Reports & Papers

This 43-page report form a series of guidelines providing a comprehensive technical standard operating procedure for shelter repair and rehabilitation programmes in Syria.

This report makes a preliminary attempt to delineate how housing, land, and property can be used to finance and support militaries, militias, and insurgencies in three conflicts, including Syria.

The Day After, an Istanbul-based Syrian organisation, has published a series of reports on housing, land and property rights issues in Syria.

This 40-page report by the Arab Reform Initiative aims at mapping and analysing the government’s approach towards informal housing.

This is a summary of a news report titled “Housing Complexes in North-Western Syria,” published by the Assistance Coordination Unit, which surveys the growing number of housing complexes in Northwest Syria.

This paper outlines how Syria can develop more liveable, economically viable, and environmentally sustainable places in the post-conflict phase. It projects four scenarios, each with varying numbers and characteristics of returning refugees and IDPs. Next, it compares the returnees' potential residential patterns and urban concentration to Zipf's Law, a normalised distribution of ‘ideal’ city sizes.

In Syria, the average annual housing deficit reached nearly 130,000 homes in the decade preceding the 2011 conflict, according to official estimates. This represents the annual gap between the demand for housing and the supply of implemented housing units and has become a major obstacle to property rights.

As battles have subsided since 2018, real estate prices in Damascus have risen to such an extent that owning a private home in the Syrian capital has become an inaccessible luxury to most of its residents.

This paper shows how the geography- and political economy of warfare has impacted upon residential patterns and housing practices in Damascus during the civil war. The empirical results are based on satellite imagery, policy documents and a survey among spatial planning experts and students.

Syria’s civil war has been marked by brutal chemical and air attacks on civilians, widespread human rights violations, and urbicidal attacks—those intended to destroy both the built environment of urban centers and their distinctive ideological and cultural features. As open conflict in Syria draws to a halting close, human rights activists must pay urgent attention to the methods of reconstruction and property restitution contemplated and initiated in the postwar period, given the widespread destruction of Syria’s cities and the expropriation of civilian property.