Studying the Ownership Structures of an Algiers’ Neighbourhood on the Eve of Its Demolition. The Creation of a Geographic Information System Using Historical Land Records from the 1930s

The history of colonial cities often comes to a halt at the neighbourhood level: sources enabling analysis at the street level, let alone at the level of individual buildings, are extremely scarce. This is the case for Algeria and, in particular, for its capital, Algiers. Thus, the ownership structure is most often known only through statistical aggregations at the city-wide level.

A major ‘renovation’ project in the highly central Marine district, involving demolition followed by reconstruction, required the expropriation of several hundred property owners in the 1930s. These expropriation procedures provided an opportunity to produce a plot map and prefectural decrees listing the owners by name. The map has been georeferenced and vectorised. The wealth of information contained in the prefectural decrees (the plot of land concerned, the owner’s name, address, gender, etc.) has been converted into a dataset. It is this dataset that is described and analysed here. It enables significant progress to be made in understanding the social history of Algiers following a century of colonisation.