Casablanca is not a field site with a single piece of ground. It is the human infrastructure of the Morocco cluster — the network of relationships, initiatives, and community practice that connects the field work in Sous Valley and Had Soualem to the wider ecology of people and places in Morocco.
Ingrid Pullar is Swedish, born next to the Botanical Garden of Gothenburg. She has lived and worked in Casablanca for forty years. Photographer, art therapist, tree grower, community organiser. Not a permaculture practitioner by training — but someone who has spent twenty years working with the people and the land where permaculture, agroecology, and ecological stewardship actually happen in Morocco.
Every spring she grows baby trees from collected seeds. When they are ready, she finds land in the community where they can be planted. She does not wait for a formal programme. She finds the ground and the people and makes it happen.
The biggest challenge is the care, protection and watering of the young trees afterwards, long term. We have seen several planting missions fail because of lack of communication, lack of tools or hosepipes, by vandalism, or failed regular watering by the ones in charge. — Ingrid Pullar, Bio for Planetary Guardians, March 2026
This is a precise diagnosis of the same governance gap that Spiralweb exists to address. Ingrid has seen it from the inside, for two decades, in one of the most active ecological communities in North Africa.
Sous Valley and Had Soualem are field sites — land, stewards, protocols, observation. Casablanca is what connects them to the wider world: the people who might visit and learn, the organisations that might partner, the Moroccan practitioners who might replicate the model, the urban community that might eventually support it.
Ingrid brings three capacities that are rare in the Morocco field cluster: fluency in Darija, which makes community engagement with rural and peri-urban Moroccan groups genuinely possible; twenty years of embedded knowledge of who is doing what and who can be trusted; and the social energy to initiate and sustain collective ecological action in an urban context where most attempts fail at the care stage.
The school food forest pilot in Casablanca is also a direct demonstration of the 13×13 method — multiple observers, shared documentation, children and adults together, low-friction participation. It is the urban expression of what Kitgum represents in the rural context.
Casablanca is the network node of the Morocco bioregional cluster, alongside Sous Valley (80 ha, Abdelhamid Badaoui) and Had Soualem (2 ha, Assyl Elazzaoui). Three different scales. Three different entry points. One bioregion.