The Ksour of the SAHARA Desert as A Great Lesson of Sustainable Urban Design in Hot Desert Oases

Abstract

Despite the severity of the SAHARA Desert from many aspects, the man was able to confront it, and to build great human  settlements distributed in different areas as the REG of Mzab Valley, the ERG of Righ Valley, Hoggar Mountains ... And many others points to human life.These Settlements called SAHARAN Ksour, which become today a valuable architectural and urban heritage. This paper presents a thorough study on SAHARAN Ksour from an environmental point of view, so we focused on its adaptation with the different environmental elements, and speaks about the most important components of architectural and urban design as:
 The internalization concept.
 Half-covered street system.
 Twisted street design.
 And the use of the palm grove as a climatic component of urban and architectural design.

And how to deal with environmental variables such as warm winds (Sirocco), sandy spring wind, high temperature
and the seriously low humidity, all these elements, components and relations are presented in this paper in many
examples of Ksour situated in Algerian SAHARA. This paper is a lesson between environmental components and SAHARA desert urban heritage, which we aim to give prominence to the ability of the past SAHARAN human settlements to challenge the desert at the time where present ones can't challenge it, all this to find a formula for the future SAHARA desert sustainable architectural and urban design.