EL MEDREB is an Algerian slang expression used, depending on the context and the interlocutor, to define both an unknown location and a very precise one.

After DJART’14, the TCD team decides to dive into a research of abandoned buildings in Algiers starting from the district of El Hamma by investigating its social, architectural and historical context.

El Hamma, in the east-north side of the city, is one of the biggest hubs of abandoned buildings, especially of factories and warehouses, left empty and in decay after the post-independence changes of the economic and political system.

The district has a complex urban fabric as besides being an industrial site it also includes a diverse range of population which number decreased exponentially in the last years due to the politics of desertification of the territory.

We undertake this research in order to understand the mutation of this neighbourhood and reflect critically on the various processes it is going through. At the same time we work on the preservation of the collective memory by reaching out directly the people who inhabit El Hamma, including those who were displaced in other areas of the city but who keep coming back to the district because of their strong emotional attachment to it.

El Hamma is a point of departure in our research, indeed the same processes are taking place in different areas of the city.

In today’s Algiers, on the one hand we are experiencing a lack of independent spaces for expression while at the same time the authorities are keeping planning and building huge and costly infrastructures to which citizens cannot relate themselves. On the other hand there is an abundance of neglected and unexploited architectural heritage that could fulfil the needs of creating common spaces for social encounters and culture making from the community in sustainable ways.

The common is not given, it’s rather a process constituted by a set of social relations and shared responsibilities. In contrast to top-down decisions, we want to experiment bottom-up strategies of recuperation of this neglected places and histories.

We wanted to re-imagine these abandoned spaces as potential sites for the preservation, creation and use of urban commons, collective physical and cultural places managed by and for its inhabitants.

The public program of El Medreb was a restitution of our long process of investigation and relation with the  specific district of El Hamma. It took place in two abandoned hangars and was conceived as a series of activities that reflected the research such as the oral history of the district in graffiti, the revival of cinema though movies projections, the collective memory museum workshop, the body art of displacement in the ruins of one of the hangar, among others.

Also, one of the outcomes of the project is an illustrative map of El Hamma that summarizes the information collected during the research.