Identifying, Preserving and Safeguarding Heritage: A Local Affair! From the Tony Garnier District in Lyon (France) to Ksar Tafilelt in Ghardaïa (Algeria)

Athmane Fouil
Polytechnic School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Algeria

Abstract: The built heritage, inhabited or not, is known to be a matter for experts par excellence, in particular in its phase of constitution, which is called heritage. Indeed, it is the experts who decide on behalf of society what it should keep from its past. However, if the uninhabited part of the heritage does not present major problems, neither in its qualification and even less in its management and its safeguard, the inhabited part, on the contrary, poses serious problems. In our intervention, we will approach as a preamble, some experiences of “dry” heritage, in the sense that the operation only concerned the stone, without considering the occupants. The emblematic example is that of the famous dwellings of Le Corbusier in France. Before addressing two other very disparate experiences geographically, but which have in common that it is the inhabitant who was at the origin of the patrimonialization or at least an affirmation of a choice of what the inhabitant wants to keep from his past. It is first of all about the experience of the Tony Garnier district in Lyon in France, where a group of inhabitants opposed a project to demolish their district, to propose its renovation in an original way. The other experience is that of Ksar Tafilelt in Ghardaïa in Algeria. In the middle of the disert, next to a set of Ksours, classified heritage and in their image, not only as architecture but also as a way of life, a set of habitats gave birth to a new Ksar where the past is reinvented.