Villaggi oasiani dell'Erg. Thala Timimoun e l'organismo acqueo-insediativo

The study of the Saharan oases is part of an international program involving Politecnico di Bari and Université Saad Dahlab in Blida, Algeria. The research concerns the settlement processes in those areas in which the oxymoron between the strong climatic aridity and the rich presence of groundwater has given rise to “subsistence territories” focused on hydraulic architecture as a premise to semi-residential life in the desert. Living with this apparent contrast has allowed over time the development of a social, architectural and agricultural culture, based on a “typology of necessity” that links the different scales of the settlement in a spontaneously developed symbiosis, from the location of the oasis in proximity to a salty lake, to the construction of the village, to the circulation of the water through an ingenious structure of captation and natural flow, creating an integration between building tissue and agricultural one, composed of palm groves and horticultural gardens. The oasis of Thala, in the district of Timimoun, is an exemplary case study in demonstrating the transformations of a part of the desert through a syncretic constructive thought, which derives from the foggara and the geomorphology of the soil a tissue rich of implications ethnic and religious, influenced by the continuous adaptations to the constraints imposed by the extreme climate. An ancient culture in crisis, because of the adoption of architectural and urban models of western origin and the abandonment of agriculture is causing the renunciation of one of the main highlight of the settlement equilibrium. The present research aims to contribute to the construction of a general operational-critical base for the reform of Mediterranean living and in this specific case for the updating of the modalities of intervention in the oases, in a hypothesis of protection and development that enhances their characters, threatened for decades by the atopy of urban transformations.

Keywords: oasis, foggara, ksar, urban morphology, courtyard houses, clay, adobe