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

Urban Science

article

Lahouari Bounoua¹  Nora Bachir²  Hanane Souidi³  Hicham Bahi⁴  Souad Lagmiri⁵  Mohamed Yacoubi Khebiza³  Joseph Nigro¹  Kurt Thome¹ 

[1] Biospheric Sciences Laboratory;Construction, Transport and Environmental Protection Laboratory ,(LCTPE), Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University;Water, Biodiversity and Climate Change Laboratory, Faculty of Sciences Semlalia, Cadi Ayyad University;School of Architecture, Planning and Design, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University;Department of Geography, Université Paris City;Science Systems and Applications, Inc.

关键词: Algeria;    urban land growth;    SDG 11.3.1;    population density;    impervious area;   

DOI  :  10.3390/urbansci7010029

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY