Syrian countryside post-war recovery within its local resources

Over the past 5 years of the Syrian war, massive destruction and damages hit the urban fabrics across most of the Syrian regions. The war machine was not lethal only to the dense urban fabrics of the largest cities such as Aleppo and Homs, but it majorly hit the suburban, rural, and agricultural urban fabrics around the large cities and in the small cities and villages scattered throughout regions. The socio-urban fabric of these areas with its fragile structure presents the impoverished and neglected sector of the Syrian composition before the war. Thus it was the booster of the demonstrations against the Syrian regime and it was the environment that sustained the armed operations, and the most, demographically and physically damaged. My project presents an attempt to identify these socio-urban fabrics through the overlapping of several components, and then to look into their potential of revival on an urban and architectural scale that combines local heritage and materials together with urban-agricultural solutions to the context. To identify the target socio-urban areas three components have to overlap at the same spot to validate the strategy's applicability: - Urban destroyed fabrics or units whose some parts can be restored, and where accommodation and facilities can be built in the future. - Agricultural context and fertile lands to provide a production and self sufficiency resource. - Natural resources of construction materials in the environmental context to be employed for a future sustainable design partially or entirely. To simplify the process, three prerequisites identify the intervention area; destruction areas, agricultural context and volcanic Stone. The work is based on a vision oriented towards the natural resources in construction and production. It is establishing and is to be followed by the building in local materials and working in agriculture in the same contexts that gather the same three components. The whole vision is based on the recovery of the social, urban, economic, and environmental components of the intervention areas towards better conditions of what was before the war. It aims at rebuilding small, self-sufficient and relatively independent individual communities to be less controlled by economic and political influences in order to pave the way for more reconciled and further interrelated communities in the future. Finally, pre-war Syria was a highly centralised country that have always produced marginalized urban conditions out of its centres through mobilizing all the resources from the smaller settlements into larger and consistently growing urban centres. This project tries to reinvest in the resources for the local than the centralised development to avoid more urbanisation and expansion and large cities. It is somehow a return from a contemporary tendency of cities densification, capitalising further on them and abandoning the rest of urban typologies, a tendency and policy that was present in Syria and was a fundamental factor in triggering and sustaining its revolution and later war.

Negli ultimi 5 anni la Siria ha testimoniato una guerra molto grave. La ragione principale che ha sostenuto questa guerra è la povertà della campagna agricola. Questo progetto cerca di discutere la ricostruzione del paesaggio agricolo utilizzando le proprie risorse del territorio. In particolare: basalto e suolo fertile