Characterization of urban forms within the oases settlements and their long-term impact on the outdoor thermal comfort in Tolga territory.

Abstract

Among symbiosis and harmony, there is a close relationship between human settlement and surrounding environment, whereas this link is becoming more and more detached over time. Nowadays, most of big challenges are demonstrated on the environmental balance which is deteriorating the human well-being quality inside cities, and being the imperative actors of the built environment. Accordingly, the oases networks in arid regions, are undergoing serious urban issues which are calling for a new pattern of life style, a truly artificial one. In fact, the transition from the oasis-city to the so-called contemporary city has evoked the production of exogenous urban logics far from being a continuity to ancient settlements and old patterns crowned with their specific Saharan archetypes characterized by compacity, agrarian landscapes, sociability, and their perfect economics’ autonomy model, and which are disappearing progressively under the urban sprawl, also mainly benefiting from the important urbanization and residential programs conducted by the Algerian government. Consequently, from the oasis settlement to the new city model, a failure denouncing several series of mediocre consequences, such as an increasingly urbanization, unlimited urban growth, environmental disturbances of the oases entities, and specifically the hard thermal quality inside the oases urban fabrics. Otherwise, the new urban planning strategies in these lands does not presenting any integration’s shapes towards the environment which were built only for people’s needs in term of residential housing or some specific buildings, in which the main architecture and urban patterns have no place and no value in new cities. Tolga as one of the largest oases territory in North Africa, as an oasis settlement, and a special urban form reveals an architectural and urban disfiguration that threaten its agricultural potential of millions palm trees as well as its oasis livelihood, especially during the hot season. The thermal aspect inside Tolga oases territory claims a major handicap for their local inhabitants, as well as for the dynamic of many activities. Thus, we are supposed through this study, to standing-up among these environmental issues especially about the outdoor thermal comfort variations, we need to note initially problem questions as well as: what future for the oases settlements and the palm groves, which present the main resource of Saharan agriculture under extreme weather conditions? How is the quality of the outdoor thermal comfort throughout the oases urban fabrics? How can be the longterm solutions for the thermal issues which are spreading under the absence of suitable urban planning strategies for these lands as well as a clear land policy to be apply?