Urban Design

Re-Building Resilience in Damascus

Damascus, Syria · 2022

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Urban Design

Re-think informality on Mount Qassioun through a buffer strip framework that rebuilds resilience from within.

Urban ResilienceHousingPost-Conflict

LocationDamascus, Syria

Year2022

Project Sections

Section

Context

Mount Qassioun rises above Damascus carrying decades of informal growth — communities built not by plan, but by necessity, displacement, and survival.

The settlements on its slopes are shaped by conflict as much as by culture. They are dense, resourceful, and deeply rooted — yet chronically underserved and structurally vulnerable.

To intervene here is not simply an act of urban design. It is an act of reckoning with how cities absorb crisis — and what they owe those who absorb it for them.

Section

Concept

Rather than imposing a formal urban order onto what has grown organically, the project proposes a buffer strip strategy — a framework that works with existing spatial logics rather than against them.

The buffer strip is not a boundary. It is an active zone: a threshold between the informal settlement and the broader city that absorbs pressure, introduces infrastructure, and builds capacity from within.

The founding principle is restraint: reinforce what already sustains life before introducing what does not yet exist.

Section

Urban Strategy

Three complementary strategies work simultaneously across the settlement fabric:

◻

Reinforce

Identify and strengthen existing spatial assets — paths, gathering nodes, market areas — that communities already depend on, giving them permanence and legibility without displacement.

community continuityspatial permanenceno displacement

✦¿

Connect

Introduce lightweight infrastructure — stairways, ramps, shared access routes — that links the settlement vertically and horizontally to the city below, reducing isolation without erasing identity.

urban connectivityreduced isolationaccess equity

◎

Build Resilience

Layer in services and spatial improvements — water, waste, shared space, greenery — at a pace and scale the community can absorb, own, and maintain over time.

long-term resiliencecommunity ownershipincremental growth

Together these strategies form a framework that is adaptive, not prescriptive — capable of evolving with the community it serves.

Section

Implementation

resilience is not built in a single intervention. The implementation plan is phased — each phase building on the last, each one measurable and reversible if conditions change.

The project acknowledges the instability of the post-conflict context: that timelines shift, that communities move, that needs evolve. The framework is designed to hold its principles under these conditions.

What is proposed here is not a finished city. It is the infrastructure of a future that the community itself continues to build.