Interventions of actors for the improvement of housing conditions in oasis towns: the case of Ouarzazate-Zagora-Tinghir

Abstract

Although urbanization within these eccentric regions is taking place at a slow speed, these provincial capital cities (Ouarzazate- Zagora- Tinghir) experienced accentuate development increasingly framed by areas housing operations. To this end, Pliez O. (2003) emphasizes that currently Saharan urbanization is not evidently a spontaneous movement but a national choice. In this way, the first loti housings have emerged since the end of the 1970s (Public operators: SNEC, ERAC, etc.), highlighting the action of public authorities to guide and organize the construction movement and limit the role of notables in the mobilization of urban land. In such a way, in the pre-Saharan cities, urban growth is poorly controlled (BenAttou, 2010). In this article, we attempt, through the supply produced by housing operations on the land-living, to see the role of state programs in the reduction of spontaneous housing synonymous with low-equipment and a hard living environment. This is in a relationship between public actors, private operators and ethnic communities, each with its own logic of intervention in the production of the city. Despite the scale of these operations sponsored by the public authorities, the urban area of these cities was experiencing the parallel development of a clandestine housing supported by the underemployment classes (insolvent, not targeted by housing programs). The result is a bi-speed urban planning, these oasis towns grow in two different contexts, one more planned and another spontaneous, producing unsanitary housing.  About this change in the way of living (bisson J. and jarir M. (1986) noted that at the moment when the oasis society ix open, the Saharan ksar bursts and the house closes. This dysfunction challenges the actors of the loti housing, who must develop a new and common strategy in order to cover all social categories in the oasis region.