Infrastructure Cartography

The Medina Data

12,900 features. Seven concentric rings. Centre outward.

A Moroccan medina is not random. It is organised in concentric rings radiating from the Friday mosque: sacred space nearest the centre, then commerce, then residential, then industry (pushed to the edge for noise and smell), then defensive walls, then the cemeteries beyond. This is the spatial grammar of Islamic urbanism — invented once, repeated for a thousand years.

186

mosques

foundouks surviving

~12,000

riads estimated

16 km

of ramparts

Centre → Edge: The Seven Rings

Click a ring to see its features. Width represents element count in that zone.

Core

The Friday mosque — spiritual and geographic centre

Sacred

Mosques, medersas, zaouias — walking distance from every home

206

Commercial

Souks and foundouks — trade organised by craft

137

Residential

Riads, derbs, hammams, fountains, bread ovens

12,587

Industrial

Tanneries, kilns, dyers — pushed to periphery

Defensive

Ramparts, gates — 16 km of rammed-earth walls

Beyond

Cemeteries, gardens — outside the walls

Reading Notes

The Mosque as GPS

186 mosques in one medina is not redundancy — it is infrastructure. Each mosque anchors a neighbourhood of ~100 houses. The call to prayer is a timing device. The minaret is a landmark. The ablution fountain is the water source. The mosque is the medina's operating system.

97 Foundouks

Caravanserais: two-story buildings around a courtyard where traders stored goods below and slept above. Marrakech once had 200+. Ninety-seven survive, 45 still active as workshops. Each was a node in the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlas trade networks. The foundouk is the ancestor of the hotel.

The Dead-End Logic

400 dead-end lanes (derbs) are not poor planning. Each serves 10–30 houses whose residents are often related. The derb is semi-private space: children play there, women sit at doorsteps, strangers are noticed immediately. It is the most effective security system ever designed — no technology required.

The medina is a data structure. The mosque is the root node. The souks are the commercial layer. The derbs are the leaf nodes. The walls are the firewall. The gates are the ports. It was designed a thousand years ago and it still works — not despite its complexity, but because of it.

Sources

Feature counts from UNESCO World Heritage nomination file (1985), ADER-Marrakech rehabilitation survey, Ministry of Habous mosque registry, and Wilbaux (2001). Foundouk inventory from Saïd Mouline architectural survey. Derb count from SDAU Marrakech master plan. Riad estimate from property records (approximate). Concentric ring model after Hakim (1986) “Arabic-Islamic Cities” and Bianca (2000) “Urban Form in the Arab World.”