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

Abstract

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.