Sustainable Development in Algeria’s Urban Areas: Population Growth and Land Consumption

Abstract

We analyzed the urban development sustainability in five major urban areas of Algeria by the standard of the UN Sustainability Development Goal indicator SDG 11.3.1, which focuses on the ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate. We utilized the annual global artificial impervious area (GAIA) dataset to characterize land-use and population data from the two censuses carried out by the National Office of Statistics (ONS) for 2008 and 2018. We discuss the prevailing relationship between urban land consumption rate and population growth rate at the smallest territorial and population census unit scale. We confirm that the indicator SDG 11.3.1 is nonlinear and that while, for example, the wilaya of Tlemcen as a whole appears to be on a sustainable path, twenty-one of its communes are not. We found that overall, and for most of its communes, the wilaya of Oran seems to have an urban land use commensurable to its population growth, but in the wilaya of Algiers, out of fifty-seven communes, only fourteen have a tendency towards sustainable development. However, the latter wilaya hosts the country’s capital and includes government buildings that are uninhabited but are accounted for as land consumed, and as such, the relationship between urban land consumption and population growth is biased. The wilaya of Annaba showed large discrepancies in terms of land use and population growth rates, and the evolution of these quantities is not homogenous across communes and not sustainable. In the Saharan wilaya of Ghardaia, the development is not homogeneous in all communes, with smaller communes undergoing buildup increases of more than 150% over the decade. Finally, in all communes where population growth exceeded urban land growth, there will be overcrowding, an aspect neither the SDG 11.3.1 nor the impervious surface per capita indicator captures. This result, in addition to other limitations, makes SDG 11.3.1 incomplete for the determination of the sustainable development in urban areas.

Urban Sustainability Development in Morocco, a Review

“…The study focused on five major wilayas Algeria, which included the urban area of Ghardaia, located in the northern region of the arid Sahara Desert. The findings of their research indicated that out of the twelve communes comprising the Wilaya of Ghardaia, seven showed a discernible departure from sustainability [26].…”

“…This value is partly due to the fact that Sale is a commuter to the Kingdom's capital Rabat, and where during the studied decade a large fraction of the people working in Rabat have moved to live in Sale. As noted in [26], the formulation of SDG 11.3.1 does not capture land consumption in capital cities which host government and diplomatic' buildings, which do not occupy a large fraction, but whose population is not censed in the capital. This study extends this concept to urban areas considered as commuters to a capital city and assesses the sustainable development indicator over an urban zone of interest, as defined in Section 2.2.…”

Assessing Algerian government support for sustainable development goals: A study from 2000 to 2022

“…The combination of a rapidly growing population, urban migration despite many government efforts to stem the rural exodus, the regulation of land use in territories (Bounoua et al, 2023), and a decline in cohabitation has resulted in a growing demand for housing that has not been matched by an increase in supply. To address this issue, the government has developed a number of programs to provide affordable housing.…”

Sustainability of Heritage Villages through Eco-Tourism Investment (Case Study: Al-Khabra Village, Saudi Arabia)

“…Al-Khabra village is one such attractive heritage site. Al-Khabra village has been the subject of many studies focusing on the restoration efforts and how cultural heritage preservation and sustainable tourism development can contribute to the economic and social development of local communities [21][22][23][24][25][26]. However, none of these studies addressed previously produced comprehensive development plans or barriers to their implementation nor proposed the integration of cultural and environmental elements to promote a holistic and sustainable approach to village tourism development.…”