“Fast urban model-making”: constructing Moroccan urban expertise through Zenata Eco-City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores Morocco’s ambitions to become a city-building “expert” in Africa through Zenata Eco-City, a project being built near Casablanca as part of Morocco’s national new city-building strategy. Despite being in early stages of construction, Zenata’s builders enthusiastically promote the future city as an urban model for Africa and have begun to export it long before the project’s completion. Building on urban policy mobilities literature and research on emergent new city models, we examine Zenata as an example of “fast model-making”, and analyze how authority is constructed for a model based on ideas rather than on a completed city. We explore the process of policy research and “learning” used to create and legitimize the model and investigate how promotional strategies to export it produce narratives about the city’s success and the expertise of its developers. We raise concerns about Zenata’s fast model and the circulation of expertise without content.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".