Battered by a civil conflict in the 1990s, this north African capital will showcase a dazzling new midtown crowned by a business district in 2011, thanks to an investor's dreams to promote Algerian entrepreneurship.
"This isn't just a real estate project," said 57-year-old Abdelouahab Rahim, the brainchild behind the Algiers urban renewal project.
"I also want to create a model to show that Algerian entrepreneurs are capable of building, of constructing, of investing and of creating wealth for their country."
In February, Rahim floated an 8.3 billion-dinar (91.3 million-euro, 117 million-dollar) bond issue to finance part of his project, worth a total of 2.5 billion euros in investment over several years.
It is the first time a private Algerian company has made a public bond offer.
"I chose a bond issue open to the public to allow all Algerians to participate in the construction in Algeria's future midtown. This is an economic project but also a citizens' project," Rahim said.
Wracked by more than a decade of t violence, Algeria adopted a national reconciliation charter offering amnesty to former fighters that did not have blood on their hands in a 2006 referendum.
The page has turned in other ways, as state-sponsored economic development begins to take off. The capital's cramped historic centre has been unable to accommodate a spike in demand for office space.
"The capital no longer has a midtown, and doesn't have a business district," Rahim said.
The model for the future district includes a million square metres (3.2 million square feet) of office space, serviced apartments, a commercial centre, marina, aquatic park and convention centre.
Dubbed "Algiers Medina", this future Algiers contrasts starkly with its past. The sunwashed, seaside city was a war zone in the 1990s, with the tangle of streets in the Casbah, or old quarter, the stronghold of Islamist guerrillas.
While fighters are still active, they stage many of their attacks in eastern Algeria. The last strike in the capital took place in 2007, when a pair of suicide bombings targeting United Nations and government buildings killed 42 people.
A native of the eastern Kabylia region, Rahim returned to Algeria at the height of the bloodshed in 1995, after spending two decades in Paris and Geneva.
"I responded to the appeal launched by the government in the early 1990s to the Algerian diaspora to return and invest in their government," he said.
He first invested in pharmacies and later in the insurance business before launching into hotels and business properties in 2001, buying Algiers' Hilton hotel from South Korea's now-defunct Daewoo Group, among other investments.
Today, he heads Groupe Dahli, a hotel and real estate venture that realised a 24-million-euro turnover in 2007. The same year, he launched with four other entrepreneurs the National Union of Investors, or UNI, an employers union that awaits government approval to become official.
Rahim's project has been well received by the government, which tacitly approved the renovation deal for an undisclosed sum.
For their part, Algerians hope the urban facelift will ease commuting headaches in the midtown area now marked by graceful, 19th-century white buildings with blue balconies, tortuously tiny roads and staircases.
"The ideal would be to have all the administrations and public services united" in the district, said one local resident, Toufik.
His wife, however, was more cautious.
"I'm waiting until it's finished before commenting on it," she said.
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