Sustainable Renewal of an Empty Block to Public Urban Space: Gentrification of the Railway Workers' Housing Estate and its Garden's Urban Interface, Sétif, Algeria

Abstract

The contribution questions the prospective role of the recently rehabilitated garden of the railway workers' housing district, a.k.a. "Cité des Cheminots", in Sétif, Algeria, through its immediate environment and the multiple vocations of the district. In its current state, it highlights the imbalances of the Algerian urban fabric by reducing the urban space to the needs of easements, denoting its articulatory role as resulting from the urban planning of the traditional cities. From past to present, a multiscalar reading will deduce the consideration of the garden as an interface with its surroundings. Around a historical, sensitive, and urban renewal approach, the aim is to identify the potentiality of garden offers as an urban interface in the dynamics that led to the formation of the first railway workers' housing estate and its evolution towards the historic center of Sétif town and the spontaneous reshaping of the district in late 1990. This current observation will allow the garden of the "Cité des Cheminots" to be placed in a sustainable and well-thought-out urban renewal process as an urban space that articulates the scales of the city and the district, as well as the functional scales of the city center and the residential space.