Explained: Rethinking Home, Rights, and Recovery in Syria

In a previous article, the Syrian architect and urban researcher Dima Rajjo, argued that the right to the city must be central to any discussion of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria. Housing, land, and property (HLP) rights are not just about legal ownership – they are about the lived, remembered, and shared experience of urban life. In a country where millions have been displaced and entire neighbourhoods erased, the way we rebuild is inseparable from questions of justice, belonging, and memory.

This article enquires: how do the state-led residential megaprojects now emerging across Syria align with this vision? Do they offer a path toward inclusive recovery, or do they risk reproducing longstanding patterns of exclusion where top-down urban policies, limited public engagement, and investment-driven redevelopment have historically marginalised poorer communities and informal settlements?

The trajectory of Syria’s reconstruction – under Assad and after the fall of the regime – suggests the latter.

Marota City was publicly presented by the Assad regime as a symbol of modernisation and post-war recovery; a flagship redevelopment project cast in glossy investor brochures and state media as evidence of national revival. Yet this narrative concealed a more troubling reality. Launched under Decree 66 (2012), which enabled the rezoning of informal settlements without guaranteeing return for original residents, the project displaced thousands from Basateen al-Razi. Many were excluded from compensation mechanisms and denied any role in shaping the redevelopment of the spaces they had long inhabited. These were not temporary encampments or illegal encroachments—they were long-standing urban communities, rich in social ties, collective memory, and everyday life.

The post-Assad phase has not marked a meaningful departure from these exclusionary patterns. Instead, it has seen their rebranding under the guise of national recovery. The residential initiatives announced recently by the Transitional Government – such as the Boulevard of Victory in Homs, the Al-Adawi Residential and Tourism Project in Damascus, and renewed efforts to complete Marota City – were framed as a milestone of economic progress and urban renewal. Yet these developments continue to prioritise capital investment and aesthetic transformation over restitution, participation, and social repair.

Available information – such as government announcements and public investment reports – makes no reference to inclusive planning frameworks, affordability strategies, or guarantees of return for displaced communities.

This model of redevelopment, while marketed as technocratic progress, in fact recycles earlier logics of spatial exclusion. Neighbourhoods including informal areas – where much of Syria’s urban poor lived before the war – are treated as blank slates rather than as lived spaces with deep social histories. Their erasure is justified in the language of upgrading, but their residents remain absent from both the process and the outcome. The physical reconstruction proceeds, but without the social infrastructure that makes a city meaningful or just.

This pattern is not unique to Syria. In Egypt, state-led projects such as Al-Asmarat and the New Administrative Capital have been similarly framed as efforts to replace unsafe informal areas with modern housing. However, research shows these projects were developed through top-down relocation strategies that overlooked community voices, erased social ties, and generated new forms of exclusion. The result: expansive but under-occupied housing zones, alien to the populations they were meant to serve.

For Syria, the stakes are even higher. Post-conflict urban planning is not only a question of infrastructure; it is an act of social and political reconstitution. Displacement has fractured memory, trust, and identity. To rebuild neighbourhoods without acknowledging this rupture is to prolong it.

The reconstruction process must engage with cities and neighbourhoods as spaces of memory, resilience, and everyday urban life – where recovery must begin.

This is not a theoretical risk. The trajectory Syria is currently following echoes a regional precedent with devastating consequences for social cohesion. Beirut’s post-war reconstruction, particularly the Solidere project, serves as a stark warning. Framed as a symbol of national recovery and modernity, Solidere rebuilt parts of downtown Beirut by erasing others, displacing residents, prioritising investor aesthetics over social repair, and stripping the area of its lived history.

Solidere’s legacy is not only one of physical displacement but of collective amnesia – where the scars of war were paved over and the relational life of the city replaced by a sanitised, commodified urban core. It stands as a reminder that reconstruction without reckoning is another form of loss.

Syria now stands at a similar crossroads. If rebuilding becomes an aesthetic or economic exercise divorced from memory and justice, it will not heal—it will alienate. The result will be cities rebuilt without their people, and homes reconstructed without their histories.

Reconstruction is never neutral. It is inherently political. It can either entrench exclusion or support healing. Gated enclaves and luxury towers isolate and erase. In contrast, inclusive neighbourhoods rooted in local knowledge and shaped through meaningful participation can help restore dignity, belonging, and collective recovery.

Neighbourhoods are more than physical spaces – they are where people remember together, gather, mourn, rebuild trust, and reconnect. In Syria, a society fractured by displacement and loss, these neighbourhoods hold the potential to become entry points for healing and social cohesion. Genuine and inclusive public engagement in their reconstruction can help communities reclaim shared memories and rebuild the relational fabric essential to peacebuilding. This process of shaping urban recovery is not merely technical, it is profoundly social, political, and restorative.

Syria now stands at a pivotal juncture. Will reconstruction deepen the exclusions that preceded and followed the conflict or can it chart a path toward repair? Can the right to return be expanded to encompass not just access to housing, but also the right to memory, participation, and dignity? What would it take to design recovery efforts around those who have lost the most; not only rebuilding their homes, but restoring their agency and voice?

These are not abstract questions. They point to concrete decisions about planning, investment, governance, and justice. They also suggest that another path is possible; one shaped not by displacement, but by the people who seek to come home.

We, practitioners, communities, urbanists, and all those committed to justice, must insist on a path that rebuilds not only structures, but also the social ties and cultural memory that give them meaning. If reconstruction is to contribute to peace, it must begin with those who were displaced and uphold their right not just to return, but to shape the future of their homes. This means reimagining recovery through inclusive planning, the protection of housing rights, and locally rooted models of neighbourhood restoration; approaches that place memory, participation, and justice at the heart of rebuilding. Homes are not just made of walls, but of stories; and the right to the city begins with the right to tell them.