New Socio-Spatial Reading of a Remarkable Landscape Located in Testour, toward a Heritage Setting of a Moorish Site

Abstract

Traditional conservation efforts have not improved conditions in most historic Tunisian cities. However, the changes adopted at the international level in historical urban conservation, based on urban vitality and regions’ sustainability, open horizons to new approaches of reading. Testour, a Moorish city of northern Tunisia, presents one of the historical centers most anchored in identity and the least studied. Our study aims at initiating a new transdisciplinary reading approach that provides a link between time, spaces, actors, culture and sustainability. To do so, we followed a methodological process with a gradual logic that led to a comprehensive management project. This approach presents a set of analytical methodological procedures, which consider historicity in conjunction with a global diagnostic of the landscape in favor of the evaluation of historic centers. This method enabled us to establish a new map showing the structural and functional evolution of Testour throughout history, identifying the valuation indicators and the attributes of global management. This work presents a new reading grid of Testour, including the structural, functional, values and heritage attributes.