From the Fall of Custom to the Privatization of Space: The Roots of Social Ghettos and Informal Settlement #2

A political cartoon depicting the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, with a colonial-looking figure holding a privatization decree—symbolizing European pressure behind the reallocation of land.

📘 This article is part of the series “Urban Transformation in Post-Colonial Cities: Damascus as a Case Study,” which seeks to deconstruct the historical and political architecture of urban transformation in Damascus, reflecting broader crises in cities across the Global South.

Introduction

The 1858 Ottoman Land Code was far more than a legal reform—it marked a fundamental rupture in the spatial and social structure of the Mashreq. Conceived under pressure from European creditors seeking to turn land into tradable financial assets, the law also enabled the Ottoman state's strategic retreat from its rural peripheries and restructured local power in anticipation of the empire’s fragmentation.

As soon as the code was enacted, long-standing agricultural customs began to collapse. Land was no longer a collective resource but became a subject of competition, speculation, and individualization. Memoirs by reformist statesman Midhat Pasha vividly illustrate the alienation of Arab provinces, and his observations highlight that many rural inhabitants preferred joining highway raids over farming—driven by unsustainable taxes and the absence of communal guarantees.

In this governance vacuum, agriculture declined dramatically in the Euphrates basin, local irrigation systems disintegrated, and what was labeled “Bedouin raids” emerged—an amalgam of dislocated peasants and disenfranchised nomads engaging in acts of rebellion against a vanishing moral and institutional order.

The Collapse of Communal Reference: From Fatwa to Bureaucratic Permit

Agricultural customs had long governed the relationship between land, water, and community—functioning as a moral-legal framework that restrained greed and maintained ecological and social balance. This framework unraveled in the face of official documentation: what was previously unthinkable became permissible through land registration.

With the retreat of the village sheikh, tribal leader, and communal authority, a new class emerged—“the effendi bureaucracy”—represented by notaries, legal clerks, and cadastral officials. This shift reflected a deeper ideological conflict between traditional elites, who viewed adherence to custom as cultural continuity, and reformist elites who saw modernization as a survival strategy in a changing world.

Deprived of customary governance, and confronted with imported European legal models that lacked organic roots, rural society splintered. Water rights were hoarded, boundaries disputed, and land transformed into contested terrain—monitored, manipulated, and shaped by competing local and central powers.

From Shared Fields to Divisible Assets

The 1858 law redefined property itself: land, once held communally, was converted into a divisible, marketable asset. Agriculture ceased to be a shared livelihood and became a vehicle for capital accumulation.

A new category of stakeholders emerged—often urban elites who took advantage of rural illiteracy and the unfamiliarity of peasants with the new legal codes. Leasing systems proliferated, and peasants were gradually dispossessed, transformed into laborers on lands they once collectively managed.

Urban Disruption: Market Fragmentation and Commercial Dependency

The urban sphere, particularly Damascus, was not immune. The city began to lose its role as a self-sustaining socio-economic node and was reduced to a corridor for European trade. Traditional networks of exchange eroded, and foreign companies penetrated local markets, undermining artisanal production and the city’s internal economic cycles.

Local elites increasingly competed for European agency rights, shifting commerce from direct exchange to clientelist brokerage tied to imperial capital. This economic transformation reframed the city's position—from an inward-looking production hub to an outward-dependent intermediary. It fractured not only marketplaces but the socio-spatial coherence of neighborhoods.

Craft industries declined, and so did the Damascus neighborhood as a self-sufficient unit of production, solidarity, and daily life. The city transitioned from a communal fabric to a segmented conduit.

This shift also redefined the rural–urban relationship. The countryside, once a productive partner, was reframed as a reservoir for cheap labor, military recruitment, and peripheral populations—while the city enclosed itself under a new bourgeois elite aligned with foreign capital.

These dynamics contributed to the emergence of early sectarian conflicts—not as spontaneous ruptures, but as socio-spatial consequences of a changing urban balance. Following the 1860 Damascus massacres, the Ottoman Empire, under European pressure, granted “protected” status to Christian populations, and foreign powers leveraged identity divisions to advance commercial and diplomatic agendas.

Planning from Above: The Rural–Urban Divide Reimagined

These transformations were not incidental—they were engineered. Urban expansion ceased to be a response to local demographic needs and became a political instrument of territorial control. Expansion was no longer organic but orchestrated from above, governed by military and security priorities.

The immediate rural periphery, which should have remained a sustainable agricultural zone, was overtaken by unregulated and insecure expansion. These belts were not the result of planning failure but were consciously politicized spaces used for social engineering—often under the guise of industrial development or modernization, in line with French colonial ideals of the “republican city.”

Rather than expanding into dry, non-arable zones, urban growth devoured fertile lands in the Ghouta, compromising food security and undermining the ecological and geographical identity of Damascus.

Damascus Encircled: Settlement as Spatial Control

The 1858 Land Code also laid the groundwork for spatial containment. By linking land ownership to individual registration, the state began redrawing its spatial contract with society—not through integration but through compartmentalization.

The Ottoman administration settled displaced populations from the Caucasus, Balkans, and Central Asia on Damascus’s outskirts, in areas like Marj al-Sultan, Qaboun terraces, and Salhiyeh slopes. These were not acts of humanitarian resettlement but of strategic containment—using human buffers to shield administrative centers.

The logic persisted through the French Mandate and into the post-independence period. Suburbs were designed as peripheral labor zones, security settlements, and regulated informality—spaces kept on permanent standby for political redeployment.

Ghettos by Design: Informality as Strategy

What are today called “informal settlements” are, in many cases, planned exclusions—urban ghettos intentionally shaped through legal ambiguity and institutional neglect. These communities were never meant to be integrated but to remain suspended—visible but unrecognized.

This long-term governance of exception has become the operating logic of Damascus’s periphery: zones of control, not zones of inclusion. The city’s planning apparatus operates not as a tool of equity, but as an architecture of differentiation.

The Suppressed Identity: Fabricated Uniformity in a Fractured Society

Amid these spatial transformations, a deeper identity crisis emerged. Although most Damascene families trace their roots to various Ottoman provinces, Arab nationalist narratives sought to overwrite this plurality in favor of homogenous identity constructs.

Integration was not urban or civic—it was ideological. Publications like The History of Qaboun by Fares Al-Alawi attempted to rewrite local genealogies, linking residents to Arabian tribal lineages, contradicting oral histories that point to Balkan and Caucasian origins. This was not scholarly error, but political erasure—an effort to fabricate national coherence through historical distortion.

Such manipulations laid the foundations for identity suppression, which later erupted in the Syrian uprising of 2011—not as a purely political revolt, but as the release of long-submerged questions of belonging and spatial justice.

Conclusion: Toward the Social Geography of Power

The transformation triggered by the 1858 Land Code was not just about ownership—it redefined the spatial politics of Damascus. It displaced communal norms, fragmented land and identity, and laid the cartographic foundation for modern segregation.

🧭 In the next article, we will examine how political marginalization fueled the rise of informal urbanism, and how the state’s selective engagement with these communities turned them into both zones of survival and instruments of control. We will trace how property law, urban planning, and ideological narratives reshaped not only the city’s form but its social meaning.

#UrbanTransformationSeries | #DamascusAsACaseStudy | #03 | #UrbanRecovery | #ConflictResolution | #SyrianGovernance