Spécificités spatiales et logiques sociales d’un nouveau type d’habitat domestique.

Abstract

This research is a contribution in the field that formalizes the complex and fundamental link between architecture and society. It focuses on the spatial study of a new type of housing appeared in this last decade in an agropastoral area of Algeria: the eastern Hodna. Housing whose stylistic expressions are diverse and at the same time opposed to the local rural architectural references and to the habits and customs of a semi-nomadic society which is recently established. Former nomads, people of Hodna moved from an ambulant habitat: the tent commonly called "Guittoune", passing through several other types more or less endogenous to a new type of domestic house-castle named "Diar charpenti ", in a relatively short period of time. Indeed, the socio-economic and political mutations reflected in particular by the liberalization of foreign trade, by encouraging the private sector and by the dramatic situation experienced by Algeria in the 1990s, have promoted fundamental changes not only in the socio-economic but also urban and architectural fields, across the country, particularly in the eastern region of Hodna. Fuelled by the economic boom generated by the anarchic economy developed during the period of political instability, by a certain population group: the barons of the informal, this region has been subjected to an accelerated process of change at all levels that allowed the creation of a new physical environment materialized by a domestic architectural framework that has little in common with its predecessor. The purpose of this research is to try to understand if this domestic housing, unlike that reveals its facades, could maintain, at its spatiality, a unit that could be identified as architectural genotype. And if, this or these architectural genotypes maintained any relationship with the local domestic architecture of the region. Through its two-part of analysis, this research used two analytical approaches: The first, qualitative, whose foundation is the French school: the analytic-historical typology, while the second, quantitative, is from Anglo-Saxon: the space syntax or "configurational analysis" by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson (1984, 1987, 1996, 1998). The results of this research are derived on the one hand, from typological classification of canonical types of domestic housing experienced by the study area since the second half of the nineteenth century, date of settlement of its inhabitants, to the last decade of the 2000s; On the other hand, from the exhaustive analysis of different specimens constituting the corpus of this new type of dwelling "Diar Charpenti". Following these two steps, the comparison could be made and the answer to the generic question: would there be a local spatial referencial model to this new type of housing? could be elucidated. Typological analysis revealed that the "Diar Charpenti" type was preceded by six other domestic types which are divided into two physical models of living: the courtyard house and the house with corridor. Analysis of Space Syntax has revealed the existence of two main modes of structuring the spaces: the lobby "Westeddar" and the corridor "Sabet" that subdivide the "Diar Charpenti" in seven genotypes and a phenotype not genotypic. The comparison revealed that the "Diar Charpenti" type is in a large majority a spatial descendant of ancestral domestic models with which they form a genotype of inequality. Here, the syntactic comparison proved that the current lobby is indeed the covered version of the courtyard of yore: A morpho-creator scheme. In its social aspect, space syntax has demonstrated that through its space, the society of Hodna is a society that is growing in segregation and folds on itself, the domestic space of this new domestic type is sexed and binary, indicates a considerable "socio-spatial" confusion, gives the impression of being evolutionary, but is frozen in fact. What "Diar Charpenti" houses express is not a new way of living, but instead a new way to express themselves