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Preserving the old city of damascus
Abstract
In Preserving the Old City of Damascus, Totah examines the recent gentrification of the historic urban core of the Syrian capital and the ways in which urban space becomes the site for negotiating new economic and social realities. The book illustrates how long-term inhabitants of the historic quarter, developers, and government officials offer at times competing interpretations of urban space and its use as they vie for control over the representation of the historic neighborhoods. Based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research, this book expands our understanding of neoliberal urbanism in non-western cities.
... Indeed, locals and activists were upset with the proposed masterplan they considered it "a masterplan which is aiming to distort the local identity" (Totah, 2014). And it faced resistance and rejection from a city that is "originally" formed by 5000 years of history (Lababedi, 2008). ...
... After the independence of Syria and UNESCO committee's report, "The government hired French urban planner Michel Ecochard who worked in Damascus during the mandate to modernize the city…he submitted a masterplan for Damascus in 1968 that recommended demolishing wide swaths of the old city to increase vehicular traffic in the old city" (Totah, 2014) (map3),the new masterplan came in the middle of the debate on modernity and tradition concepts, while Al Baath party was in charge, the party was aiming to modernize the country and its cities. (Totah, 2014) Indeed, Al Marjeh square was a very important site in the masterplan since it is the commercial heart of the city. Hence the masterplan proposed increasing parking lots, demolishing old buildings, build modern high-rise office buildings to increase economy and international investments.(map4) fmap3:masterplan of 1968.Source: https://www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/content ...
... the government claimed to cut activists' voice that they "had difficulties in absorbing the water that is flowing into the foundations" (Zaitoun, 2018) The claims of the government didn't change local activists' and architects' opinion, Ecochard and Banoshoya's masterplan was strongly criticized by them. They considered it an "imperialist plot against the historic urban" like Nadia Khost and Siham Torgoman (Totah, 2014). Nadia Khost said in different interviews that "Al-Sham (Damascus) isn't Abou Remmaneh and Al malki (two elite modern neighborhoods that were built outside the walls according to the new masterplan) it's the historic districts and buildings including the old city" (Totah, 2014)."with ...
Abstract:
Cities reflect as well as shape their inhabitant’s values and outlooks in various ways” (Bell & De shalit, 2011)
Cities and their built environment are reflections of the cultural structure and the dynamics of local identity. hence, they are clearly revealing history, religious and ethnic settings of the region. the difference between each region’s environment, architecture, and beliefs are what creates the place’s identity and makes it unique. The middle east region has been known for its architectural and urban legacy, where inhabitants were raised to preserve and praise it. At the end of the 20th-century middle eastern countries have witnessed radical changes on several levels: economic, political, and social. The emergence of modernization and globalization policies in such region have affected it negatively, changed the region’s architectural and urban character from traditional (vernacular) to modern, and that date was a turning point of the region’s history. This paper aims to explain the impact of modern urban planning practices by foreign urban planners on the historical identity of Damascus city and its historical urban square “Al Marjeh square”, how modern “functional” masterplans could determine the fate of historical buildings and the architectural style of the city. Finally, the paper will draw on criticisms by activists, writers and architects who raised their voices to resist the concept of “modern functional city”
Keywords: Urban planning, Modernization, City identity, Historical buildings, Criticism.
... In the Old City, this involved converting traditional residential courtyard houses into tourist venues. The main consumers, in the early years of tourism gentrification, were Syrians living outside the wall who mainly came to spend a few hours in the newly refurbished restaurants and cafes in order to engage in new consumption practices that reflected their new identity 11 TOURISM GENTRIFICATION OF THE OLD CITY OF DAMASCUS 247 under new economic conditions (Salamandra 2004;Totah 2014). However, in the years leading to civil war, Syria was becoming a popular destination for international tourists (Bell 2008;Black 2009). ...
... Gentrification in the Old City is driven by the protection and preservation of the traditional built environment. Underlying this process is the assumption that the physical history of the intramural neighborhoods is best preserved for future generations when it is converted into spaces for consumption (Totah 2014). Several gentrifiers proudly described their work as protecting the heritage of the Old City especially from residents who were of rural and modest backgrounds (Totah 2014: 196-197). ...
Bringing together scholarly but readable essays on the process of gentrification, this two-volume collection addresses the broad question: In what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people? In this first volume of Gentrification around the World, contributors from various academic disciplines provide individual case studies on gentrification and displacement from around the globe: chapters cover the United States of America, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Morocco, Great Britain, Canada, France, Finland, Peru, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria, and Iceland. The qualitative methodologies used in each chapter—which emphasize ethnographic, participatory, and visual approaches that interrogate the representation of gentrification in the arts, film, and other mass media—are themselves a unique and pioneering way of studying gentrification and its consequences worldwide.
... While this work highlighted important architectural attributes, it did not address the city's longitudinal transformation in identity across historical phases, particularly in response to socio-political shifts. This study built on such findings by extending the scope to include later developments, especially the post-colonial period, where modernization and socialist planning policies introduced new architectural forms that fragmented the city's historical continuity [51]. ...
Facing substantial challenges due to rapid urbanization and socio-political shifts, the urban identities of our cities are in a state of significant transformation. This study explored the dynamic evolution of Damascus’s urban identity over distinct historical periods, employing a multi-dimensional methodology, which integrated spatial assessments, observational data from urban planners, and historical analyses. The findings revealed a transition from a stable urban identity in the pre-colonial period, to fragmented and, eventually, lost states in the post-colonial era. This study has underscored the need for strategic interventions to preserve the city’s identity amidst modernization pressures, providing valuable insights for urban planners and policymakers. The findings underscore the pressing need for strategic, context-sensitive interventions that can restore and revitalize Damascus’s unique urban identity, contributing to a broader discourse on the sustainable preservation of the cultural heritage in historic cities facing modernization pressures.
... Indeed, this suggested masterplan upset both the indigenous residents and architects especially when the old city of Damascus was considered a "backward" place, besides, the French architects were aiming to replace the organic vernacular plan that respect the traditions of the inhabitants with "universal concept of modernity" (Lababedi, 2008). Faedah M. Totah mentioned in her book 'Preserving the old city of Damascus' that, the master plan of Ecochard aimed to distort the identity of the city and the inhabitants (Totah, 2014). However, the urban plan had many serious issues and it was stopped after the independence of Syria by UNESCO in 1953 until the 1960s, Al-Baath party re-hired the French architect Ecochard to modernize the city and the Japanese architect Banjoya (Matsubara, 2015), they completed the unfinished masterplan and re-suggested 'modern' ideas including, 1. Replacing the inwardly 'close' plan in the walled part of the city, with a transparent 'outwardly' plan in the modern part (Al-Kodmany, 1995). ...
The emergence of advanced technologies, globalization and modernization policies has affected architectural and urban practices negatively. Nowadays, buildings are considered the major source of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The urgent need to reduce energy consumption and design more self-sufficient buildings have made some countries comply with the Kyoto protocol. The directive of building’s energy performance (EPBD, 2002) that was published in 2002 has emphasized two aspects: reducing energy consumption and improving energy efficiency in buildings. Moreover, the published recast of the directive (2010) has decided that all buildings after 2020 have to be self-sufficient ‘nearly-zero energy’ buildings. Nevertheless, the building sector in Syria is accounted for 50% of total energy consumption. Furthermore, Syria is relying on fossil fuels to generate energy since the country has yet to develop renewable energy capacity. Nowadays, the energy sector is in chaos due to political conflict. Therefore, architects should enhance building performance and design energy-efficient buildings that can be achieved by referencing vernacular, regional strategies and understanding the dynamics of the region’s inhabitants to achieve environmental sustainability goals and to create meaningful places.
This dissertation is drawing on damascene houses, accordingly, a comprehensive analysis of the vernacular architecture and modern architecture of the city is conducted to propose an energy-efficient, regional design guide for the hot-arid climate of the region. Hence, the dissertation starts with discussing a brief contextualization of the previously done literature, it continues with the second chapter, which is providing a comprehensive analysis of the vernacular dwellings in Damascus in terms of the early settlements and the implemented regional, passive strategies. The third chapter is discussing regionalism in architecture, architectural identity, and the socio-cultural aspects that are affecting energy consumption. Thus, the chapter is investigating the tangible and intangible dimensions of Damascene buildings, besides; the abandoned vernacular strategies are discussed. After the first three chapters, the data is collected to propose design strategies in chapter four that could cope with the user(s) and the climate. Finally, a new design that is relying on an existing representative case is proposed. Thus, the dissertation aims to provide an energy-efficient, regional guide model for architects to follow.
Keywords: Energy-efficiency, Regional architecture, Vernacular dwellings, Damascene houses, Architectural identity.
Tehran, the capital of Iran since the late eighteenth century, is now one of the largest cities in the Middle East. Exploring Tehran's development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi paints a vibrant picture of a city undergoing rapid and dynamic social transformation. Rezvani Naraghi demonstrates that this shift was the product of a developing discourse around spatial knowledge, in which the West became the model for the social practices of the state and sections of Iranian society. As traditional social spaces, such as coffee houses, bathhouses, and mosques, were replaced by European-style cafes, theatres, and sports clubs, Tehran and its people were irreversibly altered. Using an array of archival sources, Rezvani Naraghi stresses the agency of everyday inhabitants in shaping urban change. This enlightening history not only allows us to better understand the contours of contemporary Tehran, but to develop a new way of imagining, talking about, and building 'the city'.
Built environment is considered to be the ‘physical face’ of a civilization. Accordingly, scientists studying an ancient civilization often refer to the remains of a civilization’s-built heritage in order to better understand its cultural system. This has been evident in ancient Islamic cities such as Baghdad, Al-Medina, Fez, Kairouan, Marrakech, and Granada, as these cities have been well-framed, both legally and systematically. This Islamic frame is referred to as the Islamic Fiqh, and it has been accompanied by developments in urban Islamic communities. This research aims to examine the impact of Fiqh Al-Maliki on the built environment, and the possibility of investing Fiqh to establish tourist guidance based on scientific interpretation derived from legal and cultural systems. The researcher adopted a descriptive-analytic methodology to analyze the Fuqaha’ opinions, as well as to understand the relationship between Islamic architecture and Islamic Fiqh. It was found that Fiqh Al-Maliki contributed toward the formation of Islamic cities through the framed legal system. This Fiqh and historic wealth can be beneficial to realize the first image of the built environment and maintain its original form.
This chapter examines the reasons behind the increase in the number of boutique hotels in the Old City of Damascus during the years leading up to the civil war. Tourism gentrification of the intramural neighborhoods began in the early 1990s with the conversion of traditional courtyard houses into fashionable spaces of consumption for the Syrian middle and upper classes. Boutique hotels only began to appear in the mid-2000s as the Old City was becoming an international tourist destination. This new trend coincided with travel articles published in major British and American newspapers encouraging affluent travelers to look beyond the headlines and visit Syria. This led to an increase in the number of Western visitors to Damascus, and the political and economic integration of Syria into the global community. With the Old City becoming a global tourist destination, the political repression and social injustices in Syria for many travel writers were secondary to the luxury boutique hotels, fashionable restaurants, and historic sites.
Decaying or abandoned buildings and houses are a distinct part of Beirut’s urban landscape. Many local heritage initiatives call for their preservation while raising contentious issues regarding belonging, identity and ownership. Rather than focusing only on houses as such, this paper looks at the meanings and uses of heritage within the context of ongoing urban transformation. Here I am more concerned with what heritage does and how it works, rather than what it is. Analysing the relationship between heritage-making and gentrification attempts, I explore how heritage is mobilised in the face of socio-spatial restructuring in Beirut’s central and peri-central neighbourhoods.
This article examines merchants’ shop displays in the marketplaces of Damascus, Syria, with a focus on Islamic texts and images. In Damascus, most merchants’ businesses, from the air-conditioned to the mobile vending cart, are decorated with a wide range of religious props, photographs, posters, and texts hung on walls, displayed on desks, and nestled amongst merchandise. Though it would be easy to dismiss this décor as a kind of inconsequential backdrop, I suggest that these displays, packed with symbolism and local meaning, play roles in the selling process that go beyond mere decoration. This in part has to do with their visual nature, which allows merchants to convey important characteristics about themselves in ways that words cannot. It also has to do with their religious nature, which gives the displays the ability to transform people, merchandise, and shop space through their connection to God. In short, these displays exist as a counterbalance to the work of bargaining, hawking, and other kinds of verbal selling tactics. Though most studies of markets focus on these kinds of verbal exchanges, I argue here that the visual side of marketplace transactions is just as central to the selling process.
This section lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab–Israeli conflict. Entries are classified under the following headings: Reference and General; History (through 1948) and Geography; Palestinian Politics and Society; Jerusalem; Israeli Politics, Society, and Zionism; Arab and Middle Eastern Politics; International Relations; Law; Military; Economy, Society, and Education; Literature, Arts, and Culture; and Book Reviews.
This essay examines painting and music in modern Syria as cultural practices that give voice to modernist sensibilities. I argue that two important spatial and temporal tropes structure the aesthetics of authenticity in Syrian visual and musical arts: the old city and the countryside. Through recourse to these metonymic representations and evocations, Syrian artists articulate a vision of modernity in which discourses of emotion and sentiment are important bases of authentic Syrian cultural identity. In this manner they offer an alternative to European ideologies of modernity that have stressed rationality. At the same time they promote critical responses to the modern Syrian state.
This paper explores the uses of television in social relations in a specific urban, Middle Eastern context. In contemporary Syria locally‐produced historical dramas form part of wider processes of culture construction and social distinction. Televisual representations of the Old Damascus serve not to foster nationalist sympathies but to promote sub‐national identities. By interpreting and debating the histories presented in serial dramas, Syrians dispute the past and criticise the present.
This is one of the first studies evaluating the experience of gentrification in a developing country. The conservation of the historic centre of Puebla, Mexico, is analysed with particular attention to the uses to which renovated properties are put and the nature and motivations of the agents involved. Gentrification in Puebla constitutes the symbolic reconquest of a space over which the local middle classes feared they had lost moral authority. The class and 'race' symbolism of conservation and gentrification is emphasised.
Since the end of the 90s, many westerners come in the Moroccan medinas to stay on vacation, to invest and to reside. This phenomenon is most important in Marrakech. The medina is always associated with a place of city traditions, with a typical Arab and Moroccan urbanity put forward in a context of globalization in the way of living and the opening to tourism of Morocco. In this context, there are raised questions on foreign presence and cohabitation with natives. They often bring out ambiguous relationships when evoking the identity dimension, the patrimony value and the urban sociological practices today identified of new inhabitants and tourists.
Critiques of the view that the bazaar is a model of the competitive market often portray it as exotic and irrational. This article shows that the folk category 'bazaar' glosses over the analytical distinction between two types of market: those in commodities which are standardised in terms of quality and quantitiy and therefore substitutable, and those in commodities that are physically heterogeneous and therefore non-substitutable. The features typically associated with the bazaar by its ethnographers are only found in the latter type of market. Drawing on ethnographic material from a south Indian town, the article shows that the differences in the transactional properties of the two kinds of goods account for a series of contrasts in the relations among and between buyers and sellers, the operation of the price mechanism, the control of information, the organisation and recruitment of labour, and the roles of money and credit.
This paper looks at demand issues in gentrification. It takes as its basic proposition that everyone involved in the demand side belongs to the same economic class and therefore possesses the same set of motivations; that 'otherness' in gentrification is something that needs to be problematised rather than assumed. It argues that the presumption of otherness arises because accounts of demand for gentrification begin at the end, from achieved housing situation, and argue back, rather than at the beginning, with means. The motivations of gentrifiers, suburbanites and displacees are the same, a concern for defining and preserving identity in the modern world: what differ between them are the means at the disposal of each group. Concern with identity means taking seriously the importance of fashion in gentrification: gentrifiers and suburbanites are members of different status groups, using housing as status symbols to define and claim membership of those groups. Displacees are just as concerned with the maintenance of their identity, but do not have access to the same amount of resources as gentrifiers. Because the solution to the gentrifiers' identity crisis takes place at the expense of the displacee, gentrification takes on a synecdochal quality: the concerns expressed in struggles over gentrification exemplify the general concern with identity in conditions of modernity, which should be understood as the subjective experience of everyday life within a capitalist mode of production. The context within which these struggles over status take place is nonetheless class-constituted and class-laden. Gentrification and the struggles it engenders should be interpreted as a form of hegemonic practice. Ultimately, it is this that makes gentrification 'gentrification'.
Gentrification, the conversion of socially marginal and working-class areas of the central city to middle-class residential use, reflects a movement, that began in the 1960s, of private-market investment capital into downtown districts of major urban centers. Related to a shift in corporate investment and a corresponding expansion of the urban service economy, gentrification was seen more immediately in architectural restoration of deteriorating housing and the clustering of new cultural amenities in the urban core.
Research on gentrification initially concentrated on documenting its extent, tracing it as a process of neighborhood change, and speculating on its consequences for reversing trends of suburbanization and inner-city decline. But a cumulation of 10 years of research findings suggests, instead, that it results in a geographical reshuffling, among neighborhoods and metropolitan areas, of professional, managerial, and technical employees who work in corporate, government, and business services.
Having verified the extent of the phenomenon, empirical research on gentrification has reached a stalemate. Theoretically interesting problems concern the use of historic preservation to constitute a new urban middle class, gentrification and displacement, the economic rationality of the gentrifier's behavior, and the economic restructuring of the central city in which gentrification plays a part.
Broadening the analytic framework beyond demographic factors and neoclassical land use theory is problematic because of serious conceptual and methodological disagreements among neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian, and mainstream analysts. Yet efforts to understand gentrification benefit from the use of economic paradigms by considering such issues as production, consumption, and social reproduction of the urban middle class, as well as the factors that create a supply of gentrifiable housing and demand for it on the part of potential gentrifiers.
An emerging synthesis in the field integrates economic and cultural analysis. The mutual validation and valorization of urban art and real estate markets indicates the importance of the cultural constitution of the higher social strata in an advanced service economy. It also underlines how space and time are used in the social and material constitution of an urban middle class.
Following instructions suggested in Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, 35 residents of Tripoli, Lebanon were asked to draw a map of the city and to list its important features. Their responses emphasized certain sections or quarters of the city, and they minimized individual buildings and landmarks. These findings are interpreted as being consistent with various pertinent values in Lebanese Arab culture. The conclusion is that the urban image is a product both of visual cues and of socio-cultural associations.
In late February of 1986, a week or two before the massive joint celebration of the 25th anniversary of Hassan II's accession to the Moroccan throne and the 10th of his launching of the Green March into the Sahara (the March actually took place in November of 1975, but it was ritually assimilated to Coronation Day for this milestone occasion), the municipal council of a small city in the east-central part of the country issued a decree. Henceforth, the color of all buildings in the city was to be beige: crème, in the French redaction, qehwi, in the Arabic. Paint could be obtained at designated outlets.
The postwar period of 1945 to 1963 witnessed dramatic political and economic transformations in Syria. To date, however, the cultural manifestations of these transformations remain largely unexamined. This article seeks to begin the process of redressing that historiographic imbalance and recovering the meaning of these transformations for those who experienced them through a close reading of the discourse surrounding the first Damascus International Exposition of 1954. This event constituted the stage upon which the recently independent, and still fragile, Syrian state conducted an exercise in autoethnography, the attempt to define and represent itself to its citizenry and to the outside world, as well as the screen upon which Syrians' collective longings were focused and projected. Thus, I treat this body of discourse as a unique opportunity to apprehend an emergent elite's anxieties about foreigners' perceptions of their country, as expressed in this stratum's homiletic discourse about street begging and other forms of urban disorder that threatened to disrupt the exposition's staging.
The mass migration from rural areas to larger cities in the Third World and the rapid social changes entailed by this transformation have attracted the attention of social and political scientists since the 1950s. The problematic issue of the “integration” of rural migrants into the urban society and the changes this transformation has brought about have long been among the most studied questions. Yet they still call for more research to increase our understanding of the phenomenon, particularly in our era, which is witnessing radical shifts from earlier times in terms of social, economic, and technological characteristics. The question of “integration to what?” becomes important in political and practical terms. In the 1950s, when mass migration to cities started, the answer to this question seemed quite clear. The cities were the places of the modernizing elites, especially in the case of Ankara, the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. As in other Third World countries, the modernizing bureaucratic and military elites of the early republic, who had assumed the role of transforming the society into a modern, Western one, regarded the city as an effective means for the acculturation of its inhabitants to modern–Western values and ways of life. The modernization theory, which maintains a dichotomy between rural and urban, supported this idea.
Cairo's cityscape has transformed rapidly as a result of the neoliberal policies that Egypt adopted in the early 1990s. This article examines the spatial negotiations of class in liberalizing Cairo. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of neoliberal policies on global cities of the South, few studies have adopted an ethnographic focus to examine the everyday negotiations of such transformations. I examine the ways young female upper-middle-class professionals navigate Cairo's public spaces, both the safe spaces of the upscale coffee shops and the open spaces of the streets. Their urban trajectories can be read as the footsteps of the social segregation that has increasingly come to mark Cairo's cityscape. I conclude that the bodies of upper-middle-class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo's upper-middle class in Egypt's new liberal age.
This paper examines the construction of identity and lifestyle through consumption practices associated with the restoration of humble early 20th century bungalows in Southern California. Homeowners engage in the historic preservation of their homes, endowing them with agency, and reveal in narratives personal transformation of identity and lifestyle. As preservationists they turn their experiences of private consumption into civic activism, collectively constructing local preservationist cosmologies with which to inspire and justify their advocacy of exclusionary aesthetic tactics in the public realm. Although preservation homeowners invoke legal protections to transform the appearance of multiethnic, multiclass localities, they also engage in educational outreach to win converts and mitigate the effects of gentrification in the continuing restructuring of older suburban landscapes.
Building on insights from Freud, Nietzsche, and Norbert Elias, the author addresses the question of the construction of guilt in Judeo-Christian civilization. The author begins with a consideration of biological versus cultural reproduction, as these are figured in the Torah and in the Christian Bible, and in tha moves on to some social-structural, historical, and psychodynamic considerations of how and why civilization manages to sustain itself.