Visioning the regional future: Globalization and regional transformation of Rabat/Casablanca

The mainstream literature on globalization and regional transformation emphasizes two major perspectives. The first perspective combines global city theory with macro theories of transformations with a normative bias often leading to deterministic conceptualisations of globalization links to regional transformation. The other perspective emphasizes economy as the most important if not the only pushing factor for regional transformations with little attention to all transformations involving soft and informal structures The latter may be vital for such transformation. This paper takes a completely new approach namely to analyse local stakeholders' visions of regional transformation of the Rabat/Casablanca region in face the challenges that globalization poses.