From the Ottoman Tapu Law to delayed agrarian reform, this article traces how collective land management was broken apart without a viable productive replacement. Fragmented holdings, weak agricultural institutions, water depletion, and rural displacement gradually turned the countryside around Damascus from the city’s green lifeline into a zone of informal urban expansion.

This article traces how Damascus’s industrial promise was eroded by nationalization without capable institutions, the disappearance of local representation, bureaucratic expansion, private-sector fragmentation, and exposure to global competition—producing a gray economy and an increasingly distorted urban periphery.