From Housing as a Right to Housing as an Administrative Privilege: How Damascus Split Between Planning and Reality #11
Urban Transformation in Post-Colonial Cities – Damascus as a Case Study
Chapter Three | The State of Control: From Inequality to Urban Discipline | Article Four
The previous article ended at a critical moment: the fragmentation of agricultural land and the failure to build a viable rural economy did not create a crisis in the countryside alone; they pushed the city itself to absorb its rural surroundings. As agriculture became less viable, migration to Damascus increased, and parts of the Ghouta turned into areas for construction, the central question began to change.
The question was no longer: who owns the land? It became: who can live in the city legally?
At this point, the crisis moved from the field to the home. A person arriving in Damascus in search of work needed more than a roof: they needed buildable land, a permit, infrastructure, financing, and access to urban services. In one form or another, they needed to pass through the state.
From the late 1950s and early 1960s, Syria created several institutions to intervene in housing, including housing cooperatives in 1958, the Military Social Establishment in 1959, and the Public Establishment for Housing in 1961. Their stated purpose was to expand housing production, organize urban growth, and provide channels to housing that were not purely commercial.
The problem that later emerged was not the absence of institutions. It was the gap between the scale of the city taking shape in reality and the scale of the city those institutions were capable of producing on paper.
When the State Tried to Build the City from Above
In the model that took shape during the 1960s and 1970s, the state became deeply involved in producing planned land and housing. Public institutions and cooperatives took part in expropriation, planning, and construction, while housing was treated as part of a broader social project rather than simply a commodity whose price and location were determined by the market.
In theory, this model could have performed an important historical function: absorbing newcomers to the city, providing formal housing, and gradually connecting residents to employment, services, education, and administration. Housing could therefore have served as a gateway to urban integration.
Housing demand, however, grew faster than formal institutions could supply it. Studies of Damascus indicate that informal expansion accelerated particularly from the 1970s and 1980s, amid population growth, rural migration, waves of displaced people and refugees from regional conflicts, and the inability of urban-planning instruments to absorb this movement.
The city then began to divide in practice into two tracks:a formal track running through plans, institutions, permits, and cooperatives; and another track built by residents themselves.
When the House Moved Faster Than the Plan
A basic problem in interpreting Syrian informal settlements is to see them simply as violations of law.
Residents did not collectively wake up one morning and decide to build an illegal city. What happened was more complex: housing demand existed, workers were moving into the city, families were growing, but the formal market and public institutions could not provide enough housing.
While an official plan might take years, a new household needed a home within months.
While the Public Establishment for Housing needed land, financing, procurement, construction, and allocation, a family could buy a small share of agricultural land, build one room, add another, and later add a floor when income improved.
The city therefore expanded according to two different clocks rather than one plan: institutional time and social time. Social time moved faster.
Research indicates that informal construction was not a marginal phenomenon. One study drawing on government data from 2004 estimated that informal areas housed roughly 40% of the population of the Damascus urban agglomeration at the time. Other research likewise suggests that self-built informal housing represented a very large share of new urban construction during some periods.
Informality was no longer an exception within the city; it had become one of the mechanisms through which the city itself was produced.
Informality Does Not Always Mean Land Seizure
Even the term “informal settlements” conceals very different legal situations.
In some areas, housing was built on public land without a clear legal right of occupation. In others, especially in the Ghouta and on the edges of Damascus, residents legally owned or purchased the land while the construction itself violated planning rules because the land was classified as agricultural or lay outside designated building zones.
This distinction is essential to understanding what followed. The city was not simply divided between the “legal owner” and the “illegal occupier.”
A resident might own the land, pay for water and electricity, send children to a public school, and participate fully in the city’s economy, yet live in a building that the planning system did not fully recognize as legal.
They were inside the state and outside it at the same time.
This duality would become one of the most persistent features of Syria’s urban transformation.
The State Recognizes the Residents—but Not Fully the Place
Public policy toward these areas was not simply one of continuous demolition.
Studies of Damascus describe measures from the 1970s onward that limited demolition of some durable structures when no alternative housing was available. During the 1980s, policy increasingly moved toward upgrading certain informal areas and connecting them to services. Through the 1980s and 1990s, water, electricity, sanitation, and other public services were extended to many such neighborhoods.
This created a striking urban condition: the state extended electricity to a neighborhood not fully recognized by planning rules, opened schools for children living in buildings classified as violations, and paved streets, while leaving the underlying property and planning problem unresolved.
In other words, the state recognized people as residents who required services while postponing full recognition of their place as a normal part of the city.
This is more than a semantic distinction. The difference between providing services and regularizing legal status creates an entire economy, politics, and structure of power.
Who decides on regularization? When does an area enter the formal plan? Which building may remain? Who receives compensation if expropriation occurs? Which document carries greater force when actual possession conflicts with the plan?
These questions make the value of a home depend not only on concrete and land, but also on the degree to which institutions recognize it.
From the Price of Land to the Price of Recognition
Here we can see the shift from “land as an asset” to “legal status as an asset.”
In an ordinary market, location, size, and surrounding services should determine much of a plot’s value.
But in a city where ownership, planning, violation, regularization, and expropriation overlap, another value enters the equation: the probability of recognition.
A cheap plot today may become expensive if it enters the official plan tomorrow. An informal house may gain value as soon as expectations of regularization spread. Conversely, a property may lose value if threatened with expropriation or if its owners cannot secure their rights.
Urban planning thus ceased to be merely an instrument for arranging streets, parks, and buildings. The planning decision itself became a producer of economic value.
The less transparent the rules and the weaker local participation, the more valuable information, connections, and the ability to anticipate official decisions became.
Some researchers argue that selective regularization of informal areas contributed to patron-client relationships between residents and local or political authorities. This is an interpretation in the literature rather than a single uncontested fact, but it helps explain how a legal and urban question can become a relationship of social and political bargaining.
Housing Cooperatives: A Social Solution Trapped in an Institutional Bottleneck
Housing cooperatives represented an important attempt to break this cycle.
The basic idea was simple: people in need of housing pooled gradual payments, the cooperative obtained land and implemented a project, and collective financing produced housing at lower cost than the market.
But the model ultimately depended on a resource the cooperative did not control: serviced, planned land.
When buildable land becomes scarce, allocation is slow, and infrastructure costs rise, a housing project shifts from a process of construction into a process of waiting.
Here the paradox becomes clear. Someone in the formal system may wait years for a home, while another person can build informally within months.
The state therefore began to lose the race against informal construction—not because informality was better, but because it could adapt more quickly to the real timetable of households.
Flexibility is one of the defining features of informal space. A house begins with one floor and becomes two. A family occupies one part and rents another. The ground floor turns into a workshop, a shop opens, a family member works from home, and the building’s function changes as the household changes.
It is an urban form that grows like a tree rather than like a contractor executing a finished plan from day one.
This flexibility came at a cost: narrower roads, fewer public spaces, pressure on water and sewage networks, and insufficient schools and services relative to actual population density. Several studies therefore stress that the central problem in many informal neighborhoods of Damascus was not always the quality of individual buildings, but the gap in infrastructure, services, and planning.
When Informality Became Part of the System
This brings us to the central paradox of the chapter.
The state tried to control the city through planning. Yet planning’s inability to meet demand pushed residents to build beyond it. The state then had to provide services to what had been built outside the plan. The outside became part of the inside.
The formal city could no longer function without the economy of informal neighborhoods, while those neighborhoods could not function without state services.
A hybrid urban system emerged: the state planned one part of the city, residents produced another, and the state later attempted to connect what residents had built to public networks.
Informal settlements cannot be described only as a failure of planning. They are also an alternative mechanism that emerged when formal planning could not produce what society needed at the required speed, scale, and price.
The problem is that this alternative mechanism was never given the tools to become a complete city. Large areas remained suspended between recognition and denial, ownership and planning, service provision and legal right.
The City That Built Two Tracks of Citizenship
Viewed over decades, the issue was no longer only about housing.
The formal city gives its residents a clear legal address, permits, and property that can be mortgaged, sold, and transferred with greater security.
The informal city depends, to varying degrees, on possession, private contracts, facts on the ground, kinship networks, and later settlements.
Where one lives therefore shapes the relationship with institutions. The difference between a planned and an informal neighborhood is no longer merely the width of a street; it is a difference in the degree of legal certainty.
Modern Damascus can therefore be reread from a different angle: two urban realities did not emerge because one group chose order and another chose disorder. They emerged because the economic and institutional system could not open the gate to the formal city at the speed and scale society required.
Society built another gate. Much of what followed was an ongoing attempt to manage the consequences of having two entrances to the city.
From the Social City to the Investment City
This equation would change again in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The public sector, unable to produce enough housing, began to retreat as economic policy moved more strongly toward markets and private real-estate investment. The literature describes broad reforms affecting housing, planning, rents, investment, and property law during the first decade of the 2000s, within the shift officially described as a “social market economy.”
A more difficult question then appears: if the previous state had failed to provide sufficient social housing, would the market solve the problem? Or would land that had once been contested between planning and informality now become a high-value investment asset, generating a new form of exclusion?
That is the subject of the next article.
We will move from the city of control to the city of investment, and from the crisis of housing production to the political economy of land redevelopment, examining how real-estate capital entered the equation and how informal areas neglected by planning for decades became some of the most attractive sites for redevelopment.
The question was no longer simply who could build in the city, but who held the right to rebuild it.
Sources & References
For further reading, the article draws on the following literature:
