Agrarian Reform: When the State Arrived Late, Took the Land, and Killed the Oasis #10
Urban Transformation in Post-Colonial Cities – Damascus as a Case Study
Urban Transformation Series | Damascus as a Case Study | Article #10
The third article of Chapter Three | The State of Control: From Inequality to Urban Discipline | Urban Transformation in Post-Colonial Cities – Damascus as a Case Study
From Inequality to Fragmentation: The Tapu Law as the Beginning of Exclusion and Agrarian Reform as a Distorted Continuation
When the Ottoman Tapu Law was issued in 1858, it was not merely an administrative measure to modernize property records. It marked a decisive moment in dismantling agricultural customs that had, for centuries, maintained a fragile balance between land and society. In the Barada basin and the Ghouta, land had been collectively governed through customs regulating cultivation, restricting construction, and organizing seasonal water use, producing a relatively coherent ecological and economic system.
The Tapu system overturned this order:
It tied land to documents separated from its social and productive relationships.
It transformed ownership into an individual legal matter and displaced the collective frameworks that had governed agricultural space.
It allowed land to be registered in the names of urban or influential beneficiaries rather than the farmers who actually cultivated it.
A deep social inequality followed: a small group of “new owners” received legal recognition, while many cultivators were unable to formalize their historic relationship with the land. This was not only an economic injustice, buta rupture of the agricultural village as an integrated social and productive unit. A century later, agrarian reform arrived as a delayed response, but instead of resolving the problem itshifted it from “inequality” to “fragmentation”:
Rather than repairing property relations, itdistributed land as a revolutionary grantwithout a sufficiently developed agricultural model.
It divided holdings into units too small to remain economically viable, complicating planning and finance and creating thousands of scattered plots that were difficult either to operate productively or consolidate.
It left many farmers without effective extension services, functioning markets, or legal security, encouraging some to sell land or convert it to informal housing rather than continue cultivation.
The result?The agricultural landscape fragmented twice: first through the Tapu system, which weakened collective management, and again through agrarian reform, which fragmented holdings. Justice was not restored, nor was a modern agricultural economy built. What emerged was another fragile equilibrium between political rent and productive weakness.
In Damascus, theGhoutaoffers a clear example of this transformation. Before the Tapu system, land was governed by custom, and rights to cultivation, water, and trees were defined through local arrangements shaped by Islamic jurisprudence and social tradition. With the new law, the “legal owner” increasingly diverged from the “actual cultivator.” Over time, a gap opened between the holder of the title deed and the person working the land.
The independent Syrian state did not repair this distortion; in important respects it reinforced it. During the United Arab Republic period (1958–1961), agrarian reform decrees began under the slogan“returning the right to the farmer”. Under Ba'ath rule, confiscation under the banner of reform became a recurring policy instrument. Yet the underlying structure remained:the state positioned itself between land and farmer and redistributed access through political priorities and loyalty.
Farmers inZabadaniandal-Kiswahfor example, experienced waves of land redistribution after large areas belonging to prominent families or religious endowments were nationalized. Yet financing, training, and marketing networks were not built alongside redistribution. Farmers received land, but often without the tools required to make it viable.
The land was therefore no longer a communal inheritance transferred through custom, nor did it become a modern productive project. It became closer to a “temporary political allocation”: distributed by the state and then left to erode without sufficient support.
Fragmentation as a Mechanism of Depletion: When Inheritance Became a Burden on the Field
One of the major structural weaknesses of agrarian reform was theabsence of a minimum economically viable holding size. As population grew, and without effective limits preventing inherited land from being divided below an economic threshold, inheritance became a powerful mechanism of fragmentation:
A five-hectare plot might be divided among seven heirs; each share could later be divided again among their children, until the holding fell below half a hectare—too small to support meaningful mechanization or investment.
InHarastafor example, many small family farms became yards or fallow plots after losing their economic viability. Some owners sold, some built informally, and others abandoned the land.
This fragmentation made planning extremely difficult. How can irrigation or marketing be organized in a village composed of hundreds of overlapping small holdings? Who participates, and who has authority to decide?
Instead of becoming a platform for development, land became adead asset: difficult to invest in, difficult to sell because of inheritance disputes, and socially difficult to abandon because of cultural attachment.
The relationship between farmer and land consequently ceased to be primarily productive and became increasingly symbolic. Farmers remained attached to land because it represented belonging, even when it no longer provided a viable livelihood.
The Failure of Agricultural Relations: The Breakdown of the Production Network
Agricultural relations are not merely about owning or plowing land. They are the system connecting farmer and land and turning labor into income, income into accumulation, and accumulation into stability. That system includes finance, supply chains, transport, marketing, extension services, technical support, insurance, and the ability to plan an entire season without collapsing midway. In Syria, this system was progressively dismantled:
Farmers’ associations, initially established as organizational structures to help distribute resources, seeds, fertilizer, and credit, gradually became bureaucratic instruments under the ruling party; the farmers’ union was increasingly used to politically organize and monitor farmers rather than primarily serve their economic needs.
Agricultural extension, intended to serve as the technical arm of agricultural policy, became formalistic and disconnected from realities on the ground. While pests and climatic conditions changed, extension bulletins often remained repetitive, with weak laboratory capacity and limited feedback from actual fields. More broadly, Syrian institutions suffered from weak linkages among responsible agencies, education, production, markets, and developments elsewhere in the country and world.
Markets, which should allow farmers to sell output fairly, were often dominated by rent-seeking intermediaries—including public institutions—able to control transport, storage, and access to urban consumers. Instead of a competitive market, farmers frequently faced an oligopolistic chain between farm and consumer.
Financial supportwas neither sufficient nor consistently equitable. Agricultural loans could be affected by political access or offered under burdensome conditions difficult to repay amid rising costs and volatile prices. Rather than strengthening production, credit could become another source of debt and insolvency.
As these supports weakened, farmers gradually withdrew. This was not simply an individual choice but a structural consequence of a broken chain. Agriculture ceased to operate as a coherent project and became an attempt to cultivate within an environment high in risk and low in guarantees.
The Water Crisis: Declining Euphrates Flows, Groundwater Depletion, and the Erosion of Water Security
Irrigation in Syria was not simply a technical tool; it was the backbone of agriculture. Every decline in water availability weakened the agricultural system.
The origins of the crisiswere both political and climatic. Through the large GAP development program, Turkey began storing substantial quantities of Euphrates water from the 1980s onward. Arrangements concerning downstream flows referred to a benchmark of 500 cubic meters per second into Syria, while periods of drought and political tension saw substantially lower flows, at times reported near 200 cubic meters per second. A river long associated with fertility thus became increasingly vulnerable to severe seasonal stress.
The Syrian responsedid not match the scale of the problem. Irrigation projects remained incomplete, canal networks were not sufficiently modernized, and major storage infrastructure was limited in affected areas. Farmers therefore increasingly resorted to the most accessible alternative:drilling groundwater wells, sometimes without systematic planning and often through self-financing or political and security patronage.
In Rural Damascus alone, the number of wells reportedly tripled between 1995 and 2010. More than half were unlicensed, and some exceeded 200 meters in depth. Groundwater accumulated over very long periods was therefore being extracted within a single generation.
With weak oversight,flood irrigation spread, despite being among the most water-intensive irrigation methods. Agriculture became increasingly extractive rather than environmentally sustainable, worsening desertification, soil degradation, and salinity.
Under these conditions, it became difficult to speak of “water security” or “stable agricultural production.” Instead, avicious circle: declining water → shrinking agriculture → farmer migration → conversion of farmland into real estate → increased consumption → greater pressure on water.
The crisis was not solely one of management; it reflected a deeper failure to treat water as the foundation of economy and livelihood rather than merely another resource. Without redesigning the relationship among water, people, and environment, agricultural decline risks becoming only the first symptom of a wider breakdown.
A Distant Countryside Empties While the Near Countryside Is Absorbed
The expansion of informal settlements around Damascus cannot be understood without distinguishing betweentwo types of countryside:
Distant rural regionssuch as Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and parts of Hawran: as drought and declining agricultural viability intensified, they generated major migration flows toward large cities, especially Damascus and Aleppo.
Nearby rural regionssuch as Eastern and Western Ghouta: these areas absorbed much of the incoming population. Heavy demographic pressure, combined with declining agricultural profitability, encouraged owners to convert farmland into inexpensive housing at the margins of formal planning.
The interaction between the “migrating countryside” and the “receiving countryside” generated a new urban dynamic: the growth ofunplanned horizontal expansion, which broke through the city’s historical boundaries and eroded the customs that had separated fields from homes, mountain from plain, and countryside from urban fabric.
From Oasis to Informal Settlement: When the City Was Cut Off from Its Green Lifeline
Syria’s major cities did not emerge randomly. Over millennia they formed around oases at the edge of arid landscapes, where water and vulnerability meet and where agricultural and urban organization becomes a condition of survival. Damascus in particular was an oasis-city inseparable from the Ghouta, which supplied food and water while constraining and shaping urban expansion.
In this context,the countryside was not merely a productive zone; it was a partner in shaping the city’s identity and its ecological and social balance. Over recent decades, however, the failure to develop and protect rural areas eroded this historical relationship. The Ghouta ceased to function fully as a green belt and became a margin exposed to urban pressure and a receiving zone for migrants from distant rural areas whose livelihoods had collapsed.
What followed can be described as a kind of “edge cancer”: unplanned horizontal expansion consuming agricultural land piece by piece and producing informal neighborhoods without adequate infrastructure or coherent planning. This did not happen because residents preferred disorder, but because organized urban provision failed and the city increasingly grew through spontaneous adaptation rather than planning.
Accordingly,informal settlementsas described in UN-Habitat terminology, were not merely a housing exception but a direct resultof the loss of balance among population, environment, and economy. They are not merely unplanned housing areas; they also reflect the weakening of the social contract between state and citizens.
When the State Arrived Late, It Distributed Land Instead of Voice
At a decisive historical moment, land was separated from its customary relationship to production and later redistributed without the institutional tools required to sustain it. Rights were not fully restored; disadvantage was redistributed—from unequal ownership to fragmented holdings, from elite power to farmer incapacity, and from the absence of justice to the absence of productive capability.
Agrarian reform, intended as a historical correction, instead oftenreproduced the crisis in another form. Land was treated less as a productive right than as a political instrument. No durable rural development project was built around it, and the countryside was allowed to erode piece by piece.
The city thus lost the countryside that had buffered it against market volatility, while the countryside lost the city that had once helped maintain a balance among people, water, and cultivation. In the resulting vacuum, informality expanded, representation weakened, and the state’s role narrowed increasingly toward security control rather than developmental planning.
The countryside did not fail simply because it was poor; it failed in part because its voice was not heard. When representation disappeared, fields were not sustainably redistributed but broken into pieces. Land ceased to be treated as a productive system and increasingly became a residential commodity waiting for a buyer.
Ultimately, the crisis of Syria’s countryside cannot be understood separately from the city, and the field cannot be repaired without restoring a political meaning to urbanization: land must be distributed fairly, and voice must be distributed with it.
When the state failed to build a fair agricultural model, it produced not only a crisis in the field but a chain of repercussions that reached the city itself. Land that had never been distributed through a coherent framework of justice became, during the so-called “Corrective Movement,” an instrument of political accommodation without corresponding production, and later ameans of managing and controlling population, rather than a secure basis for livelihood or housing.
As the state entered a condition of “suspended sovereignty” over parts of its own territory, planning instruments increasingly gave way to instruments of control: security approval substituted for ordinary licensing, housing cooperatives became tied more closely to the state apparatus than to community representation, and segregated residential enclaves emerged carrying the seeds of division rather than integrated urban life.
In the next article, we follow this critical transition: from the fragmentation of the field toa map of security-constrained housing, from land as a right to land as a privilege, and from the city as shared space to a city built according to an invisible map ofloyalty, surveillance, and classification.
