In this image, you are looking down the main street of Gueliz toward the minaret of the Koutoubia mosque and beyond, the High Atlas mountains. Gueliz was constructed to have its center, the traffic circle just in front of you, exactly one kilometer distant from the Koutoubia. Its streets radiate out like spokes of a wheel from traffic circels placed here and there in the midst of a geometric grid--not very differently from the radial and grid pattern of Washington, D.C.

Who designed Washington, D.C.'s street plan? Can you make a distant connection between that plan and that of Marrakech's new town?

The French, who occupied Morocco from 1912 to 1956, had a very different conception of space from the Moroccan. To them, even in the 1920s when Gueliz was getting underway, moving about in an automobile held priority. Streets needed to be wide and houses detached from each other and clearly visible from the street. In the central business district, seen here, apartment and commercial buildings six and seven stories high went up.

The two Marrakech's are spatially joined but morphologically distinct, representing strategically different conceptions of space.