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Koenraad Boegart is a post-doctoral researcher at the Middle East and North Africa Research Group (MENARG) under the direction of Professor Sami Zemni at Ghent University (Belgium). He is currently doing research on urban neoliberalism in Morocco and tries to link the political and economic changes of the last thirty years in a country such as Morocco with social protest. Some of his publications are "New State Space Formation in Morocco: The Example of the Bouregreg Valley” (Urban Studies 49(2): 254-269 [2012]); “The Problems of Slums: Shifting Methods of Neoliberal Urban Government in Morocco” (Development and Change 42(3): 709-731 [2011]); “Imagining the State Through Social Protest: State Reformation and the Mobilizations of Unemployed Graduates in Morocco” (co-authored with Montserrat Emperador, Mediterranean Politics, 16(2): 241-259 [2011]); “Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike”, (co-authored with Sami Zemni and Brecht De Smet, Antipode, 45(4): 888-907 [2013]; and “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts: The Politics behind Three Decades of Neoliberalism in the Arab World” (Middle East Critique, 22(3): 213-234 [2013]).Koenraad Boegart's project:Urban Politics in Morocco: A Political Economy of Uneven DevelopmentAttempts to understand the significance and implication of the Arab uprisings must not lose sight of the fact that the current pressures for change are rooted in the fundamental political transformations  that  took  place during the  previous three  decades.  These  transformations were intimately related to the city and its neoliberal reforms. This project outlines how we can  situate  our  analyses  of  the  events  of  the  last  three  years  within  a  broader  political economic perspective. To do so concretely, it takesMorocco’s cities, and more specifically Rabat and Casablanca, as case studies to reflect upon those broader perspectives. By looking at both the politics of megaprojects and slum upgrading initiatives I attempt to understand fundamental  political  transformations  in  Morocco,  and  the  wider  region,  since  the  1980s. Urban development, simultaneously encompassing luxurious and high-end urban renovation projects  as  well  as  slum-eradication  and/or  upgrading  schemes,  has  become  an  important terrain upon which state-society-market relations are being redrawn.&#160;