Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Innovative ways of creating urban-regional heritage address the spatial logic of the “mellah” at the medina of Tetuan, Morocco, and its permeability in urbanism and architecture, thus revealing the social and political structure of this city designed by Spanish planners in the 19th and 20th centuries. To identify people and places that are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in transmitting heritage processes, the investigation starts from a generic assumption that the urbanism more than technical, is political (Montaner & Muxí 2011). The sacred space of the “mellah” and the Jewish domestic space as social and political products lead to an unitary theory of space in urban Moroccan society. In this study, we seek to determine which are major aspects of construction of the “mellah” inside the medina of Tetuan, and how it was carried out the typology of physical space of type houses with patios, and also of Jewish society that occupied it until the first half of the twentieth century. To what extent this typology can be compared with the structures of Muslim houses of the adjacent medina (Serrano 2018)? We consider ultimately the intrinsic connections between the minority neighborhood and the rest of the medina through the creation of a Living Museum (Guimaraens 2016), based on the intangible heritage concept (UNESCO) and the historical, cultural, and architectural reconstitution of Jewish knowledge through ritual and daily practices in the “mellah” of Tetuan, Morocco.