Habitat social au Maghreb et au Sénégal

Through a comparative approach to housing policies and social engineering measures in the Maghreb and West Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia), this collective publication takes a critical and distanced look at the voluntarist and normative notions of urban governance and participation applied to the housing sector.
Do anti-poverty and slum clearance policies, the institutional and organisational configurations to which they give rise, and the participation of civil society and new social engineering instruments facilitate access to housing for disadvantaged groups? In what way, and what are the consequences in terms of urban design in outlying areas?
While some problems have been resolved, others remain recurrent and new constraints are emerging. While multi-stakeholder partnerships and participation are supposed to guarantee a more inclusive, equitable and effective process than the usual stato-centric interventions, in practice these initiatives come up against multiple challenges of a socio-economic, organisational and political nature.
Based on a cross-cutting reading of the main points of reflection gathered in this book, the general conclusion attempts to put into perspective the different national contexts and complex experiences studied in depth: the empirical and analytical contributions of each article form the basis of this concluding chapter.
This collective work is a follow-up to the seminar entitled ‘Sustainable social housing: a Maghreb-Senegal perspective’, which took place in Rabat in June 2008 at the headquarters of the Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion. The seminar and publication received financial support from the Institut CDC pour la Recherche.

Aziz IRAKI is a geographer and professor at the Institut national d'aménagement et d'urbanisme (INAU, Rabat). His research focuses on urban management, the emergence of new players in the urban field and collective mobilisation.
He has also carried out several evaluations of rural development programmes in Morocco.

Julien LE TELLIER is a geographer and post-doctoral researcher whose work focuses on public policy in the fields of housing, essential services and transport. He has carried out a number of studies on urban social development and social intermediation on the outskirts of major Moroccan cities.