Algerian Architecture

Global city rankings offer one way of looking at how urban environments support everyday life. The Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) Global Liveability Index evaluates 173 cities across stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure, highlighting both long-term patterns and changes from one year to the next. In the 2026 edition, Copenhagen has been named the world's most liveable city for the second consecutive year, followed by Vienna and Melbourne. The Danish capital scored 98 out of 100 overall, receiving perfect scores in stability, education, and infrastructure. The global average remains unchanged at 76.1, with improvements in healthcare, education, and infrastructure offsetting continued declines in stability.

A week of architecture news has highlighted the growing connections between environmental change, public systems, and the evolving role of architectural practice. Extreme weather events in different regions have drawn attention to the vulnerability of settlements, infrastructure, and territorial networks, while new approaches to housing demonstrate how changes in procurement, construction, and governance can influence architectural outcomes. At the same time, the recognition of established practitioners points to the lasting impact of architectural ideas across generations, as the profession continues to engage with questions of resilience, systemic change, and the broader conditions shaping the built environment.

Severe late-August wildfires across northern Algeria have brought residential areas, agricultural lands, and critical transport corridors directly into the path of rapidly spreading flames. The destruction across Jijel, Béjaïa, and Tizi Ouzou claimed at least 12 lives and forced the emergency closure of major national highways. The latest outbreak follows a summer of repeated fires across the country, with authorities recorded nearly 2,000 fires nationwide in July, while fires in the northeastern province of Annaba at the end of the month forced more than 100 people to leave their homes and damaged nearly 150 houses. The current fires have again brought residential areas, roads and other infrastructure into the path of rapidly spreading flames. Forest fires occur regularly in northern Algeria during the summer, with increasingly frequent drought and periods of intense heat contributing to more severe fire conditions.

The Climat de France is a French colonial social housing project in Algeria designed by Fernand Pouillon and currently renamed Oued Koriche. Located approximately 8km west of the country’s capital, Algiers, it was built from 1954 to 1957, right in the middle of the Algerian War of Independence. The project has several buildings with different scales. Its most prominent structure is a large rectangular building that houses 3000 dwellings, along with a spacious interior square similar to a Roman forum and exterior windows inspired by the mosaics found in Islamic architecture.

Organized by the Abdullatif Alfozan Award for Mosque Architecture and the College of Architecture at Kuwait University, the 3rd International Conference on Mosque Architecture was held in Kuwait on 14-16 November 2022. Under the theme of “Mosque: a cross cultural building,” 101 architects participated in this year’s edition, showcasing their state-of-the-art designs and how they reimagined religious buildings in a more contemporary context, taking into account the importance of community, privacy, its religious significance, and the environment.

The Association of Arab Architects has announced the winners of the 2022 Arab Architects Awards. This year’s winning architectural projects highlight the importance of inclusive design, taking into account sustainability and designing with a sensible response to the local communities and landscapes they inhibit. The two-day ceremony was held in Amman, Jordan on November 16-17, 2022, and gathered hundreds of regional architects, urban planners, engineers, and designers of all demographics to explore and engage in discussions about architecture and the future of the built environment in the Arab region.

What would it mean to design buildings that exceed the economic accountings of liberal biopolitics, that instead offer an entirely different rationale for supporting health? In the years that Michel Foucault conceptualized the term biopolitics, he was part of a constellation of researchers and architects who developed care praxes that defined the value of life and its maintenance through a desire-based calculus. The welfare state institutions of architect Nicole Sonolet in particular—mental hospitals, public housing complexes, and new village typologies built mainly in postwar France and postcolonial Algeria from the 1950s to the 1980s—were designed not only to support but to center the needs of people often excluded from design processes. Sonolet’s mental health centers for residents of Paris’s 13th arrondissement, in particular, were key projects for discovering a design practice tied to the provision of care for its own sake.