Dynamique de renouvellement urbain à travers les transformations du patrimoine résidentiel dans les hautes plaines steppiques algériennes

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of changing way of living and successive, structural, formal, and functional transformations of the residential heritage in Djelfa, a little old garrison town, which becomes one of the most important city in Algerian high plains. The city is currently undergoing rapid development and unbridled urbanization, mainly due to housing and especially individual housing, resulting from self building, which, in a changing society, is quickly transformed to be adapted. This habitat tends to become a “inheritance”, in sense of “capital” which can be profitable, confirming the pertinence of the hypothesis of a double meaning for the concept of patrimony (“capitalization” and “common property”). On the other hand, the analysis demonstrates that, in a context of increase urban ground value, city center’s old houses, witnesses of lost historical know-how, find themselves in the heart of a demolition-reconstruction process. The latter is based on erasing the existing and supplies an urban renewal form, which accentuates some consequences of ongoing speculative urban dynamic.

Keywords

• residential patrimony
• self building
• urban renewal
• demolition
• reconstruction