L' Hydrologie et la morphologie du relief comme sources d'étude historique Essai de reconstitution du processus de formation et de transformation d'Alger à l'époque médiévale

Abstract

This thesis succeeds to a first research which highlighted the quality of the information's sources of the urban hydrography and the morphology of the natural relief for the reconstruction of the morphological history of Algiers in the Ottoman era. Because of the filiation of our approach to the processual typo-morphology, we have adopted this last one as a methodological tool to extend the historical field of the hydrography's exploitation and of the natural relief to the earlier periods of the morphological history of Algiers, especially to the medieval period. In the framework of this thesis we questioned the hydrographic system of rainwater's management of Algiers as an artifact resulting from the formation's process of and transformation of the medina of Algiers, a system that can inform the historical chronology of its formation and its successive stages of evolution. Regarding the relief, in addition to taking into account its evolutionary character, we also questioned it following a «military» occupation logic of the territory. A complementary logic with the «civil» occupation logic highlighted in the processual typo-morphology. This allowed us to identify the successive military morphological perimeters of Algiers during the medieval period, perimeters that can themselves coincide with successive enclosure walls of the city. The theoretical model of territory's humanization of the processual typo-morphology, the hydrography's exploitation and the natural relief following a logic of military occupation allowed us to elaborate the typological «generic» process of Algiers. A process that represents the theoretical model of formation and transformation of Algiers in the medieval era and which constituted the historical and morphological frame of our restitution of our restitution of the morphological history of Algiers in the medieval era. And it is by crossing the «generic» typological process of Algiers with the existing information's sources that we managed to develop a scenario of Algiers's formation and transformation in the medieval era, a scenario that has an hypothesis value. In the end, the results obtained allowed us to validate our working hypothesis. A hypothesis according to which the hydrography and the natural relief apprehended following a logic of military occupation constitute sources for the morphological history's reconstitution of Algiers in the medieval era.