Damascus and the Architecture of Inequality: From Ottoman Landlords to the Age of Permissions #03

📘 This article is part of the series "Urban Transformation – In Formerly Colonized Contexts: Damascus as a Case Study," which seeks to deconstruct the historical and political structures shaping urban transformation in Damascus—an emblematic example of urban crises in the Global South.

Marjeh Square – the city’s expansion built in the late 19th century during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid.

Between 1858 and the pre-independence period, the face of Damascus was redrawn—not only through laws governing land ownership and privileges, but also through the rise of a new elite that effectively produced another city within the city. Privatization shifted from being a bureaucratic procedure to a stratified social structure, redistributing power, urbanization, and education into the hands of a narrow class, while the majority oscillated between marginalization and exclusion. This period marked the first incubator of the new urban class system that would later be consolidated under the nascent Syrian republic.

The Ottoman Land Code (Tapu Law) of 1858 represented a major moment of redistribution, primarily benefiting families with administrative and commercial roots within the Ottoman apparatus. Landownership was not merely about property; it became a gateway to political representation and control over resources. Thus emerged an urban landowning class, aligned with the central bureaucracy, yet distant from the rural majority.

In the absence of a national education system, schooling became a class privilege. Those with wealth sent their children to Istanbul, Cairo, or Paris, returning with degrees that secured their place in governance and bureaucracy. Education was not public—it was exclusive, reinforcing the monopoly of governance and control over the tools of urban planning.

The Country under the Weight of the First World War: Social Disintegration

Between 1914 and 1918, Syria lost approximately one-fifth of its population due to war, drought, epidemics, and famine. Agricultural systems collapsed, and Damascus emerged as a city of fragmented identity, receiving waves of displaced people who reproduced their marginalization in the impoverished outskirts. As mentioned in previous articles, displaced groups such as the Maghrebis, Kurds, Bosniaks, and Circassians settled around the city’s outer rings, near the elevated terraces (masatib), yet were excluded from its historic core. These communities reorganized themselves through intricate kinship and marriage networks.

In the absence of political representation, the extended family became the primary unit of social and economic organization. These families were neither passive nor withdrawn. Instead, they adapted customary norms to cope with environmental fragility and their exclusion from decision-making processes. Despite the destabilizing impact of the Tapu Law on agricultural customs—except for the specific case of the Marjeh project—construction during this period remained confined to non-irrigable lands or areas unsuitable for rainfed agriculture. Peasant families were allowed to build modest "hawsh" structures from mud and straw within limited areas along the river basin, used seasonally during summer while migrating back to village homes in the fall.

The value of land continued to be assessed at ten times its annual yield, reflecting a logic of productive value rather than market speculation. However, as land redistribution became fluid—detached from both centralized decisions and social balances—this customary structure began to dissolve, with the "village" giving way to the "urban neighborhood," without integration or protection, as we will further explore in the next articles.

The Selective Gate of the Rural Periphery: The Army of the Levant as an Outlet

The First World War reshaped the relationship between rural areas and the city. The countryside was no longer merely an agricultural extension; it became a filtering mechanism that allowed only the privileged to pass through to the urban core. For the distant rural populations, the only remaining options were either to join the French-established Army of the Levant or to engage in seasonal migration toward the urban periphery, working in construction or commercial agriculture.

Lotfi Al-Haffar: Modernization as Resistance and Negotiation

Lotfi Al-Haffar stands as the emblematic figure of the emergent urban elite negotiating modernization under colonial conditions. His project of channeling potable water from Ain Al-Fijeh was not merely an infrastructural endeavor—it was an assertion of civic agency and sovereignty.

Operating within a triangular power dynamic—the French mandate holders controlling licensing, the local elite armed with legitimacy and insistence, and land speculators holding capital—Al-Haffar positioned himself as an urban actor acutely aware of infrastructure as a battleground of sovereignty and negotiation. Between 1920 and 1937, he tenaciously pursued his vision of supplying Damascus with clean water via closed canals, inspired by the model he had witnessed in Cairo, where waterborne diseases had been rampant.

Confronted with delays, threats, and bribery attempts, Al-Haffar held his ground and introduced the innovative idea of tassehim—allowing citizens to purchase water shares through installments in a cooperative model adapted to local conditions. This was not merely a financial mechanism but a radical proposal for engaging the populace in the making of their city.

Al-Haffar’s approach was an early warning against marginalizing local expertise and civic initiatives—a neglect that would later produce chronic urban suffocation. His Ain Al-Fijeh project demonstrated that administrative insistence and popular pressure could wrest what licenses alone would not willingly grant—a lesson forgotten as planning later became confined to a closed bureaucracy.

Urban Planning: From the Marjeh Administrative Core to the Écochard Plan

The urban transformation began under Sultan Abdulhamid II with the redevelopment of Marjeh Square into a modern administrative center outside the traditional urban core. The Ottoman intervention was not about improving services or the environment but about producing a new administrative city beyond the agricultural pattern of Old Damascus. Around the square rose symbols of modern governance: the Government House (Saray), the municipality building, the post and telegraph center, and various administrative offices.

The French mandate inherited this project and reoriented it with greater clarity toward class and political stratification. The Écochard Plan of the 1930s—still largely uncritically accepted today—cemented this logic. It imposed a ring road encircling the old city and radial axes extending outward like spokes from Marjeh to the suburbs—Salhiyyeh, Jobar, Qadam, and the Mezzeh airport. These wide roads were designed not as networks of integration but as conduits for rapid military deployment and centralized control.

The plan’s core was not service equality but control: connecting the center to the peripheries without granting them reciprocal rights or services. Prestige districts like Al-Malki and Abu Rummaneh were meticulously designed as enclaves of administrative bourgeoisie, while peripheral zones like Qaboun, Barzeh, Jobar, and Qadam were systematically excluded from service provision, education, and political participation.

Most dangerously, as explored in previous articles, the plan ignored the ecological limits of Damascus—a desert-edge oasis dependent on a fragile and finite watershed. The orchards of the Ghouta were uprooted, irrigation channels destroyed, as these lands were transformed into reserve zones for urban expansion, with no concern for sustainability.

Planned Margins, Destroyed Spaces

The Écochard vision was not simply technical—it was a deliberate political choice. The goal was to preserve urban modernity as the privilege of a manageable elite, while displacing the majority into monitored peripheries or marginalized rural hinterlands. Space itself became a tool of social filtering, while the urban plan operated as an instrument for silencing, not empowering.

What we know today as the "devastated zones" of Damascus’ outer rings are not accidental slums or technical violations—they are the structural outcome of a long history of exclusion. The colonial mandate, and its inheritors, did not merely draw national borders but reshaped the intimate geography of daily life, systematically denying voice, services, and representation.

These marginalized communities were not allowed to develop their own systems, nor were they granted a political platform. Instead, they retreated into familial protection networks—the extended family as a survival strategy. This produced hyper-local identities anchored in social security networks, preventing the emergence of a broader national project or unified political identity.

These communities evolved in isolation, constructing their own customs, housing, and spatial logic—not as peasants, nor as integrated urbanites, but as marginal units of production without representation. The urban plan did not ignore them; it was precisely designed to circumvent them, to exclude them from the flows of services and decision-making.

Conclusion

Yet this phase exposed a crucial truth: a city is not built by concrete alone—it is built through recognition, justice, and participation. From Al-Haffar’s water project to Écochard’s zoning strategy, from elite consolidation to rural exclusion, the same fundamental question persists: Who owns the city?

In the next article in this series, we will explore how this structural inequality exploded into class and social conflict in the 1950s, marking a moment where controlled urbanization collided with the aspirations of the many. How did the city redefine itself? Who were the new actors in the arena of urban transformation? #UrbanTransformationSeries | #DamascusAsCaseStudy | #04 | #UrbanRecovery | #ConflictResolution | #SyrianGovernance