rigidity of official planning frameworks, producing tension between state enforcement and tacit tolerance, as residents navigate persistent legal and economic ambiguities. Prior Moroccan studies are neighborhood-specific or socio-economic; the field lacks a city-wide, multi-class analysis linking everyday tactics to long-term governance dilemmas and policy design. The paper, therefore, asks how and why residents and architects across affordable, middle-class, and affluent districts craft unapproved modifications, and what urban order emerges from their cumulative effects. A mixed qualitative design triangulates (i) five resident focus groups and two architect focus groups, (ii) 50 short, structured interviews, and (iii) 500 geo-referenced façade photographs and observational field notes, thematically coded and compared across housing types. In addition to deciphering informality methods and impacts, the results reveal that informal modifications are shaped by both reactive needs—such as accommodating family growth and enhancing security—and proactive drivers, including esthetic expression and real estate value. Despite their legal ambiguity, these modifications are socially normalized and often viewed by residents as value-adding improvements rather than infractions.

This paper systematically reviews scientific papers to understand the primary forms of HI, why they arise, and how they affect the urban landscape. It addresses the question, “What are the key trends, drivers, and impacts of Housing Informality (HI), and what methods researchers use to study the latter?”. Previous research addressed the trends, drivers, impacts, and methods individually, failing to adopt a holistic perspective that could clarify HI as a core scientific concept distinct from informal housing. Accordingly, this systematic literature review (SLR) explores 541 scientific peer-reviewed publications from Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. By utilizing a PRISMA framework, we reduced the number of documents to 27, which we thoroughly analyzed. The results highlight five main trends of HI around the globe: unauthorized modifications, informal market dynamics, Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), squatting, and unusual housing. These trends are induced by several economic and sociocultural drivers that address the gap between regulations and governance from one side and lived realities from another, resulting in economic, social, legal, health, and urban impacts.

Housing informality (HI), and particularly unauthorized modifications, are a widely spread phenomenon in Morocco’s rapidly growing coastal suburb of Harhoura, Rabat. While previous research has already focused on the socio-economic aspects of informal adaptations in affordable and middle-class housing contexts in Morocco, it leaves a gap regarding how HI is expressed in affluent settings independently and in relation to the other contexts. This research aims to visually capture how residents adapt their housing through unauthorized modifications. The research objectives are to analyze informalities that are unique to affordable, middle-class, and affluent housing and to examine if there are any shared HI patterns that transcend socio-economic contexts. This paper utilizes a mixed-methods approach by superposing fieldwork data, including the recollection of existing buildings and authorized archival data, with the help of a referential grid based on three case studies in Harhoura, Rabat, affordable, middle-class, and affluent settings, which enables effective individual and communal spatial-morphological analyses. The findings reveal distinctive and shared patterns from one side and propagation dynamics from the other, including important concepts, such as mirroring (the replication of similar informalities) and contrast (the implementation of informalities in contrast with the existing ones), between the different socio-economic contexts, which suggest higher transcending shared needs between them. By showcasing that people of diverse socio-economic means adapt their homes in strikingly similar ways, this study discredits the assumption that poverty is the primary driver of renovation approaches. This broadened lens enriches our understanding of how urban housing evolves and points to the urgency of inclusive strategies addressing key housing priorities for all.

Rural mobility in Africa is an under-researched issue. Rural communities have often suffered from reduced mobility that has hampered their access to essential services and facilities such as education, health care, food, and clean water. In many rural communities, a more affordable mobility option, such as non-motorized mobility (cycling and walking), is the preferred way for people to travel. Apart from its well-known advantages, little is known about the impact of topography and routes on the mobility options adopted by rural communities. Therefore, this study aims to use Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) to analyze the impact of topography and routes on rural mobility patterns at the level of formal and informal cycle track networks in the Bugesera District, focusing on the Nyamata and Mayange sectors, Rwanda. This study used GPS devices given to 50 participants to collect mobility patterns in the two previously mentioned sectors. Then, the study imposed a 30-m buffer on the official road networks of Rwanda collected by the Rwanda Transport Development Agency (RTDA). These data were joined to GPS tracks to highlight official and unofficial roads (tracks that did not fall within the 30-m buffer). In addition, Digital Elevation Models were applied to analyze the SRTM (30 m resolution) and ALOS PALSAR (12.5 m resolution) elevation data of the Bugesera region. The findings revealed an elevation range of 1333 to 1535 for SRTM and 1323 to 1641 for ALOS PALSAR. The study calculated the slope to find the slope percentage (m) and length (m). The findings from the DEMs and the slope calculation revealed that Bugesera has a relatively flat surface, favorable for cycling. The slope percentage was further classified into five levels of slope ranging from steep to very steep. And the Van Zuidam classification results confirmed that Bugesera has “a flat or nearly flat surface, without significant denudation processes”. With a favorable topography and a higher bicycle ownership ratio, residents of the Bugesera district favor cycling in their daily activities more than any district in Rwanda. Cycling in Nyamata or Mayange links residents to areas with higher social, educational, administrative, and economic activities.