From the 1990s, urban policy in Algeria underwent significant upheavals, including authoritarian management, which was replaced by participatory management. Following the example of Algerian cities, the city of Batna adheres with this new vision, hence the implementation of a partnership program that involves various stakeholders including the citizen. The latter is present within multiple associations. The objective of this work is to highlight the activism of neighborhood associations as a representative element of civil society and their determining role in the management of different situations. To report on this issue, a field survey was conducted in the form of semi-directive interviews addressed to the three local actors: associations, citizens and elected officials.

According to a United Nations report, the proportion of the urban population living in informal houses worldwide had reached 23.5% in 2018, which means over 1 billion people have been living in slums, and an estimated 3 billion people will be requiring affordable housing by 2030. Slums are often linked to developing countries, where weak governance and misled socio-economic choices aggravate the situation and lead to continual conflict with the authorities. This research aims to model this conflict through Game Theory and shed the light on the different parameters that influence the decision-making process and finally propose a management model to limit the spread of this phenomenon as much as possible. This model will be applied in the city of Hassi Bahbah using ABM, the results of the game modeling allowed us to extract the delta threshold which will allow decision-makers to know when they have to make decisions. Our study aims to offer decision-makers a tool based on our model, allowing them to better manage and thus monitor the evolution of informal houses. The authors hope that the findings could provide means and insights for policies and strategic directions in land uses and planning systems.

The health systems in many countries are still unable to control the evolution and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic despite the large mobilisation of national resources. International attention has focussed on finding a cure, and preventive measures and national and international strategies to be adopted and implemented with regard to other future pandemics have been neglected despite their predictability and high probability of occurrence. This work aims to anticipate a reading on experience feedback in light of the current pandemic situation, and to identify the main spatial elements of vulnerability in Batna, Algeria, which seems to control the ability of an urban area to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We used a digital model based on a multi-criteria approach implemented in a geo-decisional GIS database to serve as a decision support tool for dealing with an epidemiological situation as a preventive or curative action. The results from the model seem to adequately reflect the reality of confirmed incidents in Batna. In addition, the results of the analysis of the spatiotemporal evolution of the virus clearly confirm that the urban sectors characterised by high vulnerability are those that have recorded an increasing number of confirmed COVID-19 incidents since the start of the epidemic until December 2020.