The Evolution of Upgrading Policies in Amman

While the Municipality of Amman celebrates its centennial in 2009, highlighting the diversity of its population made up of migrants from across the Bilad al Sham, as well as its modernity, symbolized by the successive development projects (the business district of Shmeissani in the 1980s and the new Abdali downtown planned for 2011), it is clear that social disparities within the city continue to grow stronger between West Amman and East Amman. These disparities tie in with morphological differences between informal housing communities developed near the Palestinian camps of Wahdat and Jabal Hussein, with their self-built buildings; and West Amman neighbourhoods with familyowned four storey buildings, interspersed with villas and office blocks. They appear clearly on maps done at the blok level for Amman city (for density, age structure, sex ratio, type of housing, level of employement and level of litteracy). This paper outline the different public policies implemented to resolve the gap between East and West within the city of Amman. These policies are all the more important since, from 1980 to 1997, Jordan has gained a following in the field of upgrading poor urban areas in the Arab world as the first country in the region to implement the developmentalist ideology newly promoted by the World Bank in Latin America and Asia, which was to involve the inhabitants of informal areas in all the stages of renovating their home and to enable them to become homeowners through long term loans guaranteed by the State. But from the Arab-Israeli peace process (the Oslo Accord of September 1993 and the Wadi Araba Treaty of January 1994), the Jordanian government changed its methods of intervention in camps and informal areas of the country in order to focus solely on the supply of services, giving clear priority to security issues.