Explained: Reclaiming the Right to the City and Housing Justice

In the aftermath of Syria’s protracted conflict, discussions around housing, land, and property (HLP) rights have largely been framed through legal and humanitarian lenses. While essential, these frameworks often overlook the spatial, architectural, and urban dimensions of displacement, reconstruction, and return. In this article, Syrian architect and urban researcher Dima Rajjo proposes a critically integrated reading of HLP, foregrounding the ‘right to the city’ as both a conceptual and operational lens through which to reimagine urban recovery in Syria. This approach is particularly pertinent in contexts of forced displacement, where claims to land, housing, and belonging are shaped not only by legal entitlements but also by spatial form, governance structures, and community dynamics.

The concept of the ‘right to the city,’ first introduced by Henri Lefebvre (1968) and later developed by David Harvey (2008), is not simply a call for equitable access to urban resources. It is a collective claim to reshape the urban environment – a demand for participatory, democratic control over urban life. This framework challenges dominant forms of top-down governance and market-led urbanism by asserting the agency of inhabitants in producing, inhabiting, and transforming the city. Within this paradigm, displaced persons and marginalised communities are not passive recipients of services, but active agents in shaping their urban futures.

In Syria, this re-framing is particularly urgent. Both before and after 2011, urban policy followed exclusionary and frequently securitised logics.

Prior to the conflict, approximately 40 percent of the urban population lived in informal settlements, which were systematically overlooked in national planning strategies, per UN Habitat figures.

Following the uprising, legal mechanisms such as Decree No. 66 of 2012 and Law No. 10 of 2018 enabled the state to re-zone and redevelop urban areas with limited transparency and without ensuring the return of previous residents. In Basateen Al-Razi (Damascus), Baba Amr (Homs), and East Aleppo’s historic quarters, state-led urban renewal initiatives have promoted redevelopment agendas prioritising commercial and securitised interests, often with minimal regard for the reintegration of displaced communities.

While reconstruction in many of these areas remains partial or delayed, the underlying planning frameworks already reflect exclusionary priorities that undermine housing justice and spatial equity.

What remains largely absent from current HLP discourse is an urbanist and architectural interpretation; one that treats land not only as legal property, but as lived space imbued with memory, history, and social infrastructure. This broader understanding of land and space as socially embedded leads directly to questions of justice – specifically, how housing policies uphold or deny it.

Housing justice offers a critical lens through which to examine HLP policy and practice. It conceptualises access to shelter not merely as a legal entitlement, but as a matter of spatial and social equity. It recognises the political nature of housing provision and the embedded power dynamics between state and citizen, owner and tenant, planner and resident. Scholars such as Peter Marcuse and David Madden argue that confronting the commodification of housing is key to advancing urban democracy. Introducing this concept alongside the right to the city enables a deeper, more holistic critique of Syrian recovery frameworks and prepares the ground for subsequent exploration.

An urban reading of HLP shifts attention from individual property rights to collective claims over neighbourhoods, infrastructure, and the right to shape urban futures. This shift has practical implications for zoning, land readjustment, and prioritising public services and spaces in planning. It reframes recovery not as a technical task of reconstruction, but as a process of restoring social cohesion, community agency, and urban identity.

To reframe HLP through the right to the city is to centre social, spatial, and historical justice. It compels us to ask: Who is included in the vision of return? Whose narratives and needs shape reconstruction? What types of urban futures are being created? Rebuilding housing alone is insufficient; revitalising public spaces, communal institutions, and sites of memory is essential. The built environment mediates social relations and directly influences the sustainability of return.

Syrian urbanists, architects, and planners have a critical role to play. Their engagement must go beyond technical reconstruction to include the co-production of urban visions with affected communities. This entails decentralising planning authority, integrating informal settlements into national frameworks, and designing reconstruction around principles of accessibility, cultural continuity, and social resilience. Local municipalities, civil society organisations, and community networks must be empowered to participate meaningfully in planning and decision-making.

Post-conflict experiences elsewhere illustrate the value of this approach. Medellín’s transformation was underpinned by participatory budgeting and spatial inclusion; Sarajevo integrated memory mapping into housing recovery; and in Freetown, community-led neighbourhood upgrading enabled displaced residents to shape their environments. These examples demonstrate that participatory urbanism is not a utopian aspiration but a practical necessity for just and durable recovery.

In Syria, adapting these models requires sensitivity to complex political geographies, sectarian dynamics, and shifting territorial control. Yet, integrating urban and architectural thinking into HLP frameworks offers a path towards more inclusive and locally grounded recovery. It aligns with international best practice, including UN-Habitat’s principles for post-conflict urban recovery, and anchors reconstruction in the lived realities of affected communities.

These are not only theoretical insights, but reflections shaped by practice and proximity to the Syrian urban condition. Observations from across Syria’s urban landscape (before and after 2011) reveal how space becomes not only a site of reconstruction, but of contested memory, exclusion, and resilience. The right to the city is not an abstract principle; it is embedded in everyday struggles for recognition, belonging, and dignity. This perspective is grounded in the stories of communities who navigate informal settlements, negotiate legal grey zones, and persistently reconstitute their neighbourhoods despite structural neglect. It is their agency—and our responsibility as urbanists—that must shape the path forward.