Residential subdivisions, what potential for quality production?: Case of the city of Bechar, Algeria

Abstract

Having experienced in the past a fatal housing crisis, likewise any developing country with a rapidly growing population. The demands for building land in Algeria coupled with residential subdivisions have, therefore, known a real success. In Bechar (city of the south of Algeria), the increased production of the residential subdivisions (since the eighties) has not often given the expected results. Instead, we are witnessing poor quality, and often an unfinished production. For the most part, subdivisions are displayed in all their baseness, defying the rules of art and town planning. Whereas, the subdivision is not only an inert urban form conceived in the form of plot division, rather, it is a mean of urban development that must meet the quality requirements of the living environment.While the successive production of residential subdivisions today gives a depreciated image, reflecting an uncompleted construction site, this article aims to shed light on this phenomenon and seeks avenues capable of improving the quality of life in these living spaces.