ICEX highlights EDDEA’s role in the territorial development strategy for Driouch and Berkane in Morocco

The Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX) has highlighted the work EDDEA is carrying out in Morocco on the Urban Management Masterplan (Plan Director de Gestión Urbana), a tool whose primary aim is to set out the strategic lines of the region’s urban, economic, social and environmental development through its territorial planning. The areas concerned are the coast of Driouch and the province of Berkane.

In a process involving every relevant body of the regional and local administration in both areas, EDDEA and the consultancy Planificación y Desarrollo Sostenibles (P+D) have been entrusted by Morocco’s Ministry of Urban Planning, after winning the international public tender for the contract, with defining the strategic future of these regions in terms of sustainable growth over the next 25 years.

The EDDEA and P+D team is completing the first phase of the masterplan, covering the diagnosis and study of the regions’ territorial reality. The next step will be to define the challenges facing the regions under study through a participatory process that will shape the desired model of growth and the organisation of space in all its dimensions (economic, housing, environmental and so on).

Factors at play

As ICEX notes in a press release, in drawing up these territorial development strategies “many factors are considered, such as economic potential, environmental values and threats, the structuring of mobility, housing needs and other factors”.

“In the methodology applied to these masterplans, consultation is essential, which is why there are numerous meetings with all the public stakeholders, as well as with civil society, who are ultimately the true protagonists of these territorial planning instruments”, the text adds.

“EDDEA’s role is to analyse, listen, build prototypes and finally propose economic development strategies together with land-use models that enable and encourage that development, and then, in a second phase, to seek consensus among everyone involved and later obtain final approval of the plans and their strategic projects”, the architecture studio explains.

Masterplans

EDDEA and P+D have already worked together on the masterplans for the coast of El Jadida and for Greater Safi, as well as on a range of strategic plans such as the tourism development plan for Tagazout Bay in Agadir and the Sustainable Development Strategy for the SIBE Jbel Moussa in the Tangier-Tetouan area.

In all, EDDEA is working across more than 15,000 square kilometres spread between the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, taking in hundreds of communes and dozens of small, medium-sized and large cities, all with the challenge of integrating complex places, major territorial infrastructure and a multitude of interests over a 20-year horizon.