Hassi Messaoud, located about 600 km south of Algiers, was proposed by the state-owned conglomerate Sonatrach in 2006 as a company town tied to resource extraction. The project included plans for housing and community facilities, as well as a number of educational and administrative campuses that would support the extraction industry. Although Sonatrach did build a number of buildings on the site, and continues to work in the area, Hassi Messaoud is no longer considered an active project. Rather, recent development activity has concentrated in the region’s capital, Ouargla, where the first tramway ever built in the Sahara Desert began operating in late 2016.
