On December 8, 2024, the dictatorship in Syria fell. After the peaceful 2011 uprising, which the Assad regime was quick to brutally suppress, war ensued. Destruction, killing, enforced disappearance, and forced displacement, were the results. According to Human Rights Watch, more than half a million people were killed.1 UNHCR estimates that 13 million people were displaced and 6.7 million were forced to flee the country, one of the biggest displacement movements in modern history.2 Although the intensity of the fighting has diminished since the regime change, hostilities have not ceased, and displacement remains widespread. Millions of Syrians are still internally displaced and live in tents, especially in the northern part of the country.3 In addition, many Syrians remain in exile in various countries due to either the absence of a place to return to, their reluctance to return after years of living in exile, or safety and security concerns that vary by region.
Throughout the Syrian conflict, the fall of Damascus would have signaled the total collapse of the entire regime.4 Within this context, opposition-held neighborhoods on the outskirts of Damascus were sites of profound struggle. The Assad regime’s offensive in these parts of the city was supported by Russian forces and resulted in significant casualties over the years, using a variety of weapons including chemical attacks. From 2012 to 2018, many towns on the outskirts were besieged, subjected to continuous airstrikes by the Syrian Air Force, and left to starve. These sieges ended in 2018 with intensified military offensives by the Syrian regime backed by Russian air support, which were followed by forced evacuations that resulted in the mass displacement of residents to opposition-held areas in northern Syria.5 The scale of destruction was immense, reshaping the entire urban fabric of the city’s outskirts. According to satellite imagery and damage assessments, over 34,000 buildings in the surrounding areas of Damascus were damaged, with varying levels of destruction.6 The question of renovation and reconstruction remains both urgent and complex. The immediate humanitarian need for housing and infrastructure is enmeshed within wider debates around questions of property rights, governance, and social return.
Rebuilding and Returning
Postwar reconstruction is a highly politicized process. In the reconstruction of Beirut following the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), for instance, decisions about reconstruction were closely tied to power struggles, sectarian politics, and economic interests.7 In Sarajevo, reconstruction was also embedded in a post-conflict state divided by ethnic politics, governed by complex institutions, and heavily influenced by international actors.8 In these and many other cases, reconstruction is always presented as an urgent necessity. This is perhaps because rebuilding and returning are presented as two processes that frequently accompany each other. However, the race to reconstruct and return often neglects considerations of spatial memory, heritage, rights, traumas, and accountability.
Political actors and media narratives often frame reconstruction as the restoration of physical buildings and daily routines. Nevertheless, the idea of return is profoundly shaped by demographic change, economic shifts, and political realities. Layla Zibar argues that return, “in its common understanding, is framed as the conclusion of exile and the beginning of reclaiming a life suspended by loss and wandering.” Yet return is not experienced equally for everyone. It may represent a necessity, but also a confrontation with what remains from the conflict. As Zibar notes, “it is a confrontation that strips away the protective sheen of memory and reveals the extent of destruction inflicted upon the very places that sustained the dream of going back.”9
While reconstruction generally refers to the rebuilding of destroyed structures, renovation, by contrast, involves repairing, updating, or adapting existing structures while retaining substantial parts of the original fabric. In practice, many postwar recovery processes combine elements of both, and the boundary between them can be fluid. They both operate at the intersection of material repair, collective memory, and spatial governance. They shape not only the built environment but also conditions of return, displacement, and belonging. However, in a postwar context, the necessity of finding shelter often leads people to first renovate what they can in order to shelter themselves, while reconstruction only starts later, if and when it is possible.
The Politics of Residential Repair in Damascus Outskirts
Across different neighborhoods on the outskirts of Damascus, the renovation of residential buildings shifts the question from how buildings are repaired to how urban space is governed. Renovation has become a process through which governance, necessity, and informality intersect, shaping the terms through which residents are allowed to be recognized by authorities within a recovered city. In Jobar and Harasta al-Ajami, for instance, both heavily destroyed neighborhoods in the eastern outskirts of Damascus, residents struggle with a form of legal suspension. A lack of renovation permits maintains the spatial legacy of the conflict and prevents these neighborhoods from being re-inhabited. Authorities have justified the absence of renovation permits by referring to near-future redevelopment plans for these neighborhoods. The rezoning plan for Harasta al-Ajami, issued in October 2025, envisioned the total demolition of the neighborhood and the replacement of existing structures with modern residential towers.10 However, this new zoning proposal failed to reveal the legal framework under which the area will be regulated. For instance, the plan doesn’t explain if or how the complex and sometimes informal property claims in these areas will be protected. The new plan proposes public amenities like parks and new roads, but it does not specify whose private properties will be taken to implement them, which leaves residents uncertain about their future.
In contrast to Jobar and Harasta al-Ajami, where local authorities strictly prohibit any form of renovation due to pending redevelopment plans, adjacent neighborhoods such as Irbin and Zamalka have undertaken different approaches. In these areas, despite varying degrees of destruction ranging from partial to total damage, permits are being issued and can be obtained through local municipalities. This allows some degree of repair to take place, and is driven by the acute housing demand from returning displaced residents, mainly from northern Syria and Turkey. However, the permits that are given are arranged through non-standardized administrative practices and additional payments, which are sometimes framed as a form of “community contribution” (ʿamal sha ʿbi) to municipal services or local recovery efforts.
Once permits are obtained, renovations are rarely accompanied by structural assessments of damage. Decisions about what to repair and what not to are frequently left to local builders in order to avoid engineering costs. And due to the high cost of rent, residents are often forced to undertake only minimal repairs to their personal residences, while shared spaces and collective services including staircases, entrances, and facades are left damaged. As new solar panels substitute for absent electricity infrastructure while a damaged balcony or a neglected facade stands scarred by wartime violence, these kinds of interventions leave residents with no choice but to accept unsafe living conditions and lack a larger coordinated recovery strategy.11
The forces shaping renovation practices in postwar Syria are not only shaped by material damage or financial capacity. In many parts of rural Damascus, much housing was developed without formal land registration and is classified as informal “mukhalafat,” creating complex ownership claims that delay or obstruct renovation attempts.12 According to official procedures, owners must submit pre-war building permits when requesting repair authorization. Since informal structures lack such documents, renovation is effectively impossible. And for residents who do have pre-war permits, some are able to receive official permits to renovate their houses, while others without are denied the possibility under unclear conditions.
In Irbin and Zamalka, some residents also repair their properties without a renovation permit. These unauthorized interventions are often conducted to avoid administrative costs, with residents relying on informal networks to carry them out. In parallel, new buildings are being constructed without formal permits, mainly outside the official zoning plan. These practices reproduce extending patterns of informality that characterized the pre-war expansion of rural Damascus, reproducing earlier forms of spatial injustice.
Urban Renovation as Statecraft
While residential renovation determines who can repair and return, the repair of the urban environment shapes which places are prioritized and neglected, defining how the city is politically imagined. During the conflict, the Assad regime exerted control over the city and bombed Damascus’s Eastern Ghouta neighborhoods from the area of Mount Qasioun. In a highly symbolic move, the mountain was reopened following the collapse of the regime. Official announcements about a rehabilitation project in April 2025 framed its transformation into public recreational space, including renovations to infrastructure and green spaces.13 However, news media aligned with the current authorities have celebrated the ongoing construction of the mountain redevelopment project, framing it as a symbol of tourism-led revitalization. Since these projects are being developed through private investment, many residents who remember Mount Qasioun as an open and freely accessible public space from before the conflict fear that its privatization may lead to increased restrictions on access. Such concerns reflect broader anxieties that the redevelopment of the mountain could reinforce existing spatial inequalities within the city by making certain spaces less accessible to parts of the population.
Renovation projects for public spaces and infrastructures represent a further example of reconstruction as a politically motivated process. For instance, recent renovation works on Umayyad Square, including the Damascene Sword monument, have been widely celebrated.14 Since the square remained intact throughout the conflict, the intervention focused on aesthetic changes, including the replacement of the monument’s colored glass and its repainting. In a war-torn city, such urban beautification projects not only assert authority but also shape political imaginaries, spatially negotiating the collective image of a recovered city. It is therefore significant that recovery efforts were concentrated in a highly symbolic area such as Umayyad Square rather than repairing heavily damaged urban infrastructures elsewhere. As renovation practices selectively prioritize urban fabrics and demonstrate political authority in the recovery narrative, what is renovated is not only the city, but also the political dynamics embedded within it.
Epilogue: Where Does Renovation Start?
While official narratives of renovation in postwar Damascus tend to concentrate resources on highly visible or representative areas, they reveal a clear misalignment of urban priorities. Although more than 34,000 buildings in Eastern Ghouta were damaged during the war, the number of renovated buildings remains unclear. Most renovation works at the household level occur through private initiatives, and as a result, are not consistently supervised.
Suspended redevelopment plans indicate the urgency to rethink renovation collectively and understand it not only as a matter of physical reconstruction, but also as something tied to spatial memory. Such a shift would require more collaborative and human-centered urban practices, inviting architects and urban practitioners to critically reflect on hegemonic, top-down approaches to planning and design that have long shaped postwar recovery. At the same time, it questions conventional reconstruction strategies and urges a more direct response to the urban realities. Doing so would enable us to imagine futures that are more resilient, more equal, and more attentive to the realities embedded in postwar landscapes.
Bill Frelick, “The Delusion, Once Again, of a ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria,” Human Rights Watch, July 4, 2024, ➝.
“Comprehensive Overview of IDPs and IDP Returns Dashboard 29 Jan 2026,” UNHCR Operational Data Portal, February 1, 2026, ➝.
World Report 2026: Syria (Human Rights Watch, 2026), ➝.
According to the national statistics published in 2011, Damascus, the capital of Syria, had a pre-war population of approximately 3.6 million, with around 1.78 million people living in Damascus and around 1.88 million living in the governorate Rural Damascus.
Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (OHCHR, 2018), ➝.
Syrian Cities Damage Atlas (REACH, 2019), ➝.
See Inés Aquilué Junyent, “The Loss of Urban Form as a Communicative System: A Morphogenetic Critique of the Recent Reconstruction of Beirut,” Cities 169 (2026); Mona Fawaz, “Hezbollah's Reconstruction of Haret Hreik in Beirut,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2014): 922–34; and Caroline Nagel, “Reconstructing Space, Re-creating Memory: Sectarian Politics and Urban Development in Post-war Beirut,” Political Geography 21, no. 5 (2002): 717–25.
See Jordi Martín-Díaz, “Urban Restructuring in Post-war Contexts: the Case of Sarajevo,” Hungarian Geographical Bulletin 63, no. 3 (2014): 303–17; and Gruia Bădescu, “Remaking the Urban: International Actors and the Post-war Reconstruction of Cities,” International Studies Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June 2024).
Layla Zibar, “The Paradox of ‘Return,’” Al-Jumhuriya, March 5, 2026, ➝.
Jihad Yazigi, “Community Drafts Master Plan for Rebuilding Damascus’s Jobar,” The Syria Report, October 28, 2025, ➝.
Since repair costs fall on the residents with limited official support, renovation works in war-affected neighborhoods are uneven, depending on multiple factors such as financial resources and coordination among the various owners of the affected buildings. Alicia Medina, “Stalled Repair Work, Unclear Plans for Rubble in Rural Damascus’ Zamalka.” The Syria Report, December 2, 2025, ➝.
Rather than existing outside the planning system, informality in Damascus can be understood as a mode of governance through which the state manages urban growth, selectively applying or suspending legal frameworks.
“Mount Qasioun Renovation Sparks Controversy; Damascus Authorities Pledge Transparency,” The Syrian Observer, June 20, 2025, ➝.
The Umayyad Square, the largest square in Damascus, gained special significance when opposition forces reached it and proclaimed the fall of the Assad regime.