This work examines the irruption of the Great Mosque Hassan II in Casablanca (the City). The religious building, inaugurated in 1993, is an intentional contemporary monument, considered as one of the Greatest Mosques in the world. The complex has so quickly imposed itself in the whole landscape of the city as to hegemonically interfere in the urban plan of the Moroccan metropolis. The work analyses the conception of the "urban plan" and the processes of the territoralization with regard both to the monumentality and to the sacred space. Following an approach by Michel Lussault, the town planning production is taken in relation to the systems of representation of this production. Angelo Turco's works relating "the geographic theory of the complexity" (1988) have steered the research towards the analysis of the territorialization. The approach articulates the problems of urban geography and the questioning to know how the religious can qualify the territory, making it an object of an urban planning nature and a referent of the staging of a political legitimacy. The main hypothesis is that the building of the Great Mosque, wanted by the late King Hassan II, because it belongs to a double system of inheritance -the first referring at the same time both to Islam (even to an ideal model of the "Muslim City") and to the dynastic tradition ; the second to the "tradition of modernity" which characterized this metropolis - engages a process of symbolic re-conversion of the urban plan of Casablanca. Such a re-conversion is to be taken, at the same time, as an ideal act of religious re-connotation under the sign of Islam of a city considered "profane" -because of the inheritance deriving from its colonial past - and as a transition towards a new urban order. The latter is made clear by emergency of an urban plan polarized on the Great Mosque.

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   |texte=   The mosque and the city : the symbolic re-conversion of urban plan in Casablanca (Morocco)
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