Sustainable Urban Conservation and Management of Historical Areas. Come Back to Thirty Five Years (1981–2016) of Observation in Fez Medina, Morocco

Urban conservation has been a subject of academic and professional discourse for over three decades. In Fez medina, urban conservation is linked to urban redevelopment and thereby represents a significant component of urban design with respect to sustainability. The best practice and the constraints and difficulties of the Fez medina sustainable conservation are addressed in this paper, based on observation and a system dynamic approach to describe and analyze the urban heritage safeguarding process, its stages and components during the last thirty-five years. The overall rehabilitation strategy for this historical area is to alleviate the constraints through a sustainable conservation program, especially the historic housing stock, the social development, the historic monuments and the urban environment including the architecture heritage, which could not be launched without seeking adequate tools (institutional, financial and technical) for its implementation. ADER-Fez, the Agency for the Dedensification and Rehabilitation of Fez Medina, places stakeholder participation at the core of its implementation strategy, including social animation and social participation in housing rehabilitation, and sets a program of emergency intervention on historic monuments and buildings, housing units threatening collapse and on infrastructure and urban facilities, with two concerns: the safety of the human lives and the safeguarding of cultural heritage and traditional constructions of architectural quality adapted to the requirements of modern life.