Etude sur les habitations a wast ed-dar « décentré » et son impact sur le tissu urbain : cas de constantine avant 1837

Abstract

Many are the works which had been devoted and dedicated, since centuries and until our days, at the traditional city impregnated by Moslem culture. This is due – and let us support it humbly –, with the thought distinguished which was used as support to the act of building the "city ", as with the extremely appreciated coherence which characterized its urban structures, thus causing curiosity, attachment and admiration at the inhabitants of the old city but also at those which came to visit it. We can say that our modest research go with this logic, because from the beginning, we made a point of studying from the architectural point of view, the old town of Constantine by allocating a particular interest to its traditional residential fabric before 1837. We were challenged by presence of numbers significant of dwellings (surroundings 39.55% of the whole of the listed houses), whose interior courtyard did not occupy a central position compared to the building, but appeared rather as if it had unusually undergone a displacement towards one or more banks and even an angle of construction. We were also concerned with detect an adequate name which the inhabitants indicated the houses encircled by the problems. However, we could put the hand only on one name that the inhabitants continue until the contemporary era, to employ while saying: Dwelling with "Wast ED-Dar ". Arrived at this stage, we wondered whether the dwelling at "decentred" interior courtyard would not form a true space which would result probably from a mental space that the inhabitants had created as a preliminary, or would not constitute the simple "result " of particular circumstances which had affected the old urban fabric of Constantine, thus dividing existing dwellings into others containing this time decentred "Wast ED-Dar ".