With Agents of Change, IABR provides researchers, architects, and thinkers with the opportunity to explore a topic in greater depth. These individuals are selected to work on spatial themes that often fall outside the usual design domains. Developing new perspectives and alternative forms of knowledge sparks the imagination and potentially stimulates public debate. The results are published as videos, conversations, essays, and lectures within the IABR network and on the website.
This research project critically examines the socio-spatial, environmental, and political impacts of large-scale renewable energy infrastructures in Morocco, with a particular focus on projects driven by European interests. While Morocco is frequently presented as a success story of the global green energy transition, the project questions this narrative by investigating how such developments can reproduce neocolonial power relations, reinforce authoritarian governance, increase national debt, and marginalize Indigenous and rural communities.
Building on earlier research into the NOOR solar complex – one of the world’s largest concentrated solar power plants – the project responds to growing evidence that ‘green’ infrastructure can result in land dispossession, ecological degradation, and social inequality. Through on-site research, collaboration with local researchers, artists, and communities, and engagement with cultural institutions, the project foregrounds lived experiences and local knowledge often excluded from official sustainability discourses.
