Study of the urban expansion of the city of Oran using LANDSAT satellite images and local data

The city of Oran or more officially the Urban Agglomeration of Oran (UAO) is the second largest city of Algeria on the Mediterranean Sea that has experienced an extensive urban growth in the last three decades. Combining the spatial information extracted from LANDSAT satellites images and the data collected from the urban planning local institutions, the evolution of various main aspects of this urban expansion have been studied. This study has shown that from 1987 to 2015, the built space has increased by more than twice on the detriment of bare space and the vegetation space. 4% of vegetation space and 39.5% of bare space of their respective initial superficies were transformed. The housing unit density HUD has more than doubled to be 830 unit/km2 and the average household size AHS has decreased from 6.4 to 4.2 persons per household. After 2000, there have been more constructions of tall towers for housing than before and, the construction of new individual homes on the state land stock was stopped, and more collective housing units constructed instead. The urban green space has not experienced the same development fate as built space and has not exceeded 140 ha.