Fez’s thousand fountains

The Medina’s urban structure has been evolving through hundreds of years. It has always been a remarkable cultural, historic, and traditional place not only in the region or in Morocco but in the whole Arab world, and the North of Africa in particular.

Culture, the arts and traditions have for centuries been irradiated from this city.

 It has been immensely splendorous and even today, it is one of the places where the urban and cultural heritage values of the Arab world are best preserved.
However, since the end of last century, this city—which for centuries had lived in harmony with the environment—has been undergoing a process of environmental degradation, losing its roles if compared with the modern Fez sector. This has led to increasing levels of abandonment, together with a loss of population, especially in its central area. The lack of urban environmental quality conditions, the influence of modern lifestyle patterns and, particularly, the lack of facility supplies have all triggered off the situation described above.The challenge consists of renewing this city, under urban-environmental sustainability principles, and taking as fundamenal basis the historic patterns of both architecture and socio-cultural aspects, adapting them or recovering them for modern life. In this sense, the framework phrase of this competion “respecting the heritage, celebrating the future" summarizes our quests. History tells us about a city with “a thousand fountains" and it particularly refers to its origin linked to the river or the presence of water. There used to be fountains in squares, and in home patios. People can still recall the ubiquitous noise of the fountains.
In our view, this entails a clear relation between the city and its environment, with its source of life—water. However, this has been lost. The fountains have either been adandoned or have disappeared, especially those within homes’ backyards; moreover River Fez has even been lost. It is for that reason that for this team, the Medina's environmental recovery and specially, the recovey of its river, its public spaces (squares and streets) and especially of fountains constitute a challenge to the future, by recovering the past and rehabilitating it as an example of a man-culture-territory relation for future generations.