Copyright

Meriem Ben Ammar

Published On

2024-04-10

Page Range

pp. 27–46

Language

  • English

Print Length

19 pages

2. Impact of Jurisprudential Heritage in the Organisation of the Medina of Tunis

Joint Ownership, Social Practices and Customs

Meriem Ben Ammar focuses on architecture and town planning in the medina of Tunis, highlighting norms and rules relevant to the spatial organisation of houses, the material separation between neighbours and the management of the city in general. She analyses an archived manuscript dating from the eighteenth century on Hanafi law, written by Tunisian jurist Muhammad bin Ḥusayn bin Ibrahim al-Bārūdīal-Ḥanafī. This manuscript offers fair solutions to conflicts over property ownership, construction forms and housing issues between inhabitants and their closest neighbours. Over many centuries, this intellectual heritage encouraged a unified system of construction in the walled medina of Tunis, an organisation of its urban network and the preservation of its neighbourhood relationships.

Contributors

Meriem Ben Ammar

(author)
PhD student in Architecture at University of Cagliari

Meriem Ben Ammar is a PhD student in Architecture at the University of Cagliari Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture. She obtained both an undergraduate and master’s degree in Architecture from the Tunis National School of Architecture and Urbanism and holds a second master’s degree in Heritage Sciences: Islamic Archaeology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tunis, where she prepared her master’s thesis on Islamic legal manuscripts.