The Impact of Precarious Habitat’s Eradication on Socio- Economic and Spatial Changes in State of Bouira, Algeria

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate and analyze the phenomenon of precarious housing in Algeria, which acknowledges a tragic scale dating back to the colonial period, and continues to increase during the decade 1990-2000 under the pretext of exodus, reaching a threshold of 554,000 precarious dwellings (8% of the total housing stock) according to the only census to date, carried out by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning in 2007, of which the state of Bouira marked 15,435 dilapidated dwellings (2.79%). In this study, we seek to know the role of the urbanization control implemented by the public authorities in order to eradicate precarious housing due to socio-economic changes for their occupants. To this end, theoretical approaches were used to analyze the causes of the phenomenon and temporalize it. A socio-economic survey was also carried out in 4 precarious neighbourhoods, located in two municipalities, Djebahia and El-Adjiba, with 420 dwellings, 574 households and 3013 inhabitants. The results obtained show that, compared to the number of dwellings benefited for the period 2003-2010 (from 19,195 to 53,839), the number of precarious dwellings in the state of Bouira decreased progressively from 33,174 precarious housing units in 1999 to 23,442 units in 2004 to achieve 12,361 units in 2014. This is due to the re-housing intervention (social, participative and rural housing) as well as the rehabilitation program, which has proved successful in some localities and has failed in others.