Seismic Politics: Risk and Reconstruction after the 1960 Earthquake in Agadir, Morocco

On 29 February 1960, an earthquake struck the city of Agadir, Morocco, killing between ten and fifteen thousand Moroccans and Europeans and damaging the majority of the city's structures. Drawing on data from seismographs, witness accounts, and direct observations of destruction, international teams of experts working in the aftermath of the disaster rewrote Agadir as a seismically vulnerable space. In the process, they depoliticized destruction and assigned responsibility for the devastation of the city's poorest neighborhoods to "natural" forces and ineffective "traditional" building practices. Once established in the work of geologists, seismologists, and engineers, the notion of seismic risk shaped the material and moral trajectories of reconstruction during the first decade of Morocco's independence from France. As it cut across scientific, engineering, and bureaucratic domains, seismic risk gave rise to projects aimed less at controlling nature than at redistributing vulnerability and authority among experts, administrators, and inhabitants in Agadir.