2023 Volume 11 Issue 3 Pages 192-213
The rural area of the southern slope of the ‘Aurès’ massif represents a significant model of a very particular way of life, which depends not only on the impact of its physical environment, but also on its own culture. That is to say that this rural community seems to be defined according to a dialectical relationship with the society that produced it. In this regard, this paper aims to identify, under the framework of a comparative study, the mode of spatial structuring of a vernacular corpus taken from this rural region. In this case, the village of ‘Beni Ferah’ as a conglomerate of very important traditional settlements, in order to investigate whether there are certain recurrences of spatial syntactic properties at the level of their modes of spatial structuring, i.e. to discover the underlying layouts of the space in question and to bring out, in depth, their socio-spatial structures. The repetition of these structural characteristics is considered as the genotypic index. It is therefore necessary to carry out an analysis process based mainly on the qualitative and quantitative data of the justified graphs of these settlements, in order to highlight the spatial genetic constants that are defined as genotypes. The qualitative analysis of these justified graphs is based on visual factors (distributedness/non-distributedness, symmetry/asymmetry), topological (occupation/movement) and analytical (permeability, segregation/sequencing). While quantitative data is based on mathematical formulas such as Mean Depth (MD), relative asymmetry (RA), integration (RRA), Base difference factor (BDF), control value (CV), and ‘Space Link Ratio’ (SLR). The results obtained revealed a recurrence of the ‘Annere’ plaza intended for the circulation of visitors, in the most integrative position. In second position, the male gathering spaces ‘Djemaa’ (located along the path crossing the mosque which contains a fairly large number of integrated convex spaces), then, the spaces of daily life ‘Thidder’, and of female gatherings (‘T'ssemerth’ and ‘Thessekifth’), being the most segregated and least controlled.
