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Algeria Urbanization and Density
Unavailable
Figure 5. Population by Age and Gender, 1987
Source: Based on information from United Nations,
Demographic Yearbook, 1991, New York, 1992, 152-53.
Data from the World Bank's World Development Report,
1992 indicated that in 1990 about 52 percent of the Algerian
population lived in urban regions. By comparison, in 1981 the UN
estimated the urbanized segment of the population at 44 percent,
up from 41 in 1977 and 30 percent in 1960. Urbanization has
occurred in part through population growth, which has converted
villages into towns and towns into cities, but urban migration
has played at least as important a role. During the decade of the
1970s unofficial estimates held that 1.7 million peasants settled
in Algiers, Oran, Constantine, and Annaba, a continuation of the
enormous shift in population from the countryside to the cities
that began at independence. The largest cities attracted many of
these migrants, but the 1977 census showed that many smaller
towns and cities grew even faster, probably because of economic
and administrative decentralization efforts during the 1970s.
Algiers remained the largest urbanized area. A city of fewer than
500,000 people with a predominantly European population in 1954,
it increased to nearly 1 million inhabitants by 1966 despite the
loss of most of its European inhabitants. In 1987 census figures
showed that Algiers proper contained 1,483,000 million
inhabitants and was still growing. Algeria's other major cities
also grew between 1977 and 1987: Oran's population increased from
490,000 to 590,000; Constantine from 344,000 to 438,000; Annaba
from 240,000 to 310,000; Batna from 102,000 to 182,000; Sétif
from 129,000 to 168,000; and Blida from 138,000 to 165,000.
In the mid-1980s the pace of urbanization, estimated
unofficially at 5.6 percent per year, was causing concern to
planning authorities, who were endeavoring to slow its tempo if
not stop it altogether. Government-sponsored agrarian reform
programs and investment in rural housing were initiated to
improve the quality of farm life and thus to stabilize the rural
population. It was hoped that these same measures would relieve
the acute pressure on urban housing, a by-product of massive
urbanization.
According to Algerian government figures, 87 percent of the
population resided on 17 percent of the nation's land. The
population density, averaging 10.5 inhabitants per square
kilometer in mid-1990, varied enormously from 2,500 per square
kilometer in Algiers to less than one per square kilometer in the
mid-Sahara. All major cities and most of the rural population
occupied a quadrilateral that extended about 100 kilometers from
the coast and stretched from Morocco to Tunisia. Within this
area, there was a difference in the way the land was used. In the
west, formerly the area of French vineyards and citrus groves,
was a region of socialized
autogestion (see Glossary)
farms. A short distance east of Algiers the land rises toward the
Kabylie and Aurès mountain zones of eastern Algeria. In an area
only about two hours distant by highway from Algiers, a densely
packed rural population continues to live in remote mountain
areas, sheltered from outside influences and maintaining Berber
languages and customs in their purest forms.
In the heavily populated northern part of the country, the
average density of population does not change substantially from
west to east. Farther inland the density of population declines
progressively southward through the High Plateaus and the Saharan
Atlas mountains, averaging from forty-nine persons down to ten
people per square kilometer. Within the Sahara, the same trend of
diminishing population from north to south is evident. In the
northern half of the Sahara, road distances between populated
oases seldom exceed 170 kilometers. The southern half of the
Algerian Sahara, however, is peopled by only a few thousand
Tuareg. The only town of any importance is Tamanrasset, deep in
the Ahaggar highlands.
Data as of December 1993
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