Tuesday 4 September 2018, 3:30pm-5:00pm 315A Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley
With over 4 million inhabitants, Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco, and faces many water-related challenges, many of which are becoming more acute with climate change. This seminar examines different parts of the water cycle and how they are managed in the context of a growing urban center in North Africa: the water supply system and its challenges, wastewater treatment and why it has struggled to keep pace with growth, and the increasing flood risk in many parts of the city. To date, efforts by the city to mitigate flood risk have proved insufficient, but there is potential to improve within a framework of integrated water management, addressing governance issues such as institutional, financial and regulatory aspects of water management at the scale of a large city of the Global South.
Dalila Loudyi is a Professor of water and environmental engineering at Hassan II University of Casablanca- Faculty of Sciences and Technics since 1996, where she has taught Hydrology, Sewage systems, Groundwater, Hydraulics of open channels and Hydraulics of pipelines courses for the past twenty years. She did her PhD in Hydroinformatics at Cardiff school of Engineering, UK. Her current research focuses on the development of innovative solutions and technologies for integrated water management at regional and urban scales in arid and semi-arid areas. Prof. Loudyi is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University – Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, working with the ReNUWIt project (Re-Inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure). She is a member of the International Association of Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR).

Highway floods in Casablanca, March 24th, 2016.

The newly constructed west Casablanca floodway channel for Bouskoura urban river diversion, 2018