Social Housing Transformation Practices in Constantine: Lessons from Ali Mendjeli Available to Purchase

This study is addressing the widespread transformation activities made to government-built housing intended for low income urban households. These unauthorised self-help transformation activities indicate not only people's willingness to become actively involved in the housing process but also demonstrate the potential for low income families to invest to improve their living conditions. In this paper we examine the changes made to the internal layouts of multi-story walk-up flats in the recently implemented satellite town of "Ali Mendjeli" in Constantine which is one of the newly adopted solutions to ease Constantine saturated city centre, and also to respond to an acute housing shortage. These transformation activities have an effect on dwelling size, cultural norms, and internal maintenance. A survey has been conducted in selected projects and socio-economic data has been collected from a sample of dwellings. The findings of the study point to the factors, which encourage these transformations, help to understand the motives and means used by the residents in the transformation procedure, find out the characteristics of these transformations, and assess means, which can be used to plan for future transformations in proposed housing schemes. Thus, this paper tends to understand the alterations carried out by the users, and to propose recommendations in order to attenuate this phenomenon.