Creating an inventory for a heritage that holds meaning for its inhabitants: The case of 1950s large housing estates in Oran, Algeria

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Abstract Assigning the heritage status to the colonial architectural legacy of the 1950s large housing estates has still not been considered, as none of them are considered sufficiently valuable or protected by law as social housing heritage. Today, a number of scientific studies carried out on the various large Algerian housing estates have been able to identify their use value, but the lack of additional information for potential stakeholders prevents them from being put to good use. This article contributes to the development of an inventory adapted to the Algerian context: a section on the built heritage of social housing from the colonial period, which has always remained on the fringes of any official intervention. The main question of this study is what are the fundamental steps to be followed for the creation of an effective inventory adapted to large Algerian housing estates, as this research work is based on the combination of two approaches, quantitative and qualitative, as well as field observation based on the methodological triangulation used to draw maximum information from each investigative tool. The objective of this article is to propose a new version of a process adopted for the elaboration of a thematic inventory by examining the identification and the evaluation of the values by referring to the system of foreign inventories to create a new one in a particular context. The article designates four large housing estates in the city of Oran as cases of study. The results obtained by this study reveal that the system of inventory slips, certain of them having patrimonial values of degree, is high measured via the assessment elements (criteria, factors, characteristics) identified in the field, whose combined efforts by the various institutional and professional actors, as well as the involvement of the inhabitants, has made it possible to bring the large housing estates out of ignorance and into the open. The addition of details on the criteria and issues that should be taken into account in the Algerian context in the creation of an inventory is a further example.