Les transformations de la maison des Bédouins du Néguev

This thesis deals with transformations in the culture of the house (shapes, ways of life, representations of the houses by their inhabitants and their participation in their design). It focuses on houses built between 1972 and 2003 at Tel Shéva, the first in a series of seven planned resettlement towns developed for the Bedouin of the Negev desert (Israel). Today, half of them are living in planed towns while the other half remains on tribal sites, in more than one hundred unrecognised villages. The Bedouins (130 000 inhabitants) of the Negev began to settle in the first part of the 20th century. Throughout its second part they underwent profound transformations, including urbanisation. In the 1960-s, the State initiated a policy of Bedouin new towns in order to curb the development of the Bedouin shanty-villages, which were growing on the outskirts of Beer Shéva, the capital of the Israel's Southern district. In those Bedouin new towns, the inhabitants are free to build a family home on a 1000 m2 plot, as long as they respect neighbourhood regulations. They receive the land as freehold and the infrastructure is state subsidised. The architectural autonomy granted to the inhabitants of Tel Shéva is designed to allow them to build according to their specific needs. The social aspects of Bedouin rehousing in planned towns have been studied extensively, but, to our knowledge, no research has yet used the changes in house conception to illustrate the cultural transformations undergone by the Bedouin. Our typology of houses representing the stages of this evolution, relies on a framework for the study of adaptation to involuntary rehousing (refugees etc) drawn up by Scudder and Colson [1982]. They identify four steps in a rehousing operation: recruitment, transition, development and incorporation. For each step, we have tried to identify one type of dwelling. Informal housing in the first stage, reproductions of the previous environment –in the second; in the third, a hybrid model of modern housing including traditional elements, and original architecture corresponding to new values - in the final stage. This thesis creates a house typology of houses from the points of view of morphology, way of life, representations and inhabitant participation in design. We have defined four types: the "tent", the "standard house", the "catalogue house" and the "individualised house". The tent, and the shelters which followed it, were not planned housing. The behaviour of the inhabitant and the representations of the houses corresponded to traditional logic. In the "standard house" stage, the first rehoused inhabitants accepted any kind of dwelling so long as it was simple and cheap. Thus, they unquestioningly applied a standard model. During the "catalogue house" stage, the designers, attracted by the market of individual housing in Bedouin towns, introduced architectural variety, to match growing social differentiation. During the "individualised house" stage, in the early nineties, customers started demanding a role in the design of their houses: a practice initiated amongst the families and friends of several designers. At this point the individual house reflects the emergence of an individualised consciousness of one's identity revealing profound changes in culture and society.