The Landscaping Emergence of Water Infrastructures in the Cities of Morocco

The urban water networks in Morocco just like other countries in North Africa and Middle East represent complex networks, which are integrated deeply with various aspects of social life.
The water networks in the Moroccan cities still play a pivotal role in the urban landscape where the traditional fountains with their repetitive formal instructions in Chefchaouen, Tétouan, Tangier, Fez and Meknès gains a significant attention of each visitor. Why and how the water networks emerge and work in this special way in the cities of Morocco, is the question that this paper tries to find the answer for.
Visiting the cities of Morocco and deciphering the relation between the fountains and the urban structure and topography shows that these fountains (places where water emerge) as a last chain of the water network in the Moroccan cities have roles more than a mere functional one. Analyzing the information gathered in the field visits states that these elements coincide completely with the topographical situation of the cities, and are the focal points in the formation of urban facilities, city centers and neighborhoods, and even more in the organization of residential fabrics. These elements have considerable presence in the main urban components such as, mosques, Hammams (public bath), Zaviehs (rooms for dervish), further to the city centers, neighborhood centers, and city entrances and gates, in the open spaces in bazaar and so on.
The results of this brief survey also show that besides the decisive role of the traditional fountains in the spatial structure of Moroccan cities, with their special aesthetical instruction and semi-mihrab form integrated to the Moroccan subjectivity and familiar ethics, these elements play a significant cultural and an identical role in the Moroccan cities. Synthesizing the result of field observation in the Islamic Moroccan cities and the remains of the ancient roman city called Volubilis, near the city of Meknes, revealed the relation between indigenous and Islamic rituals and roman traditions in the field of water networks and their main elements, fountains.