ABSTRACT
In the last decades, Algeria has experienced significant demographic growth and a rapid process of urbanization due mainly to rural migration to its main cities. Confronted with this fast and uncontrolled urbanization, Algeria's largest cities have implemented new forms of planned urban expansion, although in most cases largely unsuccessfully. A key feature that characterizes this recent urban growth process in Algeria is certainly the demographic and physical growth of its largest cities, those with over 50,000 inhabitants, in the northern part of the country. But since the 1980s, this demographic and urban growth process has been mostly due to the expansion of small towns located on the outskirts of these main cities and in other parts of the country as well (Chadli and Hadjiedj, 2003).
