John Osterman

Sociocultural Anthropology

Regional Focus: Morocco, Mauritania, Western Sahara.

Topical Focus: Urbanism, urban planning, neo-traditional housing developments.

My research focuses on the history of urban development in Morocco. Precolonial cities are often described as organic or spontaneous or as examples of 'architecture without architects.' Such descriptions, however, seem more and more to me to fetishize form, to essentialize 'the Islamic city,' and to be based on the exoticism induced by first impressions. My aim is to understand the processes and conditions by and with which people built their cities. The form of the medinas we find so intriguing today were ever-changing products of innumerable disputes, negotiations, and actions of people both enabled and constrained by cultural traditions and Islamic law, often codified to a level of detail that our zoning technocrats would find impressive.

Many of the mistakes and mis-steps of colonial- and postcolonial-era urban policies result from trying to either preserve or recreate the traditional forms of cities while simultaneously destroying the conditions and processes that brought them into being in the first place. Recent neo-traditional housing developments, for instance, re-create somewhat the courtyards, private ways, and architectural forms of precolonial cities but remain postmodern simulations of tradition which, in substance, are antithetical to the social conditions and processes immanent in the original.

My aim is to carry out field research in such a housing development that follows the conflicts and/or congruence of intent and actuality, conceived space and lived space, and the modern and the traditional.

B.A. Mary Washington College, 2000.
Peace Corps, Mauritania, 2001 - 2003.