Souss-Massa-Draa

At 23:40 on February 29, 1960, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake lasting 15 seconds killed between 12,000 and 15,000 people in Agadir—one-third of the city's population—and left 35,000 homeless. The moderate quake hit at shallow depth (15 km), creating extreme surface shaking that collapsed the port city that had grown around fishing, agriculture, and Atlantic trade since the 16th century. What followed was not reconstruction but ecological succession: a complete replacement ecosystem built several kilometers south of the ruins, designed by architects from around the world (including consultation from Le Corbusier), engineered for seismic resistance, and optimized for an entirely different metabolism—tourism rather than fishing.

The pre-1960 Agadir had operated on primary production: a modern commercial port opened in 1950 processed Atlantic catches, with canning factories shipping sardines to European markets. The Souss valley inland supported citrus groves, vegetable cultivation, and argan tree forests (830,000 hectares containing 21 million trees—Morocco's second-largest forest resource after holm oak, and endemic to this southwestern corner of Morocco). The regional economy extracted resources—fish, agricultural products, argan oil—and exported them. This pattern dated to at least the 16th century, when Portuguese and later Moroccan dynasties recognized the Atlantic port's strategic value.

King Hassan II's reconstruction (1961-mid-1960s) imposed a new urban form: grid-patterned streets, wide boulevards, concrete-frame buildings, and a relocated city center away from identified fault lines. The physical architecture locked in economic reorientation. By the 1980s, Agadir had become the world's first port for sardines, but tourism had overtaken fishing as the primary revenue source. The 10 km beach with its seafront promenade, the mild year-round climate, and modern resort infrastructure attracted European winter tourists. The founder effects of 1960s reconstruction decisions—where to place the marina, how to zone beachfront property, which infrastructure to prioritize—determined what forms of economic activity could thrive in the rebuilt city.

In 2015, Morocco's regionalization split Souss-Massa-Draa along environmental lines. The northern section (Souss-Massa) includes Agadir, the argan forest biosphere reserve, and Atlantic coastal zones—temperate, tourism-oriented, fishing-based. The southern section (Draa valley) joined the new Drâa-Tafilalet region, connecting pre-Saharan oases along a different ecological gradient. The split recognized that Souss (Atlantic-facing) and Draa (Saharan-facing) operated in fundamentally different systems.

Through 2026, Agadir continues its post-1960 trajectory: tourism dominates, fishing persists at industrial scale, and argan oil production (largely through women's cooperatives) serves global cosmetics markets. The city that emerged from punctuated equilibrium—15 seconds of seismic energy forcing complete economic and spatial reorganization—remains locked in the choices made during its secondary succession. Sometimes catastrophe creates opportunity to redesign from first principles. Sometimes it just locks in different path dependencies.