Alla-Eddine Fenchouch

Alla-Eddine Fenchouch holds a PhD in urban planning from the University of Constantine and is a lecturer at the École Polytechnique d'Architecture et d'Urbanisme in Algiers (Algeria). He is currently on a three-month post-doctoral fellowship at LATTS, from September 1 to November 30, 2023, as part of the Atlas FMSH-CASS 2023 program. His research focuses on recent developments in Algerian cities, in particular the dynamics of socio-spatial redistribution and the analysis of urban space appropriation and reappropriation practices. His current research project focuses on the ordinary manufacture of the city, its modalities, actors and effects: the case of Algiers.

The project

Title: The ordinary fabric of the city, its modalities, its actors and its effects: Case of Algiers

Through this research, we would like to contribute to the debate on recent reconfigurations of Algerian cities. Essentially, this work aims, on the one hand, to describe and explain the contribution of residents and property developers to urban production, whether effective or symbolic, formal or informal, and, on the other, to try to understand their role in the current transformations of the city of Algiers. These are real estate operations which, through their mediatization, their model, their actors, their methods of land acquisition, their styles and their insertion, distinguish themselves from other categories of real estate projects in the city. This area of research remains relatively unexplored in Algerian urban planning studies. Indeed, in the context of recent socio-spatial mutations in the city of Algiers, a significant proportion of scientific debates propose to observe the mechanisms of de-marginalization and integration of non-regulatory neighborhoods (Semmoud, 2014; Benalia, 2015), a dynamic that takes diverse forms and intensities in most major Algerian cities. The recent urban development of Algiers in a context of metropolization, driven by its strategic plan, has directly stimulated real estate projects, particularly in the northeastern part of the city of Algiers insofar as real estate activity is intense there, as evidenced by the large number of investments we were able to observe during our initial investigations.

Hosting institution: Laboratoire : techniques, territoires et société (LATTS), Université Gustave Eiffel / École d’Urbanisme de Paris

Selective Bibliography

• Fenchouch A., 2021, « Recompositions urbaines dans les villes algériennes : cas de Skikda », Fabriques urbaines, n°2, pp. 15-21.
• Fenchouch A, Tamine R., 2019, « Dynamiques marchandes et nouvelles centralités dans une ville portuaire algérienne : Skikda », Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography 
• Fenchouch A, Tamine R., 2019, « Mutations de la centralité dans une ville secondaire d’Algérie », Les Cahiers d’EMAM, n° 31.