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The completion date for the Al-Dweir Car Expo Centre, located outside Damascus, has been postponed to the end of October, the Assistant Minister of Public Works and Housing told the semi-official newspaper Al-Watan.

In September 2018, Syria’s Council of Ministers decided to establish a car expo centre in Al-Dweir, a town in the Rural Damascus governorate. A joint administration of the Damascus and Rural Damascus governorates would plan, zone, manage, and invest in the centre. The former prime minister laid the first foundation stone for the site in late 2018.

The centre has recently received renewed attention, with numerous meetings held to follow up on its implementation. These meetings were attended by the ministers of local administration and public works and housing, the governors of Damascus and Rural Damascus, members of the two governorates’ joint administration, and the general director of Cadastral Affairs.

The centre takes up 145 hectares of land and is next to the M5 Damascus-Aleppo highway near the Al-Wafideen camp. The land belongs to the Douma City Council. Zoning plans for the city were drawn in accordance with Urban Planning Law No. 5 of 1982.

A handful of companies and other public institutions affiliated with the Ministry of Public Works and Housing are building the expo centre’s infrastructure and removing rubble. Lack of fuel supplies and financial difficulties have reportedly been the main factors delaying the project. A fuel shortage halted work on the expo centre for the first four months of 2022, according to official statements.

Applications for plots in the expo centre complex began in 2019 and continued until 2021. The application rate for plots in the city reached 120 percent in May 2021, according to the state-run SANA news outlet. However, it is unclear how 120 percent of the plots are allocated.

The expo centre, also referred to as an expo “city,” is the first of its kind in Syria. In addition to plots of land allocated for exhibitions, including workshops, offices, administrative buildings, and a single-window trade office, there are also a driver’s education track and various leisure areas.

Land ownership of the area has not been completely transferred to the expo centre’s joint administration. The last follow-up meeting for the project was held in August 2022. The meeting discussed real estate ownership and the need to carry through on the necessary legal procedures to transfer ownership to the project’s joint administration.

After finally transferring ownership of the land to itself, the joint administration will sell and allocate three types of plots on the property: large plots of 2,000-5,000 square metres for large car exhibitions and assembly plants; medium 500-1,000-square-metre pilots for car dealerships; and small 2500-square-metre plots for auto shops.

Priority in applying for plots in the expo centre will go to vehicle agency owners licensed to buy and sell both new and used cars in the Damascus and Rural Damascus governorates. Owners of offices for buying and selling auto parts in those two governorates, as well as craftspeople and those wishing to open such offices will also receive priority.

The expo centre will feature only professions related to the trade and manufacturing of cars. In 2018, the Damascus and Rural Damascus governorates agreed that the duties of their joint administration would also include rehabilitating the northern entrance to the capital city, removing informal housing, and demolishing the old car market in Harasta, which was destroyed during the conflict.

The car expo centre project came along on the sidelines of the project to re-zone the northern entrance of Damascus and evict its occupants, according to a correspondent for The Syria Report. The joint administration is reportedly working to pursue the owners of car showrooms in Harasta currently slated for demolition to close up shop and move to the Al-Dweir centre. Previously, the administration compelled the Harasta showroom owners to pledge that they wouldn’t demand compensation for the demolitions and that they would apply for plots in the new expo centre if they wanted to continue working in the car industry. A similar warning was also sent to owners of all car shops in the northern Damascus entrance area slated for demolition.

Issued last June, Zoning Plan No. 106 for the Jobar neighbourhood of Damascus does not allocate any plot to rebuild the Al-Mualameen Tower, which regime forces destroyed in 2015. Record No. 53 in the Land Registry, on which the tower is listed, does not receive any mention in Zoning Plan No. 106.

The 12-storey Al-Mualameen Tower was located on the outskirts of Jobar and overlooked the nearby Al-Abasiyeen Garages, the commercial district, and Al-Abasiyeen Square. The Housing Cooperative Society owns the tower for Teachers and Educators in Damascus, hence the building’s name (“mualameen” means “teachers” in Arabic). The government granted the cooperative a permit on June 17, 1974, and it began constructing the tower in the 1980s, on a plot of land corresponding to the real estate record No. 53. In 2004, the cooperative finally handed the apartments over to applicants per the housing cooperative system. The tower was located in a zoned real estate area and was divided into individual apartments listed within the Land Registry under the names of the apartment owners.

Cooperative housing is linked to social housing programs implemented by Syria’s public authorities. Housing cooperative societies were all previously affiliated with the General Union of Cooperative Housing, which dissolved under Decree No. 37 of 2019, 58 years after it was established. The Ministry of Public Works and Housing took on the union’s roles.

The apartment owners in Al-Mualameen Tower are state employees working in education. For them, subscribing to apartments in the building was the most significant investment in their professional lives, serving as a reward for the end of their service and an asset to pass down to their children, one owner told The Syria Report.

The biggest problem with Al-Mualameen Tower and other housing cooperative projects in general was the more than two-decade delay in receiving the apartments. Applicants for Al-Mualameen didn’t receive their apartments until 2004 after most had already retired and finished paying off their payments for the housing. Worse, the newfound apartment owners immediately had to repair and restore the homes due to poor construction.

The tower’s height and location made it a strategic military point, contested between regime and opposition forces. Rebels seized the building and occupied it between 2013 and 2015. During this time, the regime tried and failed to recapture it despite bombing the tower with airstrikes, artillery shells and rockets. Then, in February 2015, regime forces dug a tunnel under the tower at 16 metres deep and 250 metres long, set up explosives inside, then detonated them, turning the building into a pile of rubble.

In late June 2022, the Damascus governorate issued Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 for Jobar and fielded objections from relevant rightsholders. The detailed zoning plan did not observe any new plot of land for rights holders in the teachers’ cooperative, which implies classifying the destroyed tower as an unlicensed building within an informal settlement. The Syria Report could not confirm whether any of the rights holders in Al-Mualameen Tower filed any objections to Detailed Zoning Plan No. 106 within the one-month deadline to do so.

The zoning area in Jobar is subject to Planning and Urban Development Law No. 23 of 2015, which gave administrative authorities the choice to employ Law No. 23, the Expropriation Law, or the Real Estate Development and Investment Law when re-zoning areas containing informal housing or rehabilitating areas damaged by natural catastrophes and war.

Law No. 23 stipulates that, as part of the zoning process, an administrative unit forms a compulsory land readjustment committee tasked with giving rights holders their shares of property in the same location as their original properties or nearby. As part of this readjustment process, rights holders within the area undergoing zoning receive plots of land designated for construction within that same area as compensation for losing their original properties. However, the land distributed to the rights holders is often not in the original locations of their properties. Furthermore, up to 40 percent of the surface area of their original properties may be deducted, without compensation, when handing over the new lands.

If rights holders file objections, prove their ownership and obtain new land through compulsory land readjustment, they must then assemble themselves and their allocated plots of land. Rights holders must then build on these properties at their own expense. If a rights holder dies, the inheritance process is carried out in the presence of all their heirs, or at least their legal representatives. Both cases require prior security approval, adding potential complications to proving the existing rights of former Al-Mualameen Tower residents.

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