ALGIERS — Tired of living in fear of gang violence, Karima and her children left the drab satellite town of Ali Mendjeli near Constantine in northeast Algeria to seek refuge with in-laws.
The 45-year-old mother of three, who asked not to give her surname, said living with in-laws is far from ideal but it beats the anxiety of daily life in her former home where rival gangs battle it out with knives and swords.
“I was afraid they would attack my children,” she said. “I have two teenagers and I feared it would end badly.”
Experts say urban violence is on the rise due to social insecurity, traumatic memories of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s and the mushrooming of deprived towns like Ali Mendjeli on the edges of major cities.
Algeria’s population has shot up from nine million when it won independence from France in 1962 to more than 40 million in 2016.
The demographic boom and rapid migration from the countryside to cities created an acute housing shortage. In 2000, the government launched a prograe to build two million homes by 2019.
But new towns like Ali Mendjeli have been built “without any territorial and environmental logic”, said Nadir Djermoune, a professor of architecture at the University of Blida, southwest of Algiers.
Rather than becoming urban spaces, they have become marginalized communities where gang violence is common, he said.
Prof. Rachid Belhadj, head of Forensic Medicine at the Mustapha Bacha University Hospital Centre in Algiers, labels them “ghettos” where violence is growing “like a cancer”.
“Violence was already there, but its use by organized gangs... is what worries us,” he said.
Belhadj, whose center examines victims of violence to verify their claims before they complain to police, said the number of people using his services has leapt from 2,500 to 6,000 per year in a decade.
No official statistics on crime rates are available, but Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui has said the relocation of slum dwellers to the new towns has “caused friction between young people”.
As for Karima, she feared her children would end up taking drugs and dropping out of school.